Trump Voters Terrifying

46% of Americans are ready to re-elect Donald Trump according to recent polling. That’s a truly stunning number especially since only 46% are committed to electing a Democrat to replace him. That nearly half of Americans are on board with a man whom even Republican congressman Justin Amash says clearly obstructed justice and should be impeached shows that they don’t care what he does wrong he’s their guy and they’re sticking with him.

If you’ve read the Mueller report like I have you too understand what Amash is talking about as it lays out the case for obstruction of justice quite clearly. Worse still he has instructed members and former members of his administration to defy congressional subpoenas preventing their investigations from gathering evidence.

The trade war he set off with China and other countries is causing farmers to lose billions of dollars in sales so his administration is providing $15-20 billion in federal assistance to soy bean farmers among others who have been harmed by the backlash. Family farmers are the ones most harmed and the least helped causing unusually high levels of farm bankruptcies.

Harley Davidson moved some manufacturing out of the country in order to avoid tariffs on sales in Europe and elsewhere. Many of those Carrier air conditioner jobs in Indiana that Trump made so much about saving during the 2016 election have now moved to Mexico anyway. There are many other examples of the trade war and Trump’s economic policies hurting more than helping.

Just this week Trump announced "I don’t want to fight. But you do have situations like Iran, you can’t let them have nuclear weapons — you just can’t let that happen.”  Republic Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas claims it would take just two strikes to wipe out Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo failed to convince House members of any real threat from Iran in their meeting earlier this week. This is the same kind of sabre rattling and falsehood pedaling that the Bush administration engaged in during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.

About two miles of new border wall/fence has been built on the southern border and Mexico hasn’t paid a dime toward it. Five immigrant children have died in custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while separated from their parents who were legally seeking asylum in the United States. Rather than sending more immigration judges to process asylum applicants Trump has contracted with private prison operators to house immigrants.

Trump’s cabinet selections have repeatedly been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, often for lavish travel expenses on the tax payer dime. Some have resigned in disgrace but others like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin hang on. Those not engaged in outright theft are often incompetent such as Secretary of Education Betsy DuVos who doesn’t understand basic educational terms and principles or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson who showed no understanding of the terms describing real estate finance at a recent congressional hearing.

None of this phases nearly half of the American public, I find that terrifying.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 24, 2019

Trump's National Security Team Out to Make War

While the national news cycle seems focused on the Mueller Report and the Trump administration’s denial of its conclusions as well as access to the full version Trump and his handpicked advisors like National Security Advisor John Bolton, Special Representative for Venezuela Elliot Abrams, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seem to be shopping for a nice small war. Trump has been antagonizing Iran since his first days in office and last year unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, officially named the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. For the last several months he and his enablers have been escalating rhetoric and threats against the duly elected leader of Venezuela.

Elliot Abrams is best known for his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, which supplied weapons to right wing insurgents in Nicaragua, during the Reagan administration, and led to his conviction in 1991 on two counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress.

John Bolton is also of Iran-Contra scandal alumnus and has worked tirelessly to undermine nuclear weapons reduction and biological weapons treaties. Until last year Bolton was chairman of the Gatestone Institute, a nonprofit organization that disseminated false anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim information, where Bolton published articles on Iran and other topics.

Mike Pompeo denies climate change and claims that reduced sea ice in the Arctic Circle is a good thing as it can lower the cost of international trade. Pompeo is known for making bombastic and false statements like claims that China is investing in facilities in northern Canada of which there are no such investments. He has also state strong support for torturing prisoners of war.

Trump has been talking about military intervention in Venezuela since the summer of 2017 including asking advisors why the US wasn’t at war with Venezuela, noting that “they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.” Just last week Pompeo stated that American troops might be used in support of the overthrow of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Earlier this week, Bolton announced that the United States was dispatching an aircraft-carrier strike group and bombers to the Middle East, saying that the U.S. is sending “a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime” and threatening “unrelenting force.” Actually the deployment has been scheduled for months as part of a rotation of forces. Nevertheless the unprovoked comments follow a yearlong campaign of threats and intimidation aimed at Iran, after the administration’s withdrawal one year ago from the Iran nuclear deal. Since then, the United States has instituted tough new sanctions aimed at crippling Iran’s economy and cutting off its oil exports.

