Kochs and Trump Team Up to Cut Billionaires’ Taxes

by Richard Eskow

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/08/01/kochs-and-trump-team-cut-billionaires-taxes

This headline appeared on Monday, July 31, 2017, at precisely 4:00 am: “Koch Brothers Move to Back White House’s Tax-Cut Plan.” This one appeared less than twelve hours later: “White House sees tax reform zipping through Congress in October, November.”

That’s what you get when you combine the Kochs’ money and influence with Trump’s executive power and support from the Republican base: a unified Republican Party marching in lockstep toward a destructive goal.

The Kochs’ much-publicized hostility toward Donald Trump has been replaced by a strategic alliance between the ideologically extreme billionaire brothers and the ideologically fluid but equally self-serving businessman/president. They have reached “new-found unity” around an issue that is guaranteed to excite all Republican politicians; tax cuts that would benefit Trump, most members of his cabinet – and, of course, the Koch brothers themselves.

They don’t call them “cuts,” of course. That would sound crass. Instead, in time-worn Republican fashion, they hide their selfishness behind a more refined word: “reform.”

“Social Security reform,” “Medicare reform,” “tax reform” – when Republicans say they want to “reform” something, the only thing you can be sure of is that the wealthy will benefit and everyone else will suffer.

Longtime Koch operative Marc Short was given a key role in the Trump White House. As Legislative Director, Short works with Republicans in Congress to promote the passage of Trump’s agenda – or, in this case, the Trump/Koch agenda.

When it comes to taxation, the Kochs seem to be the senior partner in this relationship. Steve Bannon’s proposal for a millionaire tax increase was quickly shot down. So was House Speaker Paul Ryan’s proposal for a “border adjustment tax,” which the billionaires brothers strongly opposed.

What remained was a “reform” plan any self-serving billionaire could love. Virtually all of the cuts – 99.6 percent of them – would go to the top 1 percent, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, cutting approximately $1.5 trillion from Medicaid while giving roughly $2 trillion in tax cuts to corporations. The House’s “reform” plan would also cut nearly $500 billion from Medicare.

These cuts will make you sick – perhaps literally. They would hurt millions of older Americans, including the two-thirds of nursing home patients who rely on Medicaid for their care. Their tax cuts would also be bad for the country’s economic health. As the experience of recent years has confirmed, government spending cuts also slow economic growth and increase the risk of recession.

Ready to Launch

Two Koch-backed groups, Freedom Partners and Americans for Prosperity, sponsored an event on Monday to advance the Koch/Trump/GOP tax cuts. Joining Short on the speaker’s list was Trumps Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, the ruthless and unethical “foreclosure king” and former Goldman Sachs partner. Mnuchin, although not quite a billionaire himself, is very wealthy and would benefit greatly from these tax cuts too.

Mnuchin peddled the usual GOP snake-oil at the conference. “This is about creating jobs,” Mnuchin said, “this is about creating wage growth, this is about a simpler and fairer tax system.” That’s what they said after they passed the last round of millionaire and billionaire tax cuts under George W. Bush. Wages stayed stagnant under Bush, and job creation slowed dramatically even before the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

The Kochs’ “multi-million dollar campaign” to promote tax cuts is just getting started. They are running digital ads and will hold another tax cut event on Wednesday, August 2, featuring far-right “Freedom Caucus” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC). Can they really get their agenda passed by November? “So that, I think, is an aggressive schedule, but that is our timetable,” Short told attendees at Monday’s event, adding: “I think we’re in for a long fall, legislative calendar-wise.”

Americans may be in for a long fall “health-wise” and “economy-wise,” too.

Trump Considers Expanding Afghan War to Exploit Minerals

Trump is reportedly being encouraged by corporate executives to take advantage of Afghanistan's mineral wealth

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/07/26/colonialism-and-greed-trump-considers-afghan-war-expansion-exploit-minerals

As the 16th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan approaches, President Donald Trump is reportedly being pressured by a billionaire financier and a chemical executive to extend the scope of the conflict for one simple, greedy reason: to exploit Afghanistan's mineral reserves.

According to James Risen and Mark Landler of the New York Times, the Trump administration is "considering sending an envoy to Afghanistan to meet with mining officials" as the president is receiving encouragement from Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire head of DynCorp, and Michael Silver, the head of American Elements, a firm that specializes in "extracting rare-earth minerals."

"In 2010, American officials estimated that Afghanistan had untapped mineral deposits worth nearly $1 trillion," Risen and Landler note. This large figure reportedly "caught the attention of" the president, who has in the past argued that the biggest failure of the U.S. in Iraq was not"taking" the country's oil.

Trump is hardly the first president to notice and eagerly examine Afghanistan's mineral reserves.

"In 2006, the George W. Bush administration conducted aerial surveys of the country to map its mineral resources," Risen and Landler note. "Under President Barack Obama, the Pentagon set up a task force to try to build a mining industry in Afghanistan—a challenge that was stymied by rampant corruption, as well as security problems and the lack of roads, bridges or railroads."

