SWAMPER KEEPER TRUMP'S CRONIES WHITEFISH ENERGY, PALS OF INTERIOR SEC RYAN ZINKE WILL CLEAN UP IN PUERTO RICO, OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WILL HAND THEM A MASSIVE BAILOUT!

THE BANKSTERS DESTROYED A TRILLION IN AMERICAN HOME EQUITY AND WERE REWARDED WITH NO-STRINGS, NO INTEREST LOANS TO BUY THEIR COMPETITORS. THEY’VE BEEN A CRIME WAVE SINCE.

Senate Votes To Nullify Rule Allowing Class Action Suits Against Banks

https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2017/10/senate-votes-nullify-rule-allowing-class-action-suits-banks/?utm_source=hadaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

As the AP notes, the rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “exposed banks to large class-action lawsuits. Supporters say that possibility would help ensure banks, credit card companies and other lenders treat consumers appropriately. The vote comes months after House action and reflects the effort of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans to undo regulations that the GOP argues harm the free market.”

Montana company with ties to Trump cashes in from Puerto Rico disaster

By Rafael Azul
25 October 2017

Five weeks after Hurricane María cut a path of destruction through Puerto Rico, millions of the island’s residents are still without power and are facing the danger of spreading disease and more fatalities. Trump’s response has only exacerbated the human suffering while behind the scenes various corporate vultures with close connections to the administration are preparing to cash in from the disaster.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post revealed that a small company located in US Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke’s hometown of Whitefish, Montana, had won a $300 million contract to help restore the operations of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA or Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica—AEE—in Spanish).

When the contract was signed the tiny two-year-old company, Whitefish Energy, had only two permanent employees. The company’s Puerto Rican labor force now consists of 280 workers recruited under contingent contracts.

The deal with the largely inexperienced company is the biggest to date and is a damning exposure of the Trump administration, which promised to “empty the swamp” of bribe-taking and corrupt Washington officials.

Susan Tierney, a former Energy Department 

official, described as “odd” the selection of 

Whitefish Energy. “The fact that there are so 

many utilities with experience in this and a 

huge track record of helping each other out, it 

is at least odd why [AEE] would go to 

Whitefish,” Tierney said, “I’m scratching my 

head wondering how it all adds up.”

Zinke responded to the Post article by 

admitting that he and Whitefish Director 

Andy Techmanski know each other but 

insisting that he had nothing to do with 

Whitefish Energy getting the contract Puerto 

Rico’s public electrical utility.

NBC Montana, however, reported that Techmanski reached out to the Department of the Interior to seek its help in “[freeing] up more resources.”

“Once the company got the go-ahead from PREPA on Sept. 26 to begin work, company executives did reach out to contacts in case they could help expedite getting qualified linesmen to the island,” Chris Chiames, spokesperson for Whitefish Energy, told the Post .

A spokesperson for Zinke’s office explained that nothing came of the request. “The secretary always politely listens when citizens and the small business community approach him with concerns and ideas,” the Interior Department said. “Neither the secretary nor anyone in his office have taken any meetings or action on behalf of this company.”

According to the Daily Beast Joe Colonnetta, the owner of HBC Investments, the private equity firm that funds Whitefish Energy, has close ties to the Republican Party and he and his wife both contributed to the Trump campaign. According to Federal Election Commission data, Colonnetta contributed $20,000 to the Trump Victory PAC during the general election, $2,700 to Trump’s primary election campaign (then the maximum amount permitted), $2,700 to Trump’s general election campaign (also the maximum), and a total of $30,700 to the Republican National Committee in 2016 alone.

The Daily Beast continued, “Colonnetta’s wife, Kimberly, is no stranger to Republican politics either; shortly after Trump’s victory, she gave $33,400 to the Republican National Committee, the maximum contribution permitted for party committees in 2016.”

