We the People . . . .

 IN CONGRESS: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

THE JOY OF CHRISTMAS

By Robert P. Bomboy

 I’m wrapping Christmas packages this week in gaily colored paper, and it’s made me think about the joy I felt on a Christmas morning long ago.

I still cherish the memory of the first Christmas after my father came home from the war.

I was not quite five years old that Christmas morning in 1945, standing in wonder and anticipation at the top of the second-floor staircase of our home in the two-sided double block. It was very early, still dark in my upstairs bedroom. The staircase to the downstairs was enclosed and had a right angle at the bottom, so, as I gazed down the wooden steps, I couldn’t see into the rooms below, but only the glow of a wonderfully warm orange light. At the same time, I could hear a hollow roaring sound that had probably awakened me. It made me a bit afraid, but the beautiful glow gave me confidence, and so I started down, one trembling step after another in my bare feet and pajamas.

I could smell the sweet balsam of the Christmas tree even before I reached the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the middle room. And even seven decades later, the memory is still so strong and so good it can make me smile with joy. The room below was full of warm-colored light and full of the Christmas tree. The tree stood on a plywood platform nearly as high as my chin. Round red, green, blue, and gold ornaments – they must have been three inches across – reflected the light and made tiny but magically beautiful pictures of the room and everything in it. The platform and tree sat in the room’s bay window, and, as I took one step and then another, making my way slowly as far as I could around the platform, I saw shining glass pine cones, red ceramic bells, an ornament shaped like Santa Claus, pinwheels in tiny circus tents that hung over the glowing Christmas lights so they would spin, and fantastically thin fluted shapes in red, orange, yellow and green blown glass. Silver icicles stirred softly and made the tree shimmer. From its very top a lighted red star shone brightly.

            But best of all was the electric train. That was what had caused the roaring noise – the train running round and round beneath the tree on the wooden platform. It was a Lionel, and it had a puffing steam engine up front and a sprightly red caboose at the end. In between was a yellow boxcar with sliding doors, an oil tank car with the same realistic kind of ladders that I saw whenever my mother took me past the locomotives’ roundhouse and the railroad tracks. The running train also had a low-slung gondola car and a black coal car like the ones I saw all the time moving through town on the D&H Railroad. A white sheet covered the foot of the tree, creating snowy mountains that the train had to make its way around. On the flat green surface of the platform, farmers worked beside a hay wagon; girls carried buckets of milk from the barn; cows and pink pigs grazed on the green felt grass. Automobiles and trucks ran along a gravel road on their way to the train station, and a flagman stood at one of the railroad crossings.

            I’m old now but I was once a little boy and, even now, I still smile when I think of my mother and father. The custom in our house was that they would not put up the Christmas tree until after I had gone to bed. My mother and father must have worked through the night on the tree and the platform and the train and the trimming of it all. They probably had just gone to bed when I awoke. And, knowing all that, even today, I remember how much they loved me.

                        The joy of Christmas to all, and a Happy New Year too!

PUTTING A PRICE ON THE INTERNET

By Robert P. Bomboy

Do you use the Internet?

            More than 87 percent of Americans – almost nine out of ten of us – go online to get a recipe, find information on our phones, talk with our friends on Facebook, locate products we want to buy, get the news - one guy in particular, whose first name is Donald, uses Twitter a lot.

            Well, heads up! Everything’s for sale in Washington these days and, if they get their way, big telecommunications companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T will buy unprecedented control over what we can do, say, see, consume, or create online.

In the latest corporate power grab, President Trump’s appointee, Ajit Pai, who was Verizon’s lawyer before he became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has said from the outset that he intends  to nullify regulations that have kept the Internet free. He is an ally of Big Business broadcasters rather than a steward of the FCC. What a conflict of interest!

His appointment last January signaled Trump’s desire to ruthlessly wipe away every vestige of President Barak Obama’s consumer-protection regulations. Ajit Pai isn’t even pretending to be working in the public interest

With plenty of help from lobbyists and his former employer, Verizon, Pai last week announced plans to undercut what's called “net neutrality.” Until now, neutrality has meant that the companies connecting you and me to the Internet couldn’t arbitrarily control which websites load faster or slower, or charge websites or apps to load faster.