Nonetheless, Trump appears to be committed to the belief that mineral extraction "could be one justification for the United States to stay engaged in the country," despite warnings from security analysts that such a strategy could risk further deadly confrontations with the Taliban.

If Trump moves forward with a mineral extraction plan, Eric Levitz of New York Magazine adds, there is a serious "danger of feeding the Taliban top-notch propaganda. It's hard to win hearts and minds, when you're also trying to win minerals and mines."

But as Gizmodo's Adam Clark Estes observes, such concerns are unlikely to move Trump, whose "greed has led the man to leave a path of destruction behind him on his pursuit of profit and glory."

"That sort of habit makes some people rich in the business world, at the expense of making others poor," Estes writes. "When you're talking about global politics and terrorism, however, people die, and nations fail."

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, the Trump White House has been consulting with high-profile war profiteers who have argued that the way forward in Afghanistan is to further privatize military operations in the country. White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and senior advisor Jared Kushner reportedly "recruited" both Feinberg and Blackwater founder Erik Prince to lay out a war plan for the president.

Critics denounced this development as a step toward "colonialism," and commentators had similar words for Trump's apparent attraction to Afghanistan's mineral wealth.

Law professor and former White House lawyer Andy Wright concluded that the Times report lays bare Trump's "British Empire thinking," which places plunder over "threat-based security."

Al Gore Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions on Climate Change

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOl9WbpcBVM

Ocean warmth predicts US drought and fire risk

July 29, 2017, by Tim Radford

http://climatenewsnetwork.net/ocean-warmth-predicts-us-drought-and-fire-risk/

Ocean cycles help to determine US drought and fire risk in several western states, with global warming adding to their severity.

LONDON, 29 July, 2017 – There is now a new way to forecast western US drought and fire risk, notably in Arizona and California. It’s simple: test the temperature of the oceans.

If the Atlantic is warm while the Pacific is relatively cold, then the risk of prolonged drought and wildfire conditions in California and on the other side of the Rockies becomes higher. It’s a natural consequence of oceanic cycles but, scientists warn, global warming as a consequence of human action can also make such droughts more severe.

Research like this matters because it identifies yet another working part in the global machinery of climate. Changes in ocean temperature drive vast and long-distance atmospheric changes that send the moisture-laden winds away from the thirsty soils.

The implication is that sustained drought, followed by raging wildfires in tinderbox forests, does not simply represent a bad run of the climate dice. Long-term natural forces are at work. And if climate scientists and meteorologists know in advance that drought is more likely, they can give farmers and growers and city authorities some useful warning.

Scientists from Utah in the US, South Korea, Hawaii, the UK and California report in the journal Science Reports that they have combined complex ocean and atmosphere observations to develop what they call a “multi-year dynamical prediction system” that could advise on the probabilities of wildfire and drought at least 10 months in advance.

Such droughts hit Texas and Mexico in 2010-2011, the Great Plains in 2012 and California from 2011 to 2014: in California alone the bill for drought and fire reached at least $2.2bn and cost 17,000 jobs. So an earth system model that could give advance notice would be of huge value.

“Our results document that a combination of processes is at work. Through an ensemble modelling approach, we were able to show that without anthropogenic effects, the droughts in the southwestern United States would have been less severe,” said Axel Timmermann, who directs a centre for climate physics at Pusan National University in South Korea.

“By prescribing the effects of man-made climate change and observed global ocean temperatures, our model can reproduce the observed shifts in weather patterns and wildfire occurrences.”

Professor Timmermann, while at the University of Hawaii, identified unprecedented levels of ocean warming in 2014. But he is not the first to have cautiously identified a global warming component in the recent Californian drought. 

Emerging pattern

No single climate event can be attributed to climate change as a consequence of the profligate combustion of fossil fuels and the build-up of greenhouse gases in the planetary atmosphere, but in a procession of such events, researchers have begun to see climate change as a contributing factor.

And once soil moisture evaporates and ground cover becomes parched, the risk of fire amplifies. Researchers have warned that global warming must make fire risk ever greater, particularly in the US southwest, even though many blazes begin to race through the dry forests as a consequence of human action.

And it now seems that the risks of such droughts can be read in advance in the details of temperature differences in two oceans. The models offered a forecast time of between 10 and 23 months for wildfire, and 10 to 45 months for drought. The next step is to test such a mechanism for forecasting fire and drought in other vulnerable parts of the world: the Mediterranean, or Australia.

“Of course, we cannot predict individual rainstorms in California and their local impacts months or seasons ahead,” said Lowell Stott of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and a co-author.

“But we can use our climate computer model to determine whether on average the next year will have drier or wetter soils or more or less wildfires. Our yearly forecasts are far better than chance.”

– Climate News Network