Koch Brothers’ Operatives Fill Top White House Positions, Ethics Forms Reveal

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/04/koch-trump-wh/

By Lee Fang

If the billionaire Koch brothers turn to the White House for favors, they will see many familiar faces.

Newly disclosed ethics forms reveal that a significant number of senior Trump staffers were previously employed by the sprawling network of hard-right and libertarian advocacy groups financed and controlled by Charles and David Koch, the conservative duo hyper-focused on entrenching Republican power, eliminating taxes, and slashing environmental and labor regulations.

Some of the relationships were well-known. Marc Short, for instance, now Trump’s chief liaison to Congress, previously led Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the dark money nonprofit used by the Koch brothers and their donor cohort to dispense money to allied groups. Freedom Partners, which maintains an affiliate Super PAC, was at the center of the Kochs’ $750 million election effort during the campaign last year.

But the ethics forms, made available to the public on Friday evening, reveal a number of previously undisclosed financial ties between the Koch network and Trump’s inner circle of political aides.

Donald McGahn, Trump’s campaign attorney turned White House counsel, provided legal services to a range of outside Koch groups working to influence the election. McGahn, through the law firm Jones Day, advised Freedom Partners, as well as i360, the Koch’s big data firm set up to identify and target voters, and Americans for Prosperity, the election advocacy and grassroots lobbying organization run by the Koch brothers. Ann Donaldson, McGahn’s chief of staff, came to the White House from McGahn’s law firm. Her financial disclosure shows that she also provided legal services to Freedom Partners and i360.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager turned close White House advisor, consulted over the last year for Americans for Prosperity’s national foundation, as well as for the Michigan and Ohio chapters of the group. Conway served as a board member for the Independent Women’s Forum, a Koch-backed group whose goal is “increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty.”

The fact that Trump’s political team worked for the Koch network during the campaign adds a new wrinkle to the relationship between the president and the most well-known pair of Republican billionaires.

The Koch network has long pioneered a strategy of backing GOP campaigns by using seemingly independent nonprofits and outside election groups. Election law prohibits organizations that raise and spend unlimited funds, such as the Freedom Partners’ Super PAC and Americans for Prosperity, from directly coordinating with candidates.

But those rules are rarely enforced. Moreover, campaigns and Super PACs have danced around the coordination prohibition by employing individuals who split their time between candidates and outside groups, making them a crucial conduit for potential coordination.

Despite the common myth that the Koch network, in the words of Politico, “sat out” the presidential campaign, Koch groups were active in battleground states that proved critical to Trump’s victory. Americans for Prosperity employed 650 staff members during the campaign, with many stationed in Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Missouri. The field staff, using the new data tools from i360, focused on making sure Republican voters made it to the polls.

In the aforementioned states, Americans for Prosperity also aired negative ads attacking Hillary Clinton in the last weeks of the campaign, linking her to Democratic candidates and problems allegedly caused by the Affordable Care Act. The ads, which blanketed swing state television stations, held Clinton responsible for healthcare with “higher cost, lost coverage, lost doctors.”

The election effort swept the GOP to a level of national power not seen since the 1920s. And the Koch network has been quick to seize upon unified Republican control of Washington to score a range of policy and political victories.

Freedom Partners Vice President Andy Koenig told the Los Angeles Times after the election that his group hoped Trump would “walk in with an eraser” and wipe out as many Obama reforms as possible. The group formulated a “Roadmap to Repeal,” a memo calling for the administration to prioritize revoking the Paris climate change treaty, repealing clean water rules, and eliminating limits on pollution from coal-fire power plants.

In recent weeks, Trump and congressional leaders have used a little-known procedure called the Congressional Review Act to swiftly roll back the very regulations identified by the Koch memo. And they have been aided by a team that came to the White House policy staff directly from the Koch network.

Koenig, the former Freedom Partners vice president, is now working in the White House as a policy assistant. Koenig’s financial disclosure shows that he made $320,000 at the group before moving through the revolving door.

In addition, Andrew Bremberg, now the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and Bethany Scully, an official working in Trump’s Office of Legislative Affairs, both worked for Freedom Partners. Bremberg’s disclosure shows that he consulted for the group through a consulting firm he owns called Right Policy LLC.

The Trump policy team includes Brian Blase, a special assistant to the president working on healthcare issues, who came to the White House from the Mercatus Center, the Koch network think tank at George Mason University.

A number of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff also came directly from Koch organizations. Andeliz Castillo, named earlier this year as a Pence senior aide, came from the Libre Initiative, the Latino outreach arm of the Koch network. Stephen Ford, Pence’s director of speechwriting, previously worked as a speechwriter for Koch’s Freedom Parters.

To be sure, there is not perfect harmony between the Koch brothers and Trump. The Koch network harshly criticized the American Health Care Act, attacking it for not doing enough to repeal Obamacare. And the groups have lobbied against the so-called border adjustment tax, a proposal favored by some in the Trump White House.

But if the latest member-wide email from Americans for Prosperity is any indication, the Koch brothers have much to celebrate with Trump in the White House.

The email, titled, “Thank you, President Trump,” hails the president for issuing an executive order to repeal of Obama’s “Clean Power Plan,” the biggest pillar in the previous administration’s climate change strategy. The message goes on to boast that Americans for Prosperity is providing the lobbying muscle, along with paid advertisements and mobilizing calls to Congress, to help confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Bill Gates and 4bn in poverty

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/04/05/bill-gates-and-4bn-in-poverty/

Is global poverty falling or rising?  Realistic estimates calculate that there are over 4 billion people in poverty in this world, or two-thirds of the population.  And yet, in their latest ‘public letter’ to us all, Bill and Melinda Gates, the richest family in the world, issued last month, were keen to tell us that the battle against global poverty was being won, as those living on less than $1.25 day had been cut by half since 1990.  How do we reconcile these two estimates?