For Internet users like you and me, the cost of Internet access will go up with Pai’s plan. Free wifi could all but disappear. Big Telecom companies will give us access to their preferred websites and services for free, but charge us extra fees to use anyone else’s. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T or any other big Internet Service Provider will be able to completely block or slow down any website or app it wants to. Pound sand!

It’s no exaggeration to describe the end of net neutrality as a corporate takeover of the Internet. 

It has been open season on the Internet this year. Last April, remember, President Trump signed a Republican bill that let Big Telecom sell our Internet browsing histories to the highest bidder, even though all the Democrats voted nay. The new law blew away rules that made Internet Service Providers ask us - get our explicit consent - before they could scoop up our browsing histories, the locations of businesses we might physically visit, and the mobile applications we use — and sell that valuable private information for profit.

Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and the others, using this very complete information about our Internet lives, are now getting even richer by creating profiles of each of us and putting them up for sale to any corporation or government willing to pay top dollar. This opens the door  to vastly wider surveillance and discrimination based on a person's race, religion, gender identity, financial situation, or medical condition.

            As the Washington Post pointed out, undoing the Internet privacy rules, was “the first step by the Republican-led FCC to overhaul the Obama-era net neutrality rules.” 

Realize that you can be hurt by this. This is a personal fight for everyone who relies on the Internet. In times past, Congress has stepped in to block the FCC from destroying the free and open Internet. Make the call, send the email, Twitter! Tell our Congressmen and senators we’re watching them, because we are.

DON'T TWEAK THE TAIL OF THE TIGER

By Robert P. Bomboy

In 1987, Gary Hart, a former senator from Colorado, was the frontrunner among Democrats at the starting gate, intending to vie for their party's presidential nomination the following year.

            Then a scandal erupted and, rather than backing off, Hart challenged journalists covering his campaign. "Follow me around. I don't care. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead," he declared.

            They did, and caught him red-handed.

            Today there are more than 150,000 full-time reporters, journalists, and freelance writers in the United States, and probably at least that many more around the world. From the beginning of his election campaign, and through these eight months of his presidency, Donald Trump's cloudburst of lies have been a daily challenge to anyone and everyone who wants to disprove him.

            Many hundreds of journalists, obviously, have taken up the challenge.

            During the past week, David Leonhardt of the New York Times, counted up a list of the scandals and potential scandals that are hanging over the president's head. Here's the list:

• As The New Yorker magazine, the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-profit newsroom ProPublica, and the public radio station WNYC all reported, longtime Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz donated more than $50,000 to a Manhattan district attorney who later dropped a case against Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

• The presidency is benefiting Trump's business in numerous ways. Government officials have stayed in hotels that bear Trump's name; for example, Trump's Mar-a-Lago club doubled its membership rates after he won the White House.

·                     Eric Trump has been giving his father quarterly updates on the financial health of his businesses, despite promises that the president would have no involvement. Those businesses have also done deals with foreign governments, despite the president's pledge that they wouldn't.

• Trump has spent more than $30 million of taxpayer money traveling to properties he owns.

• Ryan Zinke, Trump's secretary of the interior, is under investigation for chartering a $12,000 flight from Las Vegas to Montana at taxpayers' expense.

• David Shulkin, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, charged taxpayers for a trip to Europe that included stopovers in England at a Wimbledon tennis tournament and Westminster Abbey, plus a river cruise for him and his wife.

• Scott Pruitt, who runs the Environmental Protection Agency, regularly dines with donors and lobbyists from industries his department is regulating. He also used public money to pay for a soundproof booth in his office and chartered private and military overseas flights.

• Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, tried to use a government plane to fly him to Europe for his honeymoon. He may also have availed himself of a taxpayer-funded military plane to view the sun's total eclipse in August, though he says the trip had a different purpose.

• Tom Price, the former secretary of health and human services who resigned in disgrace at the end of September, spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private planes. Trump appointed Price despite Price's history of using his position in Congress to get sweetheart stock deals for himself.

• Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, has reportedly used his closeness with Trump to secure foreign investments for Kushner's family-owned business, in exchange for granting visas.

• A Chinese government office approved trademarks for a company owned by the president's daughter, Ivanka, on the same day that China's president met with her father.

• Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, may have used his position to repay a Russian oligarch.

• Michael Flynn lobbied on behalf of the Turkish government, but Trump selected
him as national security adviser anyway (before later ousting him).