Over the past few weeks, the campaign of threats and what the White House calls “maximum pressure” has intensified. In early April the administration took provocative action via the State Department announcement that it was labeling Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran’s main military arm, a terrorist group. Trump seems to be following Bush's pattern of manufactured false charges that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11, the Trump administration is painting the Iranian nation as a terrorist threat. In the two-decade history of the State Department’s terrorist listing no nation's entire armed forces have ever been designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

Watch for further sabre rattling as Congress pursues its investigation of the Mueller report and Trump’s financial dealings. Don’t be shocked if Trump starts a war in an effort to preserve his presidency.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 10, 2019

Costs of Climate Change

Some of my friends organized a booth at the Earth Day event last weekend. It was designed to explain the need for action to address global climate change and the Green New Deal as a method of doing so. I helped man the booth and had the opportunity to discuss some of the issues with a variety of folks who stopped by. Most of those I spoke with wanted to know more about the issues. One lady in particular struck me as she was unconcerned about the impact of climate change as long as she could turn on her television when she wanted to she felt taking action was too costly.

Climate change is estimated to have cost the nation an average of $24 billion per year over the last decade and will likely rise to $35 billion per year by 2050. The reality is that it’s too costly not to take action.

Looking just at the impact within U.S. borders, current research estimates the cost of carbon emissions is nearly $48 per ton. An average American is responsible for 15.5 tons of carbon emissions per year causing a cost of $744 per year. The same study estimates India's localized social cost of carbon at around $86 per ton, this is because while they emit far less carbon that many other nations due to their geography they suffer some of the worst effects of climate change. Saudi Arabia’s localized social cost of carbon is $47, and China, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates are $24 per ton. Several other countries face damages above $20 per ton. The global cost when the economic impact on all nations is added up is around $417 per ton. The study’s authors believe those to be underestimates. The researchers used an empirical data that captures all market impacts of climate change that could already be seen affecting the economy by 2014. That data doesn't include potential catastrophic events, short-term costs of adaptation, biodiversity loss, or the longer-term impacts of sea level rise and ocean acidification such as that which is killing the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and causing ocean fisheries to vanish.

Two of the greatest drivers to those costs are health issues, especially premature deaths, and coastal property damages and land loss. We already see barrier islands here on the Texas Gulf Coast being eroded by increasingly powerful storms and hurricanes, add to that rising sea levels and our coastline is going change significantly over the next century.

The effects of higher greenhouse gas emissions levels on global climate become most evident around 2050, when temperature, precipitation, and sea level rise projections begin to rapidly diverge from 20th century norms. With substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the increase in global annual average temperature compared to the 1800’s could be limited to less than 3.6°F (2°C). Without significant greenhouse gas mitigation, the increase in global annual average temperature could reach 9°F or more by the end of this century. Certain aspects of Earth’s climate system take longer to respond to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, such as global sea level, so some degree of long-term change will be locked in for centuries to come regardless of future reductions in emissions. Early greenhouse gas emissions reductions can mitigate climate impacts in the nearer term, such as reducing the loss of arctic sea ice and the effects on species that use it. In the longer term reductions can mitigate impacts by avoiding critical thresholds, such as Antarctic ice sheet collapse and the resulting consequences for global sea level and coastal homes and businesses.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 3, 2019

Mueller Report Evidence Favors Impeachment

It’s been a week since the release of the redacted version of the long awaited Mueller report. As the policy of the Department of Justice is that a sitting president cannot be indicted no matter the crime, Special Counsel Robert Mueller ended his report with the following statement: "Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President 's conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

That’s quite different from what Attorney General William Barr claimed when he first summarized the 448 page document. Barr tried to use Obi Wan Kenobi’s “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” Jedi mind trick. Fortunately the American public aren’t all weak minded Imperial Stormtroopers and we aren’t buying it.

The section identified as Trump Campaign and the Dissemination of Hacked Materials has a high concentration of material redacted and labelled as “Harmful to ongoing matters”, meaning releasing that information might jeopardize ongoing investigations and possible prosecutions. According to the report there are thirteen such ongoing investigations, other sources indicate that half of those are being conducted by the US Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, at least one in New Jersey and one in California.

The un-redacted majority of the report makes clear that senior members of the Trump campaign went so far as to setup a meeting with a group of Russians with the intent to conspire with them and likely would have if only the Russians had real dirt on Hillary. My understanding of the law is that such behavior qualifies as conspiracy with a foreign power against the United States and that’s a crime even if it was ultimately unsuccessful. That being said there is no clear evidence that Donald Trump, Senior was a party to that conspiracy.