Ricardo Ramos, PREPA’s executive director, said the government gave the $300 million contract to Whitefish and a separate $200 million deal to Oklahoma-based Cobra Acquisitions after evaluating up to six companies for the job. Ramos said that Whitefish was chosen because it did not ask for a $25 million down payment, like other companies had, which the bankrupt utility could not afford.

Ramos declined to say why PREPA failed to active mutual aid agreements with the American Public Power Association, a recognized US entity that provides linemen and other repair and maintenance workers during electrical infrastructure emergencies.

In contrast, the state of Florida was able to begin requesting assistance from the state’s mutual aid agency, the Emergency Mutual Aid Compact, six days before Irma made landfall and blacked out 60 percent of the Florida’s 6.7 million households. It took 10 days to fully restore that state’s power grid, while nearly 80 percent of Puerto Rico remains in darkness.

Ramos claims the mutual aid agreement would have required him to negotiate over expenses. “The Authority does not have the liquidity to cover all of the expenses,” said Ramos. “I have to pay them and then ask for a refund. It’s a cash flow problem.” Regardless, some mainland public utilities have offered help, including the New York Electric Authority, which has sent in work crews to the island.

PREPA has long been a target for privatization and has faced years of cost-cutting, including the layoff of hundreds of linemen who conducted repairs and maintained power lines that stretch across mountainous and remote rural areas. This economic sabotage is why the electrical system was vulnerable to powerful hurricane winds and is the chief reason why it will take months to restore power.

Whitefish is not the only corporation looking to make a bundle from the human suffering on the island. This week a group of investors that hold over $3.3 billion of Puerto Rico’s estimated $70 billion in debt, including in Aurelius Capital Management, Stone Lion Capital and Monarch Alternative Capital, have made clear that they expect a share of all federal funds allocated to Puerto Rico for hurricane relief. They have declared they will fight in court to get money earmarked for survivors, based on the argument that these funds are merely replacing money Puerto Rico already spent on other expenses, in lieu of paying off their Wall Street creditors.

Billionaires Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson are also making a bid to restore the electricity grid and other giant corporations like Google and Amazon are already active on the island. As Vox noted, “Companies like Tesla, Duracell, and German energy storage firm Sonnen are already sending battery and solar supplies to Puerto Rico, building a toe-hold in what may be a lucrative rebuilding project.”

Weeks after hurricanes in Texas and Florida: Government aid scarce, tens of thousands still displaced

By Tom Hall
24 October 2017

Nearly two months after Hurricane Harvey slammed Texas and weeks after Irma devastated Florida, residents in both states attempting to piece their lives back together confront indifference and neglect from the federal government.

A front-page article in yesterday’s New York Times noted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “has taken weeks to inspect damaged homes and apartments, delaying flood victims’ attempts to rebuild their lives and properties.” The article added that people who call the agency’s help line routinely wait on hold for hours before even speaking with a FEMA representative. One person estimated that he had spent at least 16 hours attempting to reach someone at FEMA since Hurricane Harvey hit Texas at the end of August, thus far without success.

The agency, which is understaffed and was almost out of cash even before the recent hurricanes, has been overwhelmed by applications for federal assistance, according to the Times. However, a major factor in the backlog of cases is the onerous nature of the requirements for recipients of aid from the agency, which includes an in-person inspection of applicants’ homes to verify their claimed needs. More than 80 percent of the agency’s roughly 10,000 employees are currently working in the field.

For those who are able to navigate the application process, what assistance is available is paltry. FEMA grants through its main Disaster Relief Fund are capped at $33,000, which is nowhere near sufficient to make whole people who have lost everything. The vast majority of aid recipients get far less than the maximum grant.

The main function of the program is to provide temporary housing for disaster victims in nearby hotels or mobile homes. “We will never be able to bring people back to where they were prior to disaster—that’s what insurance and loans are for,” a FEMA spokesman told the Houston Press last month. In other words, the victims of the storms must pay for their own recovery.

