Friday, September 20, 2019
'What the Hell Is Going On Here'?: Alarm Raised as Trump's Intelligence Director Refuses to Give Whistleblower Complaint to Congress
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Acting Director of National
Intelligence Joseph Maguire informed the House Intelligence Committee chairman
that he'd been directed by "a higher authority" to withhold the
complaint
Experts are warning that
protocols put in place to protect government whistleblowers have been put in
serious jeopardy—potentially at the direction of President Donald Trump,
according to a top Democrat—as the acting Director of National Intelligence is
refusing, despite legal requirements, to share an official internal complaint
with Congress.
After announcing last Friday
that the independent Inspector General of the office of the Director of
National Intelligence (DNI) had alerted him to a whistleblower complaint, House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told Margaret Brennan
on CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday that acting DNI Joseph Maguire
was refusing to turn over the complaint because it involved "privileged
communications" between people outside the intelligence community.
Maguire also told the chairman
that "he is being instructed not to" respond to the committee's
subpoena regarding the complaint, Schiff told Brennan.
"This involved a higher
authority," the chairman said.
"It's a pretty narrow group of people that it could apply to that are both
above the DNI in authority and also involve privileged communications. So, I
think it's fair to assume this involves either the president or people around
him or both."
"Make no
mistake," tweeted Washington
Post columnist Greg Sargent Wednesday. "The refusal to turn the
whistleblower's complaint over to Adam Schiff's committee constitutes another
serious erosion in checks on Trump's norm-shredding." At the Post, Sargent
wrote that an order from the White House to Maguire to ignore Schiff's subpoena
would be similar to other conduct by Trump.
"Trump's White House, of
course, has asserted various forms of presidential prerogative to block
oversight on many fronts, including preventing Judiciary Committee Democrats
from questioning multiple direct witnesses to Trump's extensive corruption and
wrongdoing, as documented by the special counsel," wrote Sargent.
The developing story, Sargent
added, is likely "about to get a whole lot more media scrutiny, because it
involves secretive back-channel maneuvering, a possible threat to national
security and potential lawbreaking at the highest levels of the Trump
administration, possibly at the direction of President Trump himself—all with a
whole lot of cloak-and-dagger intrigue thrown in."
The DNI's refusal to forward
the whistleblower's complaint to the committee represents "an ominous new
turn," he wrote, "one that should only underscore concerns that
serious—and dangerous—lawbreaking might be unfolding."
On social media, Trevor Timm,
executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote that the news
of high-level flouting of laws served to affirm the importance of
whistleblowers and helps demonstrate how difficult it can be for them to
operate within the government.
In accordance with systems
meant to insulate whistleblowers from possible retaliation from agency heads,
the Inspector General received
the complaint on August 12 and assessed it as "credible"—a
determination which by law requires the DNI to turn the complaint over to
congressional intelligence committees.
The whistleblower's
disclosure described (pdf)
"a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, violation of law or executive
order, or deficiency" regarding national intelligence, according to the
alert Schiff received from the Inspector General, which did not include further
details.
"Under the statute as
written, the Director of National Intelligence doesn't have the discretion to
not act or get a second opinion," Margaret Taylor, senior editor of
the Lawfare Blog, told the Post. "He just has to forward it
to the intelligence committees."
As Daniel Drezner, a professor
of international affairs at Tufts University, put it on Twitter: "I really
want to know what the hell is going on here."
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Day After Trump Denigrates Homeless, Sanders Unveils $2.5 Trillion #HousingForAll Plan to Address Crisis
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
"My administration will
be looking out for working families and tenants, not the billionaires who
control Wall Street."
In the wake of "abhorrent"
comments made by President Donald Trump about homeless people, Democratic
presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday unveiled his $2.5
trillion "Housing for All" plan, which calls for building millions of
affordable housing units and providing billions of dollars in rental assistance
over a decade.
In the richest country in the
history of the world, every American must have a safe, decent, accessible, and
affordable home as a fundamental right," the Sanders campaign declares in the
plan, which will be paid for by a wealth tax on the top one-tenth of the one
percent.
After teasing his
housing plan at an event Saturday, the Independent senator from Vermont said in
a statement Wednesday: "There is virtually no place in America where a
full-time minimum wage worker can afford a decent two bedroom apartment. At a
time when half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, this is
unacceptable."
"For too long the federal
government has ignored the extraordinary housing crisis in our country,"
he added. "That will end when I am president."
Billy Gendell, a Sanders
campaign policy staffer, highlighted some of the plan's proposals in a tweet:
One of the key proposals, the
Sanders campaign explains, stems from a bill the senator put forth in the U.S.
House nearly two decades ago:
In 2001, Bernie first
introduced legislation to create the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund,
based largely on the success of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust
Fund. After a 15-year effort, in 2016, a modest version of Bernie's legislation
became the first new federal affordable housing program funded in several
decades. Administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development,
it is funded through a small percentage of revenues from the
government-sponsored housing agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Over the
past four years, this program has invested $905 million on the construction,
rehabilitation, and preservation of affordable housing throughout the
country—but unfortunately that is not nearly enough compared to the demand.
