David Bernhardt confirmed as Interior secretary despite ethics concerns
David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist, speaks before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at his confirmation hearing last month to head the Interior Department. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)
David Bernhardt, President Trump’s pick to the lead the Interior Department, was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday amid persistent ethical concerns and doubts about his independence from the energy and water industry groups he long represented as a lobbyist.
Senators voted 56-41 in favor of Bernhardt’s confirmation. Several Democrats crossed party lines to support the nominee, including Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, also voted for confirmation.
Before becoming acting secretary, Bernhardt spent about eight years as a partner in Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, one of the nation’s top-grossing law and lobbying firms, according to public rankings. There he represented energy, mining and Western water interests that deal with the Interior Department, including two California entities, Westlands Water District — the nation’s largest irrigation district — and Cadiz Inc.
Bernhardt’s firm sued the department four times on Westlands’ behalf. He personally argued one appeals case challenging federal endangered species protections for imperiled salmon. He did legal work for Cadiz, which wants to build a water pipeline on a railroad right of way that crosses federal land in the California desert.
When Bernhardt was confirmed as deputy secretary in 2017, he had to sign the administration’s ethics pledge and recuse himself from participating in “particular matters” involving more than two dozen former clients. Some of the recusals were effective for two years, others for one. In the last year, he has helped put policies in place that benefit businesses he once represented as a lobbyist.
Last year, for example, Bernhardt helped craft a Trump directive that would especially benefit Westlands. The directive ordered federal agencies to devise plans to suspend or revise regulations that hamper water deliveries to Central Valley agriculture. An Interior Department spokeswoman said the Westlands recusal had expired by the time Bernhardt took that action.
Bernhardt has won praise from Republicans for opening millions of acres of public land to oil and gas leasing. But Democrats, environmental advocates and some outside ethics watchdogs say his record makes him one of the administration’s most conflict-riddled Cabinet nominees.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) called Bernhardt “a poster child for the corruption of the Trump administration.” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has accused Bernhardt of lying and asked the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia this week to investigate whether Bernhardt broke the law by lobbying for a client after he claimed to have stopped.
On Wednesday, 50 House Democrats signed a letter asking senators to oppose Bernhardt’s nomination on the grounds that his conflicts of interest and support for regulatory rollbacks should be disqualifying.
So far, Republicans have mostly shrugged off the complaints. Compared with former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who faced ethics investigations into his travel spending and business dealings, Bernhardt’s behavior in office has been less conspicuous.
But to critics of lobbyists’ influence in Washington, it is no less alarming.
“The corruption we saw from the others has been a stumbling, bumbling type of shilling for private industries,” said Huffman, who has sponsored a bill to tighten regulations on former lobbyists. “With David Bernhardt, it’s been refined to a high art. He personifies this revolving-door corruption problem.”
Citing reporting by the New York Times and a 2017 Los Angeles Times article detailing Bernhardt’s previous lobbying activities on behalf of Westlands, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut asked the Interior Department’s ethics office in February whether Bernhardt had violated ethics standards when he participated in jump-starting a review of Endangered Species Act protections for fish.
In a recent reply, ethics official Scott de la Vega said Bernhardt had not broken ethics rules because revisions of endangered species protections were much broader than “particular matters,” which would include litigation or settlement agreements.
De la Vega’s interpretation of the ethics restrictions and the August expiration of remaining recusals suggest that as secretary Bernhardt would have considerable leeway in shaping Interior Department policies that would benefit his former lobbying clients.
Outside advocacy groups that have raised concerns about Bernhardt said they have been ignored or had their complaints rejected.
In 2017, the liberal group Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint with the Department of Justice, asking for an investigation into whether Bernhardt had violated the Lobbying Disclosure Act by continuing to work on behalf of Westlands, despite having formally ended his lobbying activity. According to the group’s executive director, Daniel Stevens, it never got a response.
