After months of delay, the Biden administration is moving ahead with a diabolical Trump era tax favor for the super-rich. This decision will cost our government billions of dollars and further entrench dynastic wealth in America while working people are fully taxed.

We call the Trump era plan diabolical because on the surface it looks like a severe crackdown on wealthy tax cheats. In fact, it makes cheating easier and much less likely to be detected by IRS auditors.

The Trumpian scheme increases by more than half the number of personnel auditing gift and estate tax returns, areas where the IRS has told Congress for decades that cheating is rampant. The current — and much shrunken — staff of 137 auditors would be expanded with 71 hires.

Last week job offer letters went out to the first 11 applicants, IRS spokesman Anthony Burke confirmed to DCReport.

Colonels and Corporals

But while the existing auditors have advanced degrees in accounting and tax law, the new hires don’t even have to be lawyers or accountants. Think of this as replacing the colonels among our national tax police with corporals.

By the way, dear taxpayer, you will pay the same salary to each of the newly hired corporals as the colonels now earn. If you’re at a loss to make sense of that, so are we. Think of it as more bucks for less bang.

Worse, the existing crop of auditors will be blocked from career advancement at the IRS. That’s a clear bureaucratic signal to quit and find work elsewhere.

We taxpayers have invested a lot of money in the training and education of the 137 gift and state tax auditors so telling them to find new jobs is a waste of taxpayer resources. Those who do leave may well find work helping the wealthy escape taxes on gifts to descendants, mistresses and the like, applying their taxpayer-financed education and training against the interests of honest and compliant taxpayers.

This downgrade in skills and education matters because the accountants and lawyers who advise the super-wealthy have already created myriad techniques to slip fortunes past the taxman. By design, these techniques are difficult to detect, even for the existing staff of highly trained auditors.

Orwellian Scheme

To think that the new hires, with far less education and training, will detect these tax schemes is Orwellian.

Of course, this Trump-era scheme that President Joe Biden has embraced does make perfect sense if the unstated but de facto tax policy of both parties in Washington is to help the rich escape taxes.

That was explicit Trump policy, but Biden said he would raise taxes on the roughly 2% of households making more than $400,000 per year while cutting taxes for nearly all of the 98%. Biden’s plan died for lack of full support by his own party and total opposition by Republicans in the House and Senate.

Internal IRS documents obtained by DCReport last Spring characterized the hiring of lesser skilled auditors without a pay reduction as nothing more than a subtle change to comply with arcane civil service policy. But at least one high-level IRS manager saw through this façade and fought the plan, an email obtained by DCReport showed.

Slow WalkIng

After we revealed this scheme last June, the IRS slow-walked the plan for months. But then earlier this year, noticing that the rest of the news media had ignored the matter, began moving ahead with the Trump era scheme to help wealthy tax cheats.

We exposed the stealth plot to help the super-rich just days after DCReport revealed a nearly total collapse of audits of super high-income Americans, those making on average $30 million a year.

The IRS audited just 38 of the 26,517 households in this rarefied income stratum in 2018. Recommended additional taxes after audit fell 99.1% from 2010, my analysis of new IRS data tables found.

Our June 2021 expose was published soon after ProPublica and The New York Times published separate reports showing how many of the wealthiest Americans pay little to no taxes. DCReport revealed how this forces everyone else to subsidize their lifestyles. All these reports dealt in part with weak enforcement of the tax laws regarding the highest income and wealthiest Americans.

Generous Opportunities

It’s important to understand that Congress has already granted massive opportunities for the rich to pass money on to heirs and others. A married couple age 40 who lived to age 90 and have four children can legally pass more than $27 million of wealth to those children without incurring any tax. (Adjusted for future inflation the untaxed gifts would be much greater.)

More than 26,000 American households report an annual income of $10 million or more, the IRS has disclosed in Table 18 of its annual Data Book. More than two decades ago I got the IRS to confirm that it had received tax returns showing annual incomes in the billions of dollars — that’s not wealth, but a single year’s income. The service emphasized that there were only a few such returns, but in the years since the turn of the century wealth at the top has been piling up like a Spring snow dump in the Great Lakes region.