This week, the Senate is scheduled to vote on a $36 billion bill that would fund relief efforts in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, as well as the areas of California affected by the recent wildfires. However, this bill, together with the $15 billion package passed last month, would only scratch the surface of the damage caused by some of the costliest natural disasters in American history. The economic impact from Hurricane Harvey alone is estimated to be as high as $180 billion.

At the beginning of October, over 60,000 people remained displaced in Texas from Hurricane Harvey, according to an Associated Press report. The two main shelters in the Houston area, located in the city’s main convention centers, have long since been closed down in order to reopen the facilities for convention business. More than 834,000 Texans had applied for FEMA assistance by the start of October, according to the AP, with only 298,000, or scarcely more than one-third, having received funding.

FEMA has denied outright 23 percent of 2.9 million applications for assistance from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, according to the Times. The vast majority of these denials, roughly 432,000 applications, have taken place in Florida, where, according to the newspaper, “the agency determined that many homes were not significantly damaged by the storm.” In St. Lucie County, Florida, among the hardest-hit by Irma on the Florida mainland, FEMA has given out only $7.9 million to 6,507 households, an average of around $1,200 per household. St. Lucie County has a population of 300,000 people.

Meanwhile, the need for food assistance remains widespread. Tens of thousands of people have flocked to assistance centers in recent weeks, where they can apply for temporary food stamps. In Florida, as the World Socialist Web Site reported earlier this month, more than 50,000 people lined up for food assistance at sites throughout the state, forcing closures at some facilities that were overwhelmed by demand. While only a fraction of St. Lucie residents have received assistance from FEMA, nearly a quarter of the county’s population has qualified for temporary federal food assistance.

As always in natural disasters, the hardest-hit segments of the population are overwhelmingly poor and working class, with many lacking the financial resources to evacuate or living in the most vulnerable and flood-prone areas.

This experience was repeated in the Houston area, where an estimated 3,000 lined up at Deusson Park in the Texas late-summer heat to apply for $649 in state food assistance for a four-person household. Several people in the crowd fell ill from heat exposure, according to the Texas Tribune, and an elderly man died of cardiac arrest shortly after arriving. The extended deadline to apply for food assistance expired last Friday.

When asked why the county did not open more facilities to handle the applications, Harris County Chief Executive Ed Emmett scapegoated the applicants themselves, citing the potential for fraud by people applying for the meager food assistance on offer. “It’s become just a government giveaway as opposed to targeting people who really need help,” Emmett told reporters. Government fraud investigators were reportedly on site at numerous centers monitoring the application process.

 

The American oligarchy prepares a new tax windfall for the rich

25 October 2017

The drive to enact the most massive tax cut for the rich in US history accelerated Tuesday as Donald Trump met behind closed doors with Senate Republicans to finalize the plan.

The House of Representatives is set to approve Thursday the Senate budget resolution passed last week, a parliamentary maneuver that will allow the Republicans, under expedited rules, to pass the tax plan by a simple majority in the Senate rather than a filibuster-proof three-fifths vote. The actual proposal will be released on November 1, setting the stage for the final push to secure passage by the end of the year.

Wall Street celebrated the stepped-up push for the plan with a 167-point surge in the Dow, bringing the index closer to 24,000. Since Trump was elected last November, the Dow has risen by more than 25 percent. It has quadrupled since 2009, thanks to the multitrillion-dollar bank bailout and other handouts to the corporations and banks under Obama.

The Trump tax measure, however, will raise to a new level the plundering of society’s resources by the ruling class.

Its provisions read like a Christmas wish list for the rich: slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, generating additional corporate revenues of $6.7 trillion by 2037; reducing the top personal income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent; abolishing the alternative minimum tax, which applies only to the wealthy; and slashing to 25 percent the rate at which business owners are taxed on money recorded as “pass through” income.

It also abolishes the estate tax, which affects those worth over $5 million, just 0.02 percent of the population. This measure has long been desired by the corporate oligarchy, allowing its members to pass on to their children all the wealth accumulated through fraud and speculation, effectively establishing a form of dynastic rule.