Bernhardt could not have been appointed to an Interior Department post under the Obama administration’s ethics pledge, which barred registered lobbyists from taking jobs with an agency they had lobbied within the last two years.
Trump dropped that ban, and his administration’s ethics enforcement is not as strict as past administrations, according to legal experts.
“I think the Obama administration was more conservative in their interpretation of the ethics pledge,” said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer. “And the Obama administration didn’t have as many people coming in from the private sector.”
Sally Jewell, who served as Interior secretary during President Obama’s second term, said in an interview that she took the revolving-door lobbyist ban so seriously that she wouldn’t hire a job prospect who wasn’t a registered lobbyist but “had done a lot of work and influence on Capitol Hill. … I said, ‘I can’t. It’s too close.’”
“It does feel like we worked very hard to play by the rules,” she said. “And we’re now at a time where people are looking sort of technically at the words and not necessarily the spirit of the ethics laws.”
Mayor Pete Buttigieg is the hottest thing in politics. Can it last?
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-mayor-pete-buttegieg-democrats-president-2020-20190412-story.html
South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg drew an overflow crowd in Concord, N.H. (Nikolas Hample / Associated Press)
Only not.
“People looked at me like I was some kind of celebrity,” he said, “and it was in South Bend, and I was thinking, ‘You guys know me. We’ve been in this very same room and you’ve been yelling at me about neighborhood stuff.’ It was like I was a different person.”
That’s what it is like to be the breakout star of the 2020 presidential campaign and, for the moment, the hottest thing in American politics.
The Democratic upstart with the inscrutable surname (pronounced BUDDHA-judge) and platinum resume — Rhodes scholar, business consulting background, Afghanistan war vet — has raised an impressive $7 million, begun climbing in polls and become the unlikely pace-setter for engagement on social media.
If Democrats think the way to beat President Trump is through contrast, Buttigieg offers a stark one.
There is, of course, his youth. He is 37. It will be 2054, he tells audiences, by the time he is as old as the president.
There’s his husband, Chasten, who has become a top campaign surrogate, with nearly a quarter of a million followers of his lively Twitter account.
There’s Buttigieg’s distinctly unopulent upbringing as the son of Notre Dame professors, his Mr. Rogers haircut and Howdy Doody grin, and, perhaps more than anything, his brainy yet straightforward manner of speaking.
The obvious challenge for Buttigieg is thriving beyond what he himself calls this “flavor of the month” phase. He needs to rapidly grow his campaign, to compete against better established candidates with larger and more sophisticated operations. He must brace for harsher scrutiny from voters taking second or third looks, and a more thorough going-over by a less fawning media.
But consider where he’s started and what he’s attempting: If elected, Buttigieg would be the youngest president in U.S. history, the first openly gay chief executive and the first candidate ever to go directly from City Hall to the White House. Building on unexpectedly early success leaves little room for complaint.
“It’s a good problem to have,” he said dryly.
::
As he prepares to formally declare his candidacy Sunday in South Bend, the two-term mayor has become ubiquitous on radio and TV, making it easier to list the shows Buttigieg has not appeared on, among them “Sesame Street” and “Game of Thrones,” than all he has.
The world has come to know his favorite books (which include “Ulysses” and “The Little Prince”), the fact he learned Norwegian to read a novel, as well as 10 things Buttigieg can’t live without (durable wool socks and blue felt-tip pens are two of them).
He swept in on a tidal wave of hype, and before Buttigieg said a word, hundreds shouted his name — the Pete part, anyway — then renewed the whoops and cheers when he strode up a ramp to give the throng a better view.
“I’m probably not what you picture when you’re thinking about your next president,” Buttigieg said.
“Yes, you are!” a voice cried, and when the audience roared, Buttigieg responded with a happy bit of understatement.
“Well,” he said, “we’re getting somewhere.”
::
Buttigieg doesn’t shrink from attacking Trump and his administration. In a CNN town hall, the March appearance that launched his vertiginous ascent, Buttigieg was scathing in his criticism of Indiana’s devoutly Christian former governor, Vice President Mike Pence.