Ayn Rand’s Acolyte

Alan Greenspan, then the Federal Reserve chairman, told Congress in 2004 about wealth concentrating at the top. The testimony was surprising given Greenspan’s views generally. He was an acolyte of Ayn Rand, the extreme libertarian novelist, and executor of her estate. But even Greenspan warned that increasing concentration of wealth “for the democratic society, that is not a very desirable thing to allow it to happen.”

The gift tax buttresses the estate tax, which applies only to huge fortunes. Most of the money that the super-wealthy hold at death consists of capital gains that have never been taxed.

Congress allows people of means to give $16,000 this year to as many others as they choose without paying any tax and without filing a gift tax return. A wealthy married couple can give $32,000 a year to each of their children. If those children are grown and married the older couple can make tax-free gifts of $64,000 each year to each of their grown children and spouse plus additional gifts to grandchildren.

Gifts above these levels are tax-free up to a lifetime total of a skosh more than $12 million, a total adjusted annually for inflation. Again, double those numbers for married couples.

Once gifts exceed those amounts, they are subject to tax at rates from 18% to 40%.

These huge exemptions from tax make clear that auditors are, or should be, focused on tax cheating by people with tens of millions of dollars of assets if not tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

Folks with those kinds of riches can hire the very best tax avoidance lawyers and accountants for a few pennies or dimes on each dollar of gift and estate tax they are escaping. By lowering the qualifications of gift and estate tax auditors, the odds that these wealthy tax cheats and chiselers will get caught shrink dramatically.

Biden White House Unaware

In June last year, when DCReport asked about this Trump era scheme to help the rich avoid taxes, we learned the Biden White House was unaware of it.

That wasn’t surprising because the IRS remains under the control of Charles Rettig, a holdover from the Trump era. Rettig was a Beverly Hills tax lawyer who helped the super-wealthy escape taxes and—if the IRS caught them cheating—negotiated secret settlements that avoided public humiliation while minimizing taxes and penalties.

Rettig is one of many Trump-era appointees who Biden has inexplicably left in place. Others include FBI Director Christopher Wray, who serves the pleasure of the president, and Louis DeJoy, the logistics entrepreneur who has been degrading mail delivery and is credibly accused of violating campaign finance laws before becoming postmaster general under a board whose members Biden appoints.

We’ve asked the Biden White House several times about the reasons it would allow this Trumpian plan to help tax cheats in chiselers go forward. Our emailed questions have been ignored. That’s the right of every administration.

Taxpayers would do well to ask themselves why Biden would embrace a Trump policy to make it less risky for those among the wealthiest Americans who cheat on gift and estate taxes to get away with these crimes.

Let’s step back for a moment from the awful human tragedy in Ukraine as the Russian army targets civilians. There is an even bigger issue here. And until we come up with an answer it’s going to continue to plague the world.

It’s an issue that Americans, more than anyone else, should understand. Yet based on all the news and commentary I’ve been reading since the Russian buildup began almost a year ago, this overarching issue is not even on the table.

The bigger issue is that there is no way to stop a nuclear power from invading a non-nuclear power, as America did 18 years ago this month when it took down the dictatorship in Iraq.

And make no mistake, Vladimir Putin himself has long made clear that Ukraine is not the only country he intends to take over.

Three years ago I spent a week in Ukraine. Every person to whom I spoke, whether in a formal interview or casual conversation, said that Putin was going to invade their country.

Many of them expected an invasion while Donald Trump was in office. That made sense because Trump repeatedly declared his trust in and fealty to Putin, denounced American intelligence agencies saying he did not trust them and lambasted our NATO allies. Destabilizing and, if possible, shuttering NATO is a long-term stated goal of the modern Russian tsar, as foreign affairs columnist Trudy Rubin explained recently.

Putin, whose words I have carefully read for two decades, doesn’t plan to stop with Ukraine. He has called the collapse of the old Soviet Union the worst geopolitical disaster of the 20th century and has said he is determined to put it back together. His words:

“Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory.

“Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.”

Fear in The Baltics

For more than a decade the political leaders of the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – have been telling every visiting journalist willing to listen that sooner or later they expect Russian tanks to overrun their countries.

I have family, via a son’s marriage, in Slovakia. They fear that Russian tanks will come, though they know not when; anxieties deepened mightily by the invasion of Ukraine.