Sanders proposes investing
$1.48 trillion in the trust over 10 years "to build, rehabilitate, and
preserve the 7.4 million quality, affordable and accessible housing
units." He further proposes spending $400 billion on building two million
mixed-income social housing units, expanding a U.S. Department of Agriculture
program by $500 million for new developments in rural areas, and boosting funds
for the Indian Housing Block Grant Program to $3 billion.
During the first year of his
presidency, Sanders would prioritize 25,000 National Affordable Housing Trust
units to house people who are homeless. He would also double McKinney-Vento
homelessness assistance grants to more than $26 billion over five years and
provide $500 million for states and localities' outreach programs.
In contrast, Trump was
lambasted after he claimed during a rally in California Tuesday night
that homeless people are ruining the "prestige" of major U.S. cities.
Progressives, meanwhile, praised Sanders' understanding of the crisis and his
bold proposals to address it.
The plan claims that
"most public housing is in desperate need of reconstruction and
rehabilitation" and calls for a $70 million investment to improve
accessibility and provide access to high-speed broadband in such units. Sanders
also promises to "ensure that public housing has high-quality, shared
community spaces."
Decrying the federal
government's failures to provide adequate housing assistance to low-income
people, the campaign says that "today, 7.7 million families in America are
forced to pay more than half of their limited incomes on rent because they are
eligible for Section 8 rental assistance but do not receive it because of a lack
of federal resources. As a result, many of these families are forced to choose
between paying rent or buying the food, medicine, or prescription drugs they
need."
Sanders calls for fully
funding Section 8 assistance at $410 billion over the next decade as well as
strengthening the Fair Housing Act and implementing a Section 8
non-discrimination law.
The Housing for All plan also
proposes various tenant protections—including a national cap on annual rent
increases at no more than 3 percent or 1.5 times the Consumer Price Index, a
"just-cause" requirement for evictions, and a guarantee of renters'
right to form tenants unions. Sanders further proposes creating an independent
National Fair Housing Agency similar to the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau and an office within that agency for mobile home residents.
Sanders' housing plan
incorporates various existing pieces of legislation that the senator
supports—calling for the passage of the Equality Act to include LGBTQ+ people
in the Fair Housing Act as well as the Green New Deal to fully transition to
sustainable energy nationwide by 2030. Sanders proposes decarbonizing all
public housing through the Green New Deal and providing grants to low- and
moderate-income families so they can weatherize and retrofit homes and invest
in cheaper energy.
The housing plan is designed
to help out not only people who are homeless and renters, but also first-time
homebuyers. Sanders proposes investing $2 billion at the USDA and $6 billion at
HUD to create an assistance program for first-time buyers and making
pre-purchase housing counseling available to all potential buyers.
The plan also proposes "a
25 percent House Flipping tax on speculators who sell a non-owner-occupied
property, if sold for more than it was purchased within five years of
purchase" as well as "a 2 percent Empty Homes tax on the property value
of vacant, owned homes to bring more units into the market and curb the use of
housing as speculative investment."
Sanders vowed in his statement
Wednesday that if he secures the Democratic nomination for president and wins
the 2020 election, "my administration will be looking out for working
families and tenants, not the billionaires who control Wall Street." In a
campaign newsletter, Sanders staffer David Sirota explained a proposal designed
to do just that:
One of the major planks in
Bernie's plan is a proposal to finally end the mass sale of mortgages to Wall
Street firms and crack down on predatory practices of Wall Street landlords.
That includes the firm run by Donald Trump's billionaire adviser, Steve
Schwarzman—the financier who throws
himself multimillion-dollar birthday parties and bankrolls
the GOP, while his firm fuels a housing crisis and traps tenants in a cycle
of squalor, predatory
fees and evictions.
In the wake of the financial
crisis, the federal government helped private equity giants like Schwarzman's
firm Blackstone buy up foreclosed homes, and then convert them into rental
properties. The
Atlantic reports that between 2011 and 2017, these giants gained
control of more than 200,000 homes. This has been great for Blackstone, which
has been cashing
in on the scheme—but it hasn't been great for everyone else.
The Housing for All plan,
Sirota concluded, "will crack down on corporate landlords that are
destroying too many communities throughout America."
'Look a Dying Man in the Eyes': Activist Ady Barkan Wants Joe Biden to Sit Down and Talk About Medicare for All
"Look a dying man in the
eyes and tell me how we fix this country."
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Activist Ady Barkan on
Wednesday asked former Vice President Joe Biden, the only contender for the
2020 Democratic presidential nomination who has not sat down with the dying
healthcare activist, to find time to meet and discuss Medicare for All.
Barkan, who is suffering from
ALS, made the request in a video produced by Now This released
Wednesday. The activist is going into surgery thursday for a tracheostomy to
help him breathe, but said that after after his recovery, he and Biden should
sit down.