“How could he allow himself to become the cheerleader of the porn-star presidency?” Buttigieg gibed. “Is it that he stopped believing in Scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump?”
When he refers to Washington as a grotesque but mesmerizing spectacle, Democrats have no doubt who and what he means. “We can’t take our eye off that show,” he said, and hundreds of partisans packed into a Concord, N.H., bookstore laughed knowingly.
But it’s a mistake, he suggests, to think that sort of bombardment will win back the White House.
“What matters is our everyday life,” he said, “and our everyday life is subject to the decisions that are being made by people with power over our life, and that’s what elections are all about.”
He isn’t bound at the feet by a history of Washington politics. I think that’s a healthy thing for the country right now.
KATHY BIBERSTEIN OF MAINE, ON PETE BUTTIGIEG
Buttigieg delivers a short and punchy stump speech, heavy on Democratic catechism — the sanctity of Medicare, support for universal healthcare and legalized abortion, fighting climate change, reining in corporate political influence — but one largely devoid of specifics, beyond eliminating the electoral college in favor of a popular vote for president.
The omission, he says, is purposeful, serving as an implicit rebuke of past Democratic nominees who often seemed to emphasize bloodless 14-point programs over personal connection. (He doesn’t mention Hillary Clinton or Al Gore, but both come to mind.)
He rejects “the idea that you experience an election through kind of an escalating series of policy papers,” as Buttigieg put it during an interview at a Frenchified cafe in downtown Manchester. “Especially in a party where … 80% of our messages are going to converge.
“So many other things matter,” he said, “especially having a sense of who you are and what you care about.”
The fact Buttigieg is quite unlike anyone who has ever contended for the White House — “definitely the only left-handed, Maltese American Episcopalian gay millennial war veteran in the race,” he jokes — leaves him thoroughly unfazed.
::
It may be presumptuous to seek the presidency a bare two years above the minimum-age requirement, but the youngest candidate in the Democratic field suggests he has greater standing than most.
“This is, after all, the generation that’s going to be on the business end of climate change for as long as we live,” he told his Manchester audience. “This is the generation that contributed most of the troops in the conflicts after 9/11 and has the most at stake in our figuring out a way to put an end to endless war.
“This generation, if nothing changes, could be the first in American history to earn less than our parents if we don’t do something different. So let’s do something different.”
For all his newness, Buttigieg is not above falling back on an old trope, the attack on Washington and denizens of its two major parties.
Better the hands-on mayor of a mid-sized city, he says when questioned about his credentials, than some elder who’s spent decades “marinating” inside the Beltway. Better a problem solver than someone who worries about winning the day in some committee hearing. (Might he refer to the many congressional lawmakers vying for the nomination?)
Being gay isn’t the centerpiece of his campaign. He’s not running to make a statement or champion LGBTQ rights. But Buttigieg doesn’t downplay his sexual orientation. He tells audiences his marriage was possible “by the grace of one vote on the Supreme Court,” an observation that makes a larger point about Washington’s impact on the day-to-day lives of voters.
The combination of freshness and Middle American pedigree was intriguing enough that Maine resident Kathy Biberstein drove nearly five hours round-trip to catch Buttigieg in Manchester. While it’s far too early to commit to a candidate, the 60-year-old retired corporate attorney said, she appreciated someone who could “think through ideas, not just throw barbs back at Donald Trump.”
“I still don’t know if he can win,” she said. “But he isn’t bound at the feet by a history of Washington politics. I think that’s a healthy thing for the country right now.”
Inevitably, there are stirrings of a Buttigieg backlash.
(He said he had nothing whatever to do with McKinsey’s complicity in the opioid crisis — “my specialty was grocery prices, but I also worked on renewable energy” — and expressed regret for having used the phrase “all lives matter” in a manner some perceived as denigrating the “Black Lives Matter” movement.)