            Not since the short administration of President Warren Harding in the 1920s, as I've pointed out before, has anyone in the White House been so deeply enmeshed in the briar patch.

"Amid the chaos and dysfunction," says Jamelle Bouie of the online newsmagazine Slate, "it can be easy to miss that this White House is corrupt. Remarkably, unbelievably, corrupt." 

SPEAKING WITH A FORKED TONGUE

By Robert P. Bomboy

It’s another case of President Trump speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

            Last week he trumpeted that the ruinous Republican re-writing of U.S. taxes would be “one of the great Christmas gifts to middle-income people.”

            But dining privately with wealthy friends Friday night at his swanky Mar-a-Lago club in Florida he told them, “You all just got a lot richer!” 

Yeah, that’s the truth:

When Trump signed the $1.5 trillion tax re-write into law last week, he squirmed through a special new loophole for big-shot real estate operators and reaped millions of dollars on his own taxes. And his ultra-wealthy friends across the country – who already have in their tight fists 40 percent of America’s wealth – gobbled up the biggest tax cuts of all. As he said, they all just got a lot richer.

What did we get? He promised we would save 35 percent on our taxes, but it’s actually just a dime on a dollar.

“If you ask the top one percent how Senate Republicans did this year, they’d give them an A,” New York Senator Chuck Schumer says. “But if you ask middle-class Americans how the Republican Senate did this year, they’d give them a big, fat, red F.”

Besides the tax-cut bonanza for the richest one percent of us, the conservative reactionaries opened Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling that will mean more billions for oil companies; and, as I’ve mentioned in previous columns, they rushed through a string of 19 tight-fisted new judges (including a new Supreme Court justice) all of whom now have lifetime appointments to the federal courts. The Senate moved especially fast, but quietly, to confirm 12 young federal appeals court judges — the most in a single year since the appeals courts were established in 1891.

The Republicans were drooling at the mouth when, manipulating the budget, they were finally able to undercut rules that everyone had to have health insurance.

From his first day in office, President Trump picked up an obscure law that hadn’t been used in 20 years – the Congressional Review Act – to smash up more than a bakers dozen of important rules and agencies that had protected Americans across the board. The rule protecting the Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was one of them.  A rule protecting us from oil company corruption was another. The Federal Communications Commission and Congress wiped out the rules that had protected our Internet privacy, and let Comcast, Verizon, and other big cable companies write new  Internet  inequality principles. 

With Trump in the driver’s seat, companies can now exploit their workers, Wall Street bankers can rip off borrowers, dirty energy companies can more easily pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink, pharmaceutical companies can continue their price-gouging, auto companies can sell dangerous cars without recalls. The big-money banks –  JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, for example –  stand to gain millions from Trump’s anti-climate and anti-immigrant agendas.

Corporate donors spent more than $1 billion on the Republicans to get their way in Congress, and they got it. The new rules, rates, and loopholes in the 2018 budget are their payback, and, as Trump said, they’ll be a lot richer. The giveaway endangers us, the American people. It’s an escalation of the corrupt insider-dealing that is becoming standard practice among Trump and his cronies.

In the new year, the House of Representatives plans to cut poverty programs, food stamps, welfare, and Medicaid. “It’s just perfect, isn’t it?” says Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois. “Tax breaks for the wealthiest people who haven’t ever punched a time clock in their lives, so that we could cut back food stamps for single moms trying to feed hungry kids. Perfect.”

Here’s one last Christmas thought:

How rich were Trump’s holiday dinner guests? They were rich enough to be able to afford the $200,000 initiation fee at Mar-a-Lago, plus the club’s $14,000 annual dues.

How was your Christmas?                   

HUNTING FOR SNAKES ON CAPITOL HILL

By Robert P. Bomboy

A long time ago I was a reporter covering the Maryland General Assembly, the state legislature that meets in Annapolis for three months each year, from January to March. The assembly’s penultimate work was approving the state budget, always in a mad late-night dash lasting into the wee and darkest hours of the final morning.

Long into the night we reporters hunted for snakes in an airless basement press room beneath the Maryland Statehouse where George Washington in 1783 nobly resigned his generalship of the continental army that had won the Revolutionary War. 

The “snakes” were nasty features that the assembly had secreted in every possible crack and cranny of the budget – hidden political plums and loopholes that purposely enriched wealthy individuals and corporations. Every year at budget time we found bushels of them.