Back in 2013, the World Bank released a report that there were 1.2bn people living on less than $1.25 a day, one-third of whom were children.  This compares with America’s poverty line of $60 a day for a family of four. But, according to the World Bank, things are getting better, with 720m less people on this very low threshold for poverty compared to 1981.  And Nobel prize winner Angus Deaton has emphasised that life expectancy globally has risen 50% since 1900 and is still rising. The share of people living on less than $1 a day (in inflation-adjusted terms) has dropped to 14 percent from 42 percent as recently as 1981. A typical resident of India is only as rich as a typical Briton in 1860, for example, but has a life expectancy more typical of a European in the mid-20th century. The spread of knowledge, about public health, medicine and diet, explains the difference.

However, when we delve into the data more closely, there is a less optimistic story.  Martin Kirk and Jason Hickel were quick to take the Gates’ to task on the arguments in their letter.  The Gates “use figures based on a $1.25 a day poverty line, but there is a strong scholarly consensus that this line is far too low…..Using a poverty line of $5 per day, which, even the UN Agency for Trade and Development suggests this is the bare minimum necessary for people to get adequate food to eat and to stand a chance of reaching normal life expectancy, global poverty measured at this level hasn’t been falling. In fact, it has been increasing – dramatically – over the past 25 years to over 4bn people, or nearly two-thirds of the world’s population.”

The World Bank has now raised its official poverty line to $1.90 a day.  But this merely adjusts the old $1.25 figure for changes in the purchasing power of the US dollar.  But it meant that global poverty was reduced by 100m people overnight.

And as Jason Hickel points out, this $1.90 is ridiculously low.  A minimum threshold would be $5 a day that the US Department of Agriculture calculated was the very minimum necessary to buy sufficient food. And that’s not taking account of other requirements for survival, such as shelter and clothing.  Hickel shows that in India, children living at $1.90 a day still have a 60% chance of being malnourished. In Niger, infants living at $1.90 have a mortality rate three times higher the global average.

In a 2006 paper, Peter Edward of Newcastle University uses an “ethical poverty line” that calculates that, in order to achieve normal human life expectancy of just over 70 years, people need roughly 2.7 to 3.9 times the existing poverty line.  In the past, that was $5 a day. Using the World Bank’s new calculations, it’s about $7.40 a day. That delivers a figure of about 4.2 billion people live in poverty today. Or up 1 billion over the past 35 years.

Now other experts argue that the reason there are more people in poverty is because there are more people!  The world’s population has risen in the last 25 years.  You need to look at the proportion of the world population in poverty and at a $1.90 cut-off, the proportion under the line has dropped from 35% to 11% between 1990 and 2013. So the Gates’ were right after all, goes the argument.  But this is disingenuous, to say the least.  The number of people in poverty, even at the ridiculously low threshold level of $1.25 a day, has increased, even if not as much as the total population in the last 25 years.  And even then, all this optimistic expert evidence is really based on the dramatic improvement in average incomes in China (and to a lesser extent in India).

In his paper, Peter Edward found that there were 1.139bn people getting less than $1 a day in 1993 and this fell to 1.093bn in 2001, a reduction of 85m.  But China’s reduction over that period was 108m (no change in India), so all the reduction in the poverty numbers was due to China.  Exclude China and total poverty was unchanged in most regions, while rising significantly in sub-Saharan Africa.  And, according to the World Bank, in 2010, the “average” poor person in a low-income country lived on 78 cents a day in 2010, compared to 74 cents a day in 1981, hardly any change.  But this improvement was all in China. In India, the average income of the poor rose to 96 cents in 2010, compared to 84 cents in 1981, while China’s average poor’s income rose to 95 cents, compared to 67 cents.  China’s state-run, still mainly planned, economy saw its poorest people make the greatest progress.

Poverty levels should not be confused with inequality of incomes or wealth.  On the latter, the evidence of rising inequality of wealth globally is well recorded and it’s the same story.  If you take China out of the figures, global inequality, however, you measure it, has been rising in the last 30 years.  The global inequality ‘elephant’ presented by Branco Milanovic found that the 60m or so people who constitute the world’s top 1% of income ‘earners’ have seen their incomes rise by 60% since 1988. About half of these are the richest 12% of Americans. The rest of the top 1% is made up by the top 3-6% of Britons, Japanese, French and German, and the top 1% of several other countries, including Russia, Brazil and South Africa. These people include the world capitalist class – the owners and controllers of the capitalist system and the strategists and policy makers of imperialism.

But Milanovic also found that those who have gained income even more in the last 20 years are the ones in the ‘global middle’.  These people are not capitalists.  These are mainly people in India and China, formerly peasants or rural workers have migrated to the cities to work in the sweat shops and factories of globalisation: their real incomes have jumped from a very low base, even if their conditions and rights have not. The biggest losers are the very poorest (mainly in African rural farmers) who have gained nothing in 20 years.

The empirical evidence supports Marx’s view that, under capitalism, an ‘amiseration of the working class’ (impoverishment) would take place, and refutes the Gates’ Letter that things are getting better.  Any improvement in poverty levels, however measured, is down to rising incomes in state-controlled China and any improvement in the quality and length of life comes from the application of science and knowledge through state spending on education, on sewage, clean water, disease prevention and protection, hospitals and better child development.  These are things that do not come from capitalism but from the common weal.