He showed up more than half an hour late for his appearance in Concord and prompted no small amount of grumbling when he spoke for barely 15 minutes, then posed for pictures.
“A rushed speech, a photo line and no Q&A is not the way we do things around here,” said Sarah Ovenden, 55, a travel consultant who drove an hour from Guilford, Vt., to share with Buttigieg her concerns about the national rail system. “That’s very un-New Hampshire-ish.”
A campaign spokeswoman said the cramped, overheated conditions were ill-suited to a prolonged appearance and promised Buttigieg would return often and answer many questions.
The biggest one: Can he quickly scale up to transform himself from curiosity into a serious contender for president?
“We can now,” Buttigieg told reporters, “and we have to.”
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income bracket."
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
The number of U.S. companies paying zero federal taxes DOUBLED when Trump's tax plan took effect in 2018
· 60 large companies managed to escape 2018 taxes under Trump's new plan
· Many of those corporations actually received tax rebates totaling $4.3 billion
· The businesses include: Amazon, Netflix, Chevron, Delta Airlines, JetBlue Airways, IBM, General Motors, Goodyear, Eli Lilly and United States Steel
· The result is a $20.7 billion budget hole that is adding to America's federal debt
President Donald Trump's tax policy doubled the number of highly profitable companies that were able to avoid paying any federal taxes in 2018, according to a new report.
Amazon, Netflix, Chevron, Delta Airlines, IBM, General Motors and Eli Lilly were among those who managed to escape taxes for last year, according to the study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
'Instead of paying $16.4 billion in taxes, as the new 21 percent corporate tax rate requires, these companies enjoyed a net corporate tax rebate of $4.3 billion, blowing a $20.7 billion hole in the federal budget last year,' the report says.
The Washington, D.C. think tank analyzed America's 560 largest publicly held companies, finding that 60 of them paid nothing in taxes for last year – double the average of roughly 30 companies that got away scot-free each year from 2008-2015.
Republicans in Congress pushed through the tax law signed by Trump in 2017, and its policies favoring the richest Americans and most valuable U.S. companies took effect in 2018.
Scroll down for the full list of companies and rebates
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This graph illustrates the amount of money that 60 of America's largest companies were billed for taxes last year - along with the actual money they ended up getting back instead of having to pay. Source: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy
The change cut the tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and allowed companies to take advantage of deductions, tax credits and rebates. That change alone is projected to save corporations $1.35 trillion over the next decade, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
'We know that there's this pretty glaring contrast between what the proponents of this tax law promised back in 2017 and what it's delivering now,' lead author Matthew Gardner told DailyMail.com.
'The whole argument was that the reason companies were avoiding taxes is because tax rates are so high,' he added. 'What we're seeing is that isn't coming to pass.'
Collectively, the 60 companies that avoided all taxes last year managed 'to zero out their federal income taxes on $79 billion in U.S. pretax income,' according to the study, which was first reported on by the Center for Public Integrity and NBC News.
For example, the John Deer farm equipment company earned $2.15 billion before taxes, yet owed no U.S. taxes and used deductions and credits to extract $268 million from the federal government.
Nationally, corporate tax revenues decreased 31 percent in 2018 to $204 billion.
'This was a more precipitous decline than in any year of normal economic growth in U.S. history,' wrote Gardner, a senior fellow for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, in the report.
We know that there's this pretty glaring contrast between what the proponents of this tax law promised back in 2017 and what it's delivering now. -Matthew Gardner, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy
Trump had said that the corporate tax cut would pay for itself by sparking a business boom that would create more jobs, thus generating growing income tax revenues for the nation.
That reality hasn't emerged. Instead the nation's budget deficit is higher than it's ever been in this nation's history.
That's despite Trump's campaign promise to eliminate the $19.9 trillion national debt in eight years. So far it has ballooned 41.8 percent in the first four months of the 2019 fiscal year (which runs October 1 – September 30.
The Government Accountability Office announced in April that the 'federal government's current fiscal path … (is) unsustainable.'