The top 1 percent will see their after-tax income rise by 8.5 percent if all these measures are adopted. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that half of the tax cuts will go to the top 1 percent of households, those making more than $700,000 per year. Within this group, the top 0.1 percent will receive 30 percent of the tax cuts, for an average cut of $800,000 a year.

The bottom 90 percent of the population, the working class and lower-middle class, will get little or nothing. A married couple with one child that earns less than $24,850 a year will receive no tax cut, while a similar family earning $48,700 will see a cut of just $180. At the same time, the budget deficits produced by the tax cuts will be used by both parties to demand massive cuts in social programs, including Social Security and Medicare.

As is to be expected, Trump and the Republicans are promoting the plan with shameless lying, denying that their plan is designed to benefit the rich and insisting it is aimed at cutting taxes for “hard-working Americans” and creating jobs.

The Democrats, for their part, support a huge cut in corporate taxes and are offering only token opposition to the other handouts to the rich. Following the Republican meeting on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and other Democratic senators held a press conference. Schumer, the senator from Wall Street, accused Trump of lying about the plan but said nothing about corporate taxes. Other Democrats attacked the plan for being fiscally irresponsible.

As always, the Republicans set the reactionary framework for policy and the Democrats ensure that it is enacted virtually intact. The Democrats’ main function is to disarm the working class by creating an illusory smokescreen of democratic debate and opposition.

The Trump tax plan is the outcome of a decades-long social counterrevolution that has produced a colossal transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich and the super-rich, creating levels of social inequality unseen since the 1920s and transforming the United States into an oligarchy.

The Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, granting Congress the power to tax people’s income, was passed in 1913, as part of the progressive movement’s efforts to rein in the robber barons. The estate tax was enacted at the same time.

During the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration raised the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent as part of the New Deal reforms aimed at heading off a socialist revolution. During World War II, the top rate peaked at 94 percent. Over the next three decades, the top rate never fell below 70 percent.

The first postwar reduction was carried out by John F. Kennedy, but this was only a foretaste of what was to come, as the ruling class adopted a policy of social counterrevolution under Ronald Reagan. The Democrats, who controlled Congress, capitulated to Reagan in 1981 and slashed the top rate from 70 percent first to 50 percent and then to 28 percent. This gradually rose back to the current rate of 39.6 percent.

At the same time, taxes on capital gains from stock and bond speculation were slashed to 25 percent as part of the inflation of the stock market that has proceeded since the 1980s. Tax cuts for the wealthy have been an essential part of the mechanism by which the stock market and other forms of financial speculation have been used as the primary mechanism for wealth accumulation by the financial aristocracy.

The consequences are clear. Since the 1980s, the share of national income going to the top 1 percent has risen from 12 percent to 20 percent, while that of the bottom 50 percent has fallen from 20 percent to 12 percent.

The most recent Survey of Consumer Finances from the US Federal Reserve shows that the top 10 percent of Americans now own 77 percent of all wealth. The top 1 percent owns 38.5 percent, an increase even since 2013. The share of the bottom 90 percent has declined by more than two percentage points to 22.9 percent.

The impact of these shifts in wealth and income on the conditions of life of millions of people can be seen in myriad forms: declining life expectancy, rising infant and maternal mortality, rampant drug addiction and a rising suicide rate.

This growth of parasitism has coincided with the destruction of large swathes of industry, the devastation of former industrial centers all over the country, and the impoverishment of broad sections of the working class. Now, with the Trump tax cut—authored by the Goldman Sachs alumni Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (net worth $500 million) and economic adviser Gary Cohn (net worth $610 million)—a new level of enrichment of the oligarchy is being launched that will make current levels of inequality seem quaint by comparison.

The conditions are being created for a social upheaval. The emerging working-class opposition must take up the demand for a massive revision of tax policy to break the stranglehold of the financial oligarchy and radically redistribute the wealth in favor of the working people. The top rate for both personal income and corporate wealth must be raised once again to what it was in the 1940s and 1950s, to end the theft of social resources and provide for the social needs of the broad masses of people.