That being the norm, think how many snakes are slithering around in the 479-page federal budget that the Senate passed last week, almost without looking at it. The hunt for the snakes is on again!

It’s not as if we have to look far. Everyone from tax accountants to Nobel Prize-winning economists had been screaming from the housetops all along that this budget was a tax grab for the rich.  That should not surprise us because it has now reached the point that the rich own America and they own Congress. More than half of all its members are millionaires. Eighteen lobbyists swarm around each and every member, like bees after you know what.

 In its final form, the Senate budget is perhaps the most corrupt legislative document that Congress has produced since the days of President Warren G. Harding almost 100 years ago. As the Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell tried to do with the version of the Unaffordable Care Act that failed in September, a Senate cabal wrote its budget in complete secrecy, had no hearings on it, heard no expert witnesses, refused to show it to the Democrats who make up almost half of the Senate’s numbers, refused even to share it with their own Republican members until 7 p.m. on the night they were voting on it. During that dreadful final day and night of the vote, they scribbled dozens of last-minute snakes into their budget – some additions hardly readable and written in the margins of the nearly 500-page bill, depending on whose ox was being gorged or gored.

 It was malfeasance to vote yes to it without having even the faintest idea what was in it.

The rich will gloat and pop their champagne corks. We will suffer for it. This budget and its long-term consequences will add $1 trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years. In one of their unkindest cuts of all, the Republicans will use the very deficit they’ve created to dramatically unfund Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other New Deal and Great Society benefits we’ve counted on and paid into.

And of course, by repealing the Obamacare rule requiring that everyone have health insurance, the budget will immediately rip the carpet out from under 13 million of us who were previously unable to get medical insurance. Besides causing millions of men, women, and children to lose their coverage, it will disrupt care for the elderly and change the American health care system in ways we can’t yet even predict.

The money saved will be pumped into tax cuts for the very wealthy, the one percent. The budget just passed includes tax cuts so large that they will trigger across-the-board spending cuts — including billions from Medicare. The last time Medicare was hit with cuts like this, patients lost access to critical services like chemotherapy treatment.

Throughout, Trump and his Treasury Secretary, the multi-millionaire Steve Mnuchin, lied, saying the budget would give tax cuts to most of us. Munchkin, the guy who got in trouble for using government planes and helicopters on personal flights, assured everyone – including the senators - that he had dozens of people in the Treasury working day and night to demonstrate the benefits of the budget for the middle class. Only at the last minute did the Treasury point out he was lying – he didn’t have a study like that going on and no one was working on it.

Let’s look for the ssssssnaakes:

·         For instance, there’s the “Donald J. Trump loophole.” Trump has a lot of money from his various businesses that will now be taxed at a cut rate.  Steven M. Rosenthal of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says Trump’s 2017 financial disclosure forms show more than 500 pass-through business interests that will get big tax breaks.

·         Thanks to an amendment tacked on by Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, gas and oil operators will get even bigger tax cuts than they now have. “The Senate went out of its way to confirm that passive investors in these publicly traded investment vehicles get the benefit of the pass-through discount tax rate,” says Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California and a former chief of staff for the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “This is a working definition of a tax boondoggle.”

·         In the early morning hours before the awful vote, Vice President Mike Pence cast a tiebreaker to pass an amendment letting people use up to $10,000 a year from tax-advantaged 529 savings accounts for private and religious schools and some home schooling, further undercutting public education. Until now, 529 accounts could be used only for college and higher education.

·         At the same time that wealthy investors and businesses are getting big tax cuts — including eliminating the estate tax for all but a tiny sliver of the country’s wealthiest households — the Senate tightened deductions for lower- and middle-income wage earners, and rejected funding that would have let the I.R.S. offer advice to low-income people as they filed their taxes. It’s the Christmas season and the old unrepentant Scrooge is alive and well in the land.

·         New tax cuts go to big-money taxpayers like lawyers, accountants, and a legion of others whose businesses are organized as partnerships. Half of that kind of income goes to the top one percent of taxpayers, the richest of the rich, according to the Tax Policy Center. That tax cut will cost the government about $476 billion over the next 10 years. 

·        Banks and other financial institutions will still be able to avoid taxes by making payments to offshore subsidiaries. The Senate had initially intended to take away the tax benefits from such sleight-of-hand finagling, but the banks got a last-minute reprieve. In calculating the banks’ tax bills, the budget snakes exclude payments related to derivatives, a big source of income for financial institutions and a main contributor to the 2008 financial meltdown.