We don’t need to worry about Moscow and Washington wiping each other out with atomic bombs.

What kept the rivalry between Washington and Moscow a Cold War, what kept either from launching nuclear ballistic missiles, was the concept of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.

That idea was articulated in a 1962 speech by Robert McNamara, the former Ford Motor chief executive whose hubris was unbounded. He believed that his team could use math, logic and aerial bombing to defeat the Vietnamese who wanted to be free of Chinese, French, Americans or any other oppressor. Never mind that post-World War II studies showed bombing can disrupt war material manufacturing and sow fear, but that’s pretty much all. Its overall effectiveness is disputable in a largely agrarian society. The old Soviet called Ukraine “The Ukraine” and Russia’s breadbasket.

While we may yet see a limited nuclear war using small battlefield nuclear bombs, all-out nuclear war would leave the world with nothing but ashes and an aftermath of deadly radiation.

MAD doesn’t mean that two nuclear powers will never confront one another on the battlefield. We have seen, for example, repeated skirmishes between troops in Kashmir, parts of which are disputed territory claimed by two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan. But neither New Delhi nor Islamabad is likely to risk losing their capital city to nukes over parts of a region about the size of Minnesota or Utah.

That said, MAD doesn’t apply when a nuclear power attacks a non-nuclear power.

That few people grasp this is evident in all the silly talk by politicians and pundits about creating a no-fly zone over Ukraine to take away invading Russia’s air power advantage. Indeed, such talk perfectly illustrates the impotent options for stopping an invading nuclear power from seizing any non-nuclear country.

No-Fly Zone Nonsense

The no-fly zone notion also shows a widespread lack of critical thinking skills in America.

Creating a no-fly zone starts with taking out radar, rocket launchers and other military equipment that would pose a threat to patrolling military planes needed to enforce the no-fly zone.

Even without putting a single jet fighter or reconnaissance plane in the air to make sure Russia could not use Ukrainian airspace we would be at war with Russia.

This is no small matter. Russia holds almost half of the world’s nuclear weapons, an estimated 6,257 out of 13,080.

In 2014, during his invasion of Ukrainian Crimea, Putin denied that he deployed “little green men” whose military uniforms lacked insignia. After his forces took control, giving Russia a warm-water port, Putin laughed that of course those were his soldiers.

When then-President Barack Obama and other Western leaders spoke of Putin’s invasion of Crimea being wrong, the modern tsar upped the ante. Putin threatened the use of nuclear weapons. “It’s best not to mess with us,” he declared.

Only so long as Russia does not confront conventional forces from NATO, with its nuclear weaponry in reserve, there is little danger that Putin would turn to The Bomb.

It is important, however, to know that almost a third of Putin’s nukes are battlefield-sized weapons, smaller bombs to take out battalions comprised of hundreds of soldiers, not cities. Only a fool would rule out Putin launching small tactical nuclear weapons if for no other reason than to terrorize people and make clear the depth of his determination to rule, as Stalin, did over a vast empire that includes some countries that today are free from Russian domination.

Satellites Join NATO

Some of these former Russian satellites are not only free, but they also joined NATO. Among them: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

Putin says NATO is the aggressor against Russia. For sure it’s unnerving for NATO to exist if you are in Putin’s shoes. Imagine if the oceans surrounding us, Canada and Mexico were all Russian satellites in a military alliance to contain the United States. But there’s zero evidence the West plans to invade Russia or any other country.

Putin points to the NATO intervention against Serbia in the war in the Bosnian war (or as our managing editor used to say, the war in Bosnia-Schizophrenia). But NATO didn’t start that conflict with its ethnic cleansing, it just stepped in to stop it.

So how to address nuclear powers invading non-nuclear ones?

One obvious solution – an atrocious one – would be to make every country a nuclear power.

That’s crazy. Corrupt military officers or a revolt could put the bomb in the hands of terrorists, religious zealots, criminals or just plain crazy people. Hollywood has long played with this terrible idea in films from The Peacemaker in 1997 to several of the James Bond fantasies.

It Starts With Lies

Invasions by nuclear powers start with lies, palpable lies that deceive because they come with a patina of truth, making them easy to fob off on those without critical thinking skills and the politicians who live in fear of losing their grip on power.