"The surgery will be
intense, and I'll be in the hospital for a week of recovery," Barkan says
in the video, speaking through his standard video screen that allows him to
talk via eye movements. "But I'll be out soon and back in the struggle
with you."
Despite his illness, Barkan
has been at the forefront of the campaign to win Medicare for All, talking on
camera with five candidates for president: Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.),
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), as
well as former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro. South
Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas), Sen.
Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and businessman Andrew Yang have all agreed to speak
with Barkan.
Not all the candidates support
Medicare for All. Some, like Biden, want to stick with a private system but
improve it and are critical of Medicare for All.
But Biden is the only
candidate of the top tier to not answer the invitation to speak with the dying
activist.
"Share your personal and
powerful story like your colleagues," Barkan said, referring to Biden's
oft-repeated story of losing his son Beau to brain cancer, "and explain
your vision of healthcare in America."
Barkan ended his appeal on an
emotional note.
"Look a dying man in the
eyes and tell me how we fix this country," said Barkan. "We may
disagree, but that's okay."
GM's Decision to Cut Off Employee Health Insurance 'Yet Another Reason Why We Need Medicare for All'
Progressives Say GM's Decision
to Cut Off Employee Health Insurance 'Yet Another Reason Why We Need Medicare
for All'
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Under a single-payer system,
said one Medicare for All advocate, employers would no longer have "tons
of leverage because workers are desperate to keep their benefit."
General Motors' decision Tuesday
to stop paying healthcare premiums for nearly 50,000 of the company's striking
workers offered a powerful case for why Medicare for All is necessary to ensure
stable and quality insurance as a right for everyone in the United States.
That was the argument advanced
by single-payer supporters in the wake of GM's move, which union leaders and
others quickly denounced as a cruel intimidation tactic designed to break the
United Auto Workers strike.
Sara Nelson, president of the
American Association of Flight Attendants, said employer-provided
insurance allows corporations to use the threat of healthcare cuts "to
hold workers hostage."
"Medicare for All puts
power back in our hands," said Nelson.
Labor historian Toni Gilpin
echoed Nelson, calling employer-provided healthcare "a cudgel that will be
used against workers."
Michael Lighty, a founding
fellow at the Sanders Institute think tank and an activist with the Democratic
Socialists of America's Medicare for All campaign, told Common Dreams that
under a single-payer system, employers would no longer have "tons of
leverage because workers are desperate to keep their benefit."
"By taking healthcare off
the bargaining table, workers can demand and win real gains in wages and
pensions," said Lighty, "and rebuild the solidarity at the heart of
labor."
GM's decision came amid fierce
healthcare disagreements among 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Those
disputes were on full
display Tuesday at an AFL-CIO forum in Philadelphia, where Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Vice President Joe Biden touted their respective
healthcare proposals before a crowd of union workers.
Biden, who spoke before GM cut
off striking employees' benefits, said his public option plan would allow
workers to "keep your health insurance you've bargained for if you like
it."
Warren Gunnels, senior adviser
to Sanders, took aim at
Biden's assertion on Twitter.
"Try telling that to UAW
workers who just had their healthcare benefits taken away from them by
GM," said Gunnels. "Medicare for All is the only way to make sure
that no American loses their health insurance ever again and workers will
finally receive the higher wages and benefits they need and deserve."
Sanders, who spoke at the
AFL-CIO forum shortly after GM's move, said Medicare for All would eliminate
corporations' ability to cut off healthcare benefits by guaranteeing
comprehensive coverage to everyone in the U.S.
"Here you have the
situation where the UAW is now on strike, 49,000 workers. I'm sure that in that
49,000, there are family members who are seriously ill," said Sanders.
"Under Medicare for All, whether you're working, whether you're not working,
whether you go from one job to another job, it's right there with you."
Splinter's Paul Blest argued Wednesday
that GM's decision to stop paying for workers' healthcare premiums just a day
after UAW's strike began counters one of the main centrist talking points
against Medicare for All.
"Hasn't Joe Biden been
touting the fact that unions fought for their healthcare as a reason why
Medicare for All is bad?" said Blest. "In one fell swoop, General
Motors proved why that line of attack on Medicare for All and its proponents,
namely Sen. Bernie Sanders, is complete bullshit."
"Under a single-payer
system, in which your healthcare is dependent on the fact that you exist in the
United States rather than who you work for," wrote Blest, "there
would be no employer healthcare for GM—or any other company—to cut off. And
instead of worrying about healthcare, that's one less thing workers everywhere
would have to bargain over when entering contract negotiations with their
employers."
As Vox's Tara
Golshan noted,
GM's move is far from unusual for corporate America.
"Union contract
negotiations break down all the time," wrote Golshan. "And union
leaders are quick to point out that healthcare, which always plays a major role
in union contract negotiations, is a major sticking point. Companies use healthcare
as leverage to negotiate down wage increases and other benefits. That's why
some of the biggest unions in the country support Medicare for All—or at least
moving in that direction."
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