These are in themselves democratic demands. They cannot be achieved, however, without a frontal assault on the source of the power of the corporate and financial elite: its control of economic life, and with that, the entire political system. The redistribution of wealth to the working class must be connected to the fight for workers’ power, the transformation of the giant corporations and banks into publicly owned utilities, and the socialist reorganization of economic life.

Barry Grey

65.5 Million in U.S. Speak Foreign Language at Home New report shows number has doubled since 1990, nearly tripled since 1980

Washington, D.C. (October 25, 2017) – An analysis of newly released 2016 Census Bureau data by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that a record 65.5 million U.S. residents five years of age and older speak a language other than English at home. As a share of the population, more than one in five U.S. residents now speaks a foreign language at home – including residents like Jovita Mendez, who has lived in the California for over 20 years and recently became a U.S. citizen, despite being unable to speak, read, or write in English. The largest percentage increases since 2010 among languages with more than 400,000 speakers were for Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Chinese, Persian, Haitian, and Gujarati. (Hindi and Gujarati are spoken in India; Urdu is spoken in Pakistan.) "The English language has always been part of the glue that holds our country together," said Steven Camarota, co-author of the report and Director of Research at the Center. "But the number of immigrants allowed into the country is now so large that it may be overwhelming the assimilation process, including learning English." View the entire report at https://cis.org/Report/655-Million-US-Residents-Spoke-Foreign-Language-Home-2016 Among the findings: Of those who speak a foreign language at home, 26.1 million (39.8 percent) told the Census Bureau that they speak English less than very well. This figure is based entirely on the subjective opinion of the respondents.  On an objective test of English literacy, prior CIS research showed that even among immigrants who have lived in the country for more than 15 years, 43 percent score at the "below basic" level, which is sometimes equated to functional illiteracy.  CIS has also estimated in prior research that roughly one out of three immigrants who are naturalized citizens has below basic English literacy. The new Census Bureau data show that many Americans who speak a foreign language at home are not immigrants. In fact, half of the growth in foreign language speakers since 2010 is among those born in the United States. Overall, 44 percent (29 million) of those who speak a language other than English at home are U.S.-born. Of foreign languages with more than 400,000 speakers, the largest percentage increases since 2010 were among speakers of Arabic (up 42 percent), Hindi (up 33 percent), Urdu (up 22 percent), Chinese (up 20 percent), Persian and Haitian (each up 15 percent), and Gujarati (up 14 percent). Hindi is a national language of India, Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, Persian is the national language of Iran, and Gujarati is spoken in India. States with the largest share of their populations speaking a foreign language at home in 2016 were California (45 percent), Texas (36 percent), New Mexico (34 percent), New Jersey (32 percent), New York and Nevada (each 31 percent), Florida (29 percent), Arizona and Hawaii (each 27 percent). States with the largest percentage increases in the number of foreign-language speakers 2010 to 2016 were: Wyoming (up 25 percent), Utah (up 20 percent), Maryland (up 19 percent), Nevada (up 18 percent), Oklahoma (up 17 percent), Nebraska and North Dakota (each up 16 percent), and Virginia, Florida, and Minnesota (each up 15 percent). Taking the longer view, states with the largest percentage increases in foreign-language speakers 1980 to 2016 were: Nevada (up 1,040 percent), Georgia (up 926 percent), North Carolina (up 744 percent), Virginia (up 475 percent), Tennessee (up 425 percent), Arkansas (up 412 percent), Washington (up 395 percent), Florida (up 361 percent), South Carolina and Utah (each up 349 percent), Oregon (up 346 percent), and Maryland (up 345 percent).

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More from Steven A. Camarota:  U.S. Immigrant Population Hit Record 43.7 Million in 2016 By Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler on October 16, 2017 The Declining Fertility of Immigrants and Natives By Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler on October 2, 2017 Deportation vs. the Cost of Letting Illegal Immigrants Stay By Steven A. Camarota on August 3, 2017