Both America’s Iraq invasion and Russia’s Ukrainian invasion of choice were based on calculated lies.

The George W. Bush administration ginned up tales of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, persuading many gullible politicians and journalists.

When George W. Bush warned that Iraq had nuclear weapons the statements were palpably false. Besides, if Saddam Hussein had them we would have known.

A Radioactive Cat

As far back as the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, I wrote about how incredibly sensitive nuclear detection equipment would spot any effort to slip a nuclear bomb into Southern California. The entire Southern California region was mapped for radiation levels before and during the games. (My story on which buildings nuclear arms experts said would be the prime targets for a Russian nuclear attack in Southern California, to run as a map overlay on a two-page map of the games venues, was killed by spineless Los Angeles Times editors.)

In 2008, the Seattle Times reported that a car returning from Canada at 70 mph was stopped after a border agent, parked in the freeway median, detected nuclear isotopes. What the agent found was a cat treated for cancer three days earlier with radiation.

So, without a doubt, if Iraq had possessed nukes, we would have known. Ditto the baseless insistence by the younger Bush administration that Iraq had created and amassed biological weapons which a demonstrably gullible reporter turned into worldwide news.

The official British inquiry into the Iraq invasion, known as the Chilcot Report, is devastating in its detailing of the lies, miscalculations and self-delusions that preceded the invasion.

Putin’s Nazi Nonsense

What Russian state media – Putin has shut independent news – don’t tell people is that the elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a Jew.

To be sure, there certainly are very far right-wing elements in Ukraine, just as there are neo-Nazis in the United States and many other countries. But to claim that Nazis or their modern ideological descendants control Ukraine is absurd. Pardon me while I take a moment to laugh out loud.

It’s also astonishing how few news reports and comments by elected officials note that eight years ago the Ukrainian people rose up and deposed a Putin puppet who had been stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the public treasury. It's known as the Orange Revolution.

The deposed Russian puppet built a lavish palace where before fleeing his staff dumped incriminating documents. Recovered ledgers showed payments totaling tens of millions of dollars to Paul Manafort, who later became Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. The 2016 Republican National Convention gutted its former stance and adopted Russian perspectives on Ukraine at Manafort’s and Trump’s urging.

GOP Drops Kremlin Skepticism

Before Trump, Republicans were ferocious critics of Kremlin behavior. In the 1950s they conducted official hunts for Reds hiding under beds and working at the State Department and Pentagon.

Now Trump and many Republicans side with Moscow. So does Fox News’s Tucker “I’m rooting for Russia” Carlson, the No.1 cable host in America. Carlson is trying to walk back his comments, but what I hear each night is just nuanced pro-Kremlin chatter.

Also missing in our national discussion is the Ukrainian diaspora. Under the old Soviet Union, millions of Russians were forced to move into Ukraine, diluting the local ethnic population. Before the invasion more than one in six Ukraine residents was Russian. Also, a few decades ago Ukraine had a population of more than 50 million, but today only about 40 million.

As Ukrainians flee for their lives that ratio will rise. Putin will no doubt tout future census numbers to support his nonsense claim that Ukraine is part of Russia, a subordinate part.

Kyiv Ancient Unlike Moscow

Kyiv was a thriving city a millennia ago. Back then Moscow was a wide place in the forest with a few huts. There’s a strong case for saying Kyiv is the mother of Russia, but not the other way around as Putin insists.

So how is the world to deal with invasions of non-nuclear countries by nuclear powers? I don’t have an answer, but I do have a suggestion: We need to study and devise a new global doctrine to address this menace.

And I suggest using my imaginary analytical friend, the Cosmic Journalist, to analyze the issue.

The Cosmic Journalist, coming here from another planet, can be clear-eyed. This tool for inquiry can appreciate that Putin feels contained by America, with its oceans on each side. U.S. allies simultaneously recognize that Putin’s disappointment at the collapse of the Soviet Union is no grounds for invading other countries.

Allen Weisselberg, the indicted Trump Organization executive, was removed today as a director of Donald Trump's golf resort in Aberdeen, Scotland, public records show. The move is the first to indicate how the indictment is affecting operations of the Trump Organization.