On the other hand the case for obstruction of justice by Trump is most compelling. Trump committed clearly criminal acts repeatedly, speaking both publicly and privately to subordinates suborning perjury and tampering with witnesses by suggesting pardons and issuing threats of retribution. Trump’s efforts to get Don McGahn to change the record of his conversations with Trump so there would be no evidence that he demanded FBI Director James Comey be fired is just the most egregious of several such criminal acts.

We should all remember that impeachment is not the same as a criminal trial and the same standards of evidence don’t apply nor at the penalties the same. Unlike a criminal trial the standard isn’t guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s more can Congress and the American people trust this individual to act in the best interest of the nation. As to penalties there is no provision in the constitution for fines or imprisonment simply removal from office.

One of my major complaints about the Obama administration is that he failed to hold George W. Bush and his staff accountable lying to start the Iraq war and the torture and other war crimes committed. I hope Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t make the same mistake.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - April 26, 2019

Wealthiest Do Most Tax Evasion

As Tax Day approaches it’s appropriate to think about how the wealthiest among us escape paying their fair share. We can argue over whether there ought to be brackets with higher rates than the current 37% on earnings over $600,000. What I doubt anyone will argue with is need to close the loopholes and tax dodges that high earners use to avoid paying even the current rates.

Propublica, the nonprofit newsroom based in New York, published an article recently discussing this very issue. They found that it is virtually impossible to enforce the tax code against millionaires due to the ability to create complex transactions and the army of attorneys and accountants they can muster to defend and obfuscate those transactions.

In 2016 the Internal Revenue Service determined a wealthy individual named Georg Schaeffler had engaged in abusive tax maneuvers. He stood accused of masking about $5 billion in income. The IRS wanted over $1.2 billion in back taxes and penalties. Schaeffler, is the billionaire heir of a family-owned German manufacturer.

A crack team of specialists formed in 2009 was assigned to the case and embarked on a contentious audit of Schaeffler in 2012. But after seven years of grinding bureaucratic combat in which they were outnumbered by Schaeffler's attorneys and accountants, the IRS abandoned its campaign. The agency informed Schaeffler’s lawyers it was willing to accept just tens of millions, according to a person familiar with the audit.

Shortly after the IRS formed its special team to go after tax cheats like Schaeffler Republicans in Congress began slashing the agency’s budget. The team didn’t receive the resources it was promised and needed in order to do battle with teams like those Schaeffler hired. Since then thousands of IRS employees have left the agency, especially those with expertise in complex audits, the kinds of specialists necessary to staff such an elite unit. The agency had planned to assign 242 examiners to the group by 2012, according to a report by the IRS’ inspector general. But by 2014, it had only 96 auditors. By last year, the number had fallen to 58.

Here’s why this is some important and why you and I have a right to be angry. Studies show that the wealthiest are more likely to avoid paying taxes. Those earning in the top 0.5 percent in income, or $500,000 to $19,000,000, account for fully a fifth of all the underreported income, according to a 2010 study by the IRS’ Andrew Johns and the University of Michigan’s Joel Slemrod. After adjusting for inflation, that’s more than $50 billion in unpaid taxes for 2017 out of a total of $1,587 billion. That’s an average of $62,500 in underreported income per member of the top 0.5 percent. Another way to look at it is they’re underreporting more than the average American worker earns in a year and they’re getting away with it.

While I’d like to say it’s all the Republicans’ fault I have to be honest and admit that there are plenty of Democrats taking campaign donations from those advocating for special tax loopholes that their clients can use to skip out on paying their fair share. We have a bi-partisan problem that is created and exploited by our campaign finance system. When wealthy people do most of the donating then it’s mostly wealthy people our elected officials listen to. Ultimately the only fix for this is public financing of campaigns. In the short term consider donating $5 or $10 to presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who promise not to take money from political action committees.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - April 12, 2019

Trump Attacks HealthCare He Promised to Protect

During the 2016 election Trump repeatedly claimed he would help people with pre-existing conditions yet his direction to Attorney General Barr to attack the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act says differently. It is the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, that protects people with pre-existing conditions from being charged outrageous and often unaffordable premiums.

Trump also campaigned promising, “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” His proposed 2020 budget cuts all three.

This isn’t just about breaking campaign promises it’s about people’s lives, their physical well-being and their financial health. If Trump succeeds in overturning the Affordable Care Act in court and his proposed budget is passed there are a host of the negative consequences to the lives of most Americans.