Presidential economic adviser Larry Kudlow has said that 'economic growth' has 'paid for a good chunk' of the tax cuts, and that the budget's outlook is 'not as bad' as it's perceived.
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This table lists the amount of money that 60 of America's largest companies were billed for taxes last year - along with the actual money they ended up getting back instead of having to pay. Source: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy
“Trump Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
The latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch brothers.
Efforts by the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
THE ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER BY PHONY POPULIST SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP
Companies say they often pay good wages to their imported H-2B workers, often around $15 per hour. But that price is below the wages sought by Americans for the seasonal work which leaves them jobless in the off-season. The lower wages paid to H-2Bs also allows companies to pay lower wages to their American supervisors. NEIL MUNRO
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE SAUDIS!
JOHN DEAN: Not so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s charter. He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
*
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
ANN COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people who share his MAGA vision?
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TRUMP’S CATCH AND RELEASE… all the “cheap” labor climbing our borders, jobs and welfare lines!
THE ENTIRE REASON TRUMP NOMINATED KIRSTJEN NIELSEN WAS BECAUSE OF HER LONG HISTORY OF ADVOCATING OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
In newly confirmed federal data from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, Breitbart News has learned the massive scale and scope of DHS’s ramped up Catch and Release policy.
For months, DHS officials have said privately that the Catch and Release program has been taken to new heights, while ICE union officials declared this week that the program was in “overdrive” under the direction of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. JOHN BINDER
TRUMP AND THE MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper and his family of parasites up their ar$es??
TRUMP’S TAX BILL:
A massive tax cut for his plundering Goldman Sachs infested administration.
TRUMP’S SECRET AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS DOCTRINE TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
"During the same month that Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”
agenda, Nielsen’s committee released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting
the European migrant crisis as a win for big business who would profit greatly
from a never-ending stream of cheap, foreign migrants."
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report: Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit After He's Gone
"Trump's alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top
of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed
recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income
bracket."
TRUMPS INFORMS NARCOMEX:
THE PACT BETWEEN MEXICO AND TRUMP… NO WALL, NO REAL ENFORCEMENT.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/did-trump-promise-mexico-no-pardon-for.html
Swamp Keeper Trump prepares for the inevitable move to impeach him and ask for asylum in Scotland.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign promises.
“His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund Planned Parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn’t done any of those things,” Carlson told Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.
TRUMP POSITIONS HIMSELF FOR IMPEACHMENT
MAY LEAVE THE COUNTRY FOR HIS GOLF COURSE IN SCOTLAND
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“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
*
“Mueller and the anti-Trump camp within the ruling elite know very well that the billionaire New York real estate and gambling speculator-turned president is mired in criminal activity, which is certain to be reflected in the material seized from Cohen. They have Trump by the throat, and Trump knows it.”
*
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
*
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday that the “whole Trump family” was potentially comprised by a foreign power ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP’S BIGGEST DEAL EVER:
Saving the 9-11 invading Saudis’ arses!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/11/mike-lee-swamp-keeper-trump-and-his.html
"I doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about -- what message he's sending. Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended royal family, have been his patrons for years, buying his distressed properties when he needed money.
“The Wahhabis finance thousands of madrassahs throughout the world where young boys are brainwashed into becoming fanatical foot-soldiers for the petrodollar-flush Saudis and other emirs of the Persian Gulf.” AMIL IMANI
I recommend that Ignatius read Raymond Ibrahim's outstanding book Sword and Scimitar, which contains accounts of dynastic succession in the Muslim monarchies of the Middle East, where standard operating procedure for a new monarch on the death of his father was to strangle all his brothers. Yes, it's awful. But it has been happening for a very long time. And it's not going to change quickly, no matter how outraged we pretend to be. MONICA SHOWALTER
SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP’S SECRET SAUDI MISSION:
“You saved my a rse again and again… So, I’ll save yours like Bush and Obama did!