·        The drug maker Pfizer, Google, Apple, and other huge companies whose profits have accumulated in offshore tax havens will now have their corporate income tax bills cut nearly in half, to 20 percent, a break that will save the big guys half a trillion dollars a year compared to the current law.

Who owns America? Ssssssssssssss!!!!

WHAT DON’T YOU KNOW ABOUT THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN AMERICA?

By Robert P. Bomboy

In the past few weeks we’ve seen Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives pass a federal budget that will add a trillion dollars to our national debt and give much of that to the richest one percent of our citizens.

Nearly nine months ago I wrote a column titled “The Rich Are Not Like Us,” quoting the 20^th century novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Week after week, I’ve pointed to facts showing that the rich have taken over America: The 400 richest people in our United States have more money than the bottom 150 million of us put together:  They own a third of the stock market, a third of all the property in America, and a third of anything else that can be owned. They own Congress; more than half of all its members are millionaires. Being rich, behind their guarded walls, has separated them from ordinary people like us. Being rich, they've lost whatever empathy they once may have had, and they are using the power that accompanies their money to exert vast political influence, cut their taxes – as in the current budget, and derail consumer-protection regulations, as the Trump administration is doing

Americans are not generally aware of the extent of what’s going on. In most developed countries, there is a direct relationship between income inequality (gross income gaps like that ) and the public's views about the need to address the issue – but not in America, where the gap between the rich and the poor is huge but the concern is low. The most commonly accepted measurement of income inequality, the Gini Index, ranks the United States sixth-worst among 173 nations.

Since March 2016 I’ve been adding these and nearly 400 other terrible and disheartening facts to a free, directly attributable, and easily searchable database at https: onepercentsearcher.blogspot.com. If you scroll down through it, alphabetically, or by date, or by pressing the Microsoft Command and the f keys on your computer you’ll see facts like these that ought to make you think:  

1. Did you know that the amount of money that was given out in bonuses on Wall Street this year was twice the amount earned by all of the minimum-wage workers in America combined?

2. Did you know that the top 25 hedge fund managers earn more each year than all the kindergarten teachers in America combined? Some Wall Street hedge fund managers earn billions of dollars annually.

3. Did you know that the slice of the national income pie going to the wealthiest one percent of Americans has doubled since 1979?

4. Did you know that the 400 Americans I mentioned above have more wealth ($2 trillion), than half of all the rest of us combined? Two trillion dollars is 2,000 billions.

5. Did you know that, in 1962, the household median wealth of America's top one percent was 125 times our average median wealth? That gap has now grown hugely to more than 288 times ours.

6. Did you know that the poorest half of the U.S. owns only 2.5 percent of the country’s wealth? The top one percent owns at least a third of it.

7. Did you know that 25 of the largest corporations in America paid their CEOs more money last year than they paid in taxes?

8. Did you know that corporate tax rates have dropped from 30 percent in the 1950s to under 10 per cent today.

9. Did you know that tax rates on the highest-earning Americans have plunged from an almost 70 percent tax rate in 1945 to, in the new federal budget, around 24 percent today.

10. Did you know that the super rich .01% of America, each take home on average six percent of the national income - around $23 million each every year?

11. Did you know that in 81 percent of American counties, the median income, about $52,000, is less than it was 15 years ago? This is despite the fact that the economy has grown 83 percent in the past quarter-century and corporate profits have doubled.

12. Did you know that, in 1970, a woman earned about 60 percent of the amount a man earned? In 2005 a woman earned about 80 percent of what a man earned. Since 2005, there has been no change in that figure.

13. Did you know that, since 1979, high school dropouts have seen their median weekly incomes drop by 22 percent?

14. Did you know that more than 20 percent of all American children live below the poverty line? That is higher than almost all other developed countries.

15. Did you know that, in 1946, a child born into poverty had about a 50 percent chance of rising into the middle class? In 1980, the chances were 40 percent. A child born in poverty today has about a 33 percent chance.

16. Did you know that, between 2000 and 2010, the U.S. borrowed $1 trillion in order to give tax cuts to households earning over $250,000? With the tax cuts for the rich in the new federal budget, we’re essentially doing that all over again.