Without the Affordable Care Act, most young adults 18-26 will lose the option to be covered under their parent’s insurance plan. Many young adults work part time while going to trade schools or college and aren’t eligible for employer sponsored health insurance and individual plans are notoriously expensive so overturning the Affordable Care Act via the courts will cause tens of thousands of young Americans like my daughter to lose their health insurance.

Do you know anyone with cancer or other expensive life threatening conditions? Should the courts overturn the Affordable Care Act insurance companies would once again be able to set annual and lifetime limits on the amount they’ll cover. Between two episodes of blood clots, one of which involved open heart surgery, a staph infection the nearly killed her and various other surgeries my wife would long ago have busted through the caps that many insurers were once allowed. In other words people like my wife would either die from lack of care or their family would go bankrupt or both.

The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to maintain at least an 80% medical loss ratio; that means at least 80% of premiums have to be spent on actual medical care. If an insurance company ends the year with less than that they have to refund you the difference. The first two years after the ACA first went into effect I got substantial refund checks. My insurer finally got the hang of not overcharging. Without the ACA you can bet medical loss ratios will fall and meaning premiums will go up just to so the insurance company can have higher profits.

Trump’s 2020 budget cutting Medicare and Medicaid would also impact many of us either directly or through our loved ones and friends. Medicare is already the most efficient provider of health insurance spending upwards of 95% of premiums on health care as opposed to the 80% allowed to private insurers. Cutting Medicare will mean cutting coverage or cutting physician reimbursement or both. Considering that Medicare already pays most physicians less than other insurers you can see it won’t end well.

Do you know someone in a nursing home? If so, chances are that Medicaid covers some or all of the cost since it covers 2 out of 3 nursing home residents. Trump’s 2020 budget cuts Medicaid, are you ready to care for you parent or grand-parent when they are kicked out of the nursing home?

Trump’s actions are just cruel and heartless. Let’s hope his enablers in the Senate at least see the electoral downside of this and stop him before it’s too late. If they don’t the 2020 election will be a blood bath at the polls.

Published in the Seguin Gazette April 5, 2019

End of the Beginning for Trump Investigations

It’s not unusual for people to get upset when a District Attorney declines to prosecute someone that many, often including the prosecutor and police, believe is guilty. It’s frustrating and we often want to blame the system. That’s a mistake, we as a nation set a high bar for a guilty verdict and prosecutors don’t often want to waste their limited resources trying a case when they don’t believe they can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Declining to prosecute is not exoneration; it is an admission that they have been unable to find sufficient evidence to support a guilty verdict. Often that simply means the guilty party has done a good job hiding the evidence or that there is no fingerprint or DNA left at the scene of the crime that provides conclusive proof.

In the case of Trump or a member of his family or campaign leadership possibly conspiring the Russians to influence the 2016 election there’s plenty of suspicious activity but without someone on the inside confessing or providing documentation there is no way to know for sure and certainly no way to prove such a conspiracy in court.

On the topic of Obstruction of Justice Attorney General William Barr’s letter to congress specifically says: “The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’" This is another case of suspicious activity but not enough concrete evidence to prove guilt. Remember Eliot Ness never proved Al Capone was a gangster or bootlegger or that he’d committed numerous murders. Ness’ teammate Frank Wilson of the Treasury Department proved tax evasion which is why Capone finally went to jail.

There are still half a dozen prosecutions and investigations going on in the US Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York which specializes in financial crimes and where Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen is cooperating. Some of the investigations that may lead to prosecuting Donald Trump include a pair of campaign-finance violations for hush payments that Cohen says he made to two women at Trump's direction shortly before the 2016 election to keep them from talking about alleged affairs with the then-presidential candidate, as well as the financial irregularities of the Trump Organization and Trump's inaugural committee.

Based on Michael Cohen’s public testimony before congress we already know that Trump overstated the value of various assets in order to get a loan, that’s bank fraud – a felony. He also understated the value of assets when reporting his taxable income, that’s tax evasion – another felony. In fact those two crimes are some of what Paul Manafort and his partner Rick Gates pleaded guilty to have gone to prison for.

It’s been reported that there are as many other investigations ongoing into Trump, the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign in other venues as there are in the Southern District of New York. Then there are the various House committees looking into Trump’s taxes and various other activities, so Mueller handing in his final report isn’t the end, it’s just the end of the beginning.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - March 29. 2019