WHO IS FINANCING ALL THE TRUMP AND SON-IN-LAW’S REFINANCING SCAMS???
FOLLOW THE MONEY!
"I doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about -- what message he's sending. Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended royal family, have been his patrons for years, buying his distressed properties when he needed money. In the early 1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's flashy yacht so that the then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to stave off personal bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the Plaza Hotel, one of Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an entire floor of his landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in 2001."
“The Wahhabis finance thousands of madrassahs throughout the world where young boys are brainwashed into becoming fanatical foot-soldiers for the petrodollar-flush Saudis and other emirs of the Persian Gulf.” AMIL IMANI
I recommend that Ignatius read Raymond Ibrahim's outstanding book Sword and Scimitar, which contains accounts of dynastic succession in the Muslim monarchies of the Middle East, where standard operating procedure for a new monarch on the death of his father was to strangle all his brothers. Yes, it's awful. But it has been happening for a very long time. And it's not going to change quickly, no matter how outraged we pretend to be. MONICA SHOWALTER
Buttigieg Pushes Wealth Tax: ‘People in This Country Are Not Paying Their Fair Share’
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/04/01/buttigieg-pushes-wealth-tax-people-in-this-country-are-not-paying-their-fair-share/
Buttigieg Pushes Wealth Tax: ‘People in This Country Are Not Paying Their Fair Share’
PAM KEY
1 Apr 201977
2:27
Monday on MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Mayor Pete Buttigieg supported the idea of a wealth tax, arguing that “some people” were not paying their”fair share.”
When asked if he would repeal the Trump tax cuts, Buttigieg said, “Yes, at least the tax cuts on the wealthiest because that has blown a huge hole in the treasury that my generation is going to be forced to pay. We’re going to have to pay for it probably in the form of reduced services if we don’t come up with revenue. There’s no need for some of these giveaways to the wealthiest people in the country. But we also need to rethink the way that our revenue is structured right now. That’s why I think at least three ideas that have been floating out there among many people in the 2020 conversation deserve to be part of a portfolio of revenue for the future. That would include a wealth tax, some reasonable percentage on those who are sitting on the largest amounts of wealth in this country. It would mean a financial transactions tax to deal with the fact that people are, in some cases, making preposterous sums of money off of millisecond transactions that don’t seem to contribute very much to the real economy. If they do, fine, but that needs to be shared with the country so that we can have a more robust infrastructure and education and national security and all of the things that make the accumulation of that kind of wealth possible. And we also need to reconsider the taxes for the income brackets that are making the most.”
He continued, “You know, over the last probably 40 years, Democratic and Republican politicians have accepted what you might call the Reagan consensus, this idea that the only thing you would ever consider doing to taxes is to cut them. And the only argument’s over whose taxes to cut. Obviously, we want to keep taxes low and reasonable, especially for working people struggling to get by and members of the middle class, but we also know that some people in this country are not paying their fair share. And whether it’s individual taxes like some of what I’ve been talking about or making sure we use some kind of instrument, like perhaps sales apportionment, to get a better share of U.S. corporate taxes now being hidden offshore or not appropriately taxed when it comes to global business, we could be doing a lot better to fill the treasury before it has to hit the working and middle class.”
How Pete Buttigieg Could Hurt Trump in the Rust Belt
https://townhall.com/columnists/salenazito/2019/04/09/how-pete-buttigieg-could-hurt-trump-in-the-rust-belt-n2544459
Source: Greg Swiercz/South Bend Tribune via AP
Pete Buttigieg is many things.
At just 37, he is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He is a military veteran and a deeply religious gay man who is married but also enjoys sandwiches from (anti-same-sex marriage) Chick-fil-A. He is a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar who speaks eight languages. He is the first ever millennial candidate for president and, so far, the only Democratic hopeful to appear on the "Fox News Sunday" show.
"I'm all of those things," said Buttigieg -- pronounced "Boot-edge-edge" -- in an interview with the New York Post. "I try not to have any kind of attribute ... be totally defining," he added.
Critics say these attributes are the very reasons why he can't beat Donald Trump. His supporters say they are the very reasons he can.
Mayor Pete, as he likes to be called, strikes a tone that is kinder and less combative than the insult-driven politics of Trump and the Democratic Party's far-left members. His boyish good looks, intelligence and military background are undoubtedly appealing, as is his faith.
"Scripture tells us to look after the least among us, that it also counsels humility and teaches us about what's bigger than ourselves," said Buttigieg, a devout Episcopalian. "It points the way toward an inclusive and unselfish politics that I strive to practice, whether I'm talking about my faith on the stump or not."
Mayor Pete's politics are already gaining traction. Since launching his exploratory committee to run for president on Jan. 23, he has already raised $7 million for his campaign. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 4 percent of Democrats would vote for him -- the same number that supports Elizabeth Warren, who has been a U.S. senator for six years.
The fact that he was born and bred in the American Rust Belt is possibly his biggest asset.
"Our party can and should do better in the industrial Midwest," Buttigieg said. "I'm convinced that so many people in this part of the country are already with us, much more than with the other party on issues, on substance, on policy."
He said his experience in his hometown of South Bend proves there are solutions that work besides a "promise to turn back the clock."
When Buttigieg was first elected to office in South Bend in 2011, the city was on its knees. Job growth was nonexistent, and like many Rust Belt cities with declining industry, it had been hemorrhaging jobs since the '70s.
First, he improved the cosmetics of the town by demolishing more than 1,000 abandoned homes, and then he focused on revitalizing it by attracting hundreds of millions in private investment for commercial development.
You won't find Buttigieg ridiculing fellow Midwestern voters or taking them for granted, the way Hillary Clinton's campaign did in 2015. After the University of Notre Dame, based in South Bend, invited her to attend their prestigious St. Patrick's Day event, her campaign declined, telling organizers that "white Catholics were not the audience she needed to spend time reaching out to," as The New York Times wrote.
Trump would go on to win those white Catholic votes in 2016 -- 52 percent of them, according to Pew's exit polls, reversing the gains Democrats made when Barack Obama earned their votes in 2008 and 2012.
Even so, Buttigieg's religious beliefs haven't prevented him from taking progressive positions on major issues.
He supports abortions into the third trimester out of a belief in "freedom from government," he said. And he won't rule out tax hikes. "If the only way I can get all of us paid parental leave, universal health care, dramatically improved child care, better education, good infrastructure and, therefore, longer life expectancy and a healthier economy is to raise revenue, then we should be honest about that," he said.
And although natural gas leads to good, solid jobs in the Rust Belt, he is a big booster of wind and solar power. "I think the goal still has to be focused on renewables," he said.
But just because Buttigieg has a progressive platform doesn't mean he'll get an easy ride from far-left Democrats. Last month, the woke crowd at Slate questioned the young mayor's credentials with a since-changed headline that read "Is Pete Buttigieg just another white male candidate, or does his gayness count as diversity?"
And just because Buttigieg is from the Rust Belt doesn't mean he can win a general election in places like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, especially when you compare his platform to Trump's.
"He has to share their values on bread-and-butter issues like lower taxes, regulations and religious liberty," warned Dr. G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College. If he doesn't, "it would be very difficult for him to win."
But Jeff Rea, a former Republican mayor from another Indiana town and current president of the South Bend chamber of commerce, said nobody should count out Mayor Pete. He and Buttigieg have been on opposite sides on a number of projects but have "always found a way to come together for a solution."
Buttigieg "is a very data-driven guy and also a very good man," Rea added. "That has helped him win over voters who might not like progressive politics."
No mayor in history has ever run and won his or her party's nomination for president, nor has anyone under the age of 43. Then again, no businessman had ever done it until Trump came along.
Michael Wear, the faith adviser to Obama, told me he thinks Mayor Pete has a chance.
"Things change," Wear said. "And, in America, anything can happen."
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