His removal comes as Scottish lawmakers and Avaaz, a global do-gooder organization, are pushing for an "unexplained wealth" inquiry into how Trump got the money to buy and refurbish both of his money-losing Scottish golf courses.

A 2018 British law lets investigators examine company and personal financial records to determine sources of money and riches that they deem suspicious. It's been called the McMafia law.

Trump's Aberdeen course lost nearly $1.5 million (£1.1 million) in 2019, up slightly from 2018. The property has lost money for seven years in a row.

The course also has an interest-free loan from the Trump Organization of $61.1 million (£44.4 million), disclosure documents show. Manipulating interest expenses is a common tax avoidance technique that can justify criminal charges of tax fraud unless executed with extreme care.

There are only two ways Weisselberg could be removed as a director of the Trump International Golf Club Scotland, Ltd. Weisselberg could have done so on his own. In that case, his lawyers may have advised him to do so for reasons not yet clear.

The other way would have been on orders from Donald Trump and executed through his sons Don Jr. and Eric, who remain as the only directors. That, too, may indicate a criminal defense strategic move. Since Weisselberg remains on the Trump Organization payroll it almost certainly does not suggest a split between the interests of Weisselberg and his boss.

The move suggests that Trump may be trying to make sure only he and his family members exercise any legal control over the Trump Organization.

Removing Weisselberg would not block or limit any Scottish inquiry or the investigation by the New York County district attorney's special grand jury, which on July 1 indicted Weisselberg and the Trump Organization.

The New York indictment detailed a calculated 15-year scheme using two sets of books to cheat the federal, state, and city governments out of more than $800,000 of taxes.

Weisselberg and the Trump Organization face 15 counts of grand larceny, tax fraud, and conspiracy. Weisselberg could get 15 years on conviction, but he also could get probation without even home confinement. None of the crimes Weisselberg is charged with come with a mandatory prison sentence upon conviction.

Weisselberg pleaded not guilty when brought in handcuffs before a state judge in Manhattan. The judge released the 73-year-old chief financial officer of the Trump Organization on his own recognizance.

The 25-page indictment is the first in what I'm sure will be multiple cases as prosecutors try to persuade insiders that they will be better off turning state's evidence than sticking with Trump.

Those who agree to help prosecutors early on get the best deals, often involving no prison time. Those who hold out may face prison even if they eventually cooperate. The indictment signals that prosecutors have solid evidence against tax cheats in the Trump Organization as well as anyone who took part in manipulating business records cold should they choose to seek their indictment.

As I read it, the indictment hints at future charges against Trump's two oldest sons, Ivanka Trump and Weisselberg's son Barry, who runs the ice rink and carousel in Central Park for Trump.

Mayor Bill de Blasio is trying to cancel that lucrative contract and another Trump has for a municipal golf course.

Ivanka was a Trump Organization vice president when she was paid more than $700,000 in consulting fees, which may be a disguised gift subject to tax.

Barry Weisselberg got a free apartment near Central Park, a car, and other perks on which his ex-wife has said no taxes were paid. Jennifer Weisselberg is cooperating with prosecutors, supplying them with extensive financial documents.

Donald Trump and his lawyers have tried to minimize the criminal charges while not disputing that Weisselberg received $1.7 million in noncash compensation that was never reported to tax authorities as required by law.

I critiqued Trump's cavalier attitude in this earlier column.

The United Kingdom requires private companies, like the Trump Organization, to make more disclosures than American law requires, including total revenue (called "turnover") and profits, fees paid to directors, dividends paid to owners, and loans outstanding.

In America, only companies with publicly traded stock or bonds must make such disclosures. As Donald Trump's personal property, the Trump Organization and its more than 500 affiliated enterprises are not required to make similar public disclosures in America.

ProPublica scored a fantastic scoop when it obtained and meticulously analyzed 15 years of raw income tax data on the wealthiest Americans. This leak of Internal Revenue Service records is by far the biggest and most important tax news in the 55 years that I've reported on taxes.

Thanks to the leaker, we now know beyond any doubt that the endless claims America has a progressive income tax system are bunk. A progressive system means that the more you make, the greater the share of your income you pay in taxes. Back in 2005, I got the George W. Bush administration to acknowledge that the system stops becoming progressive near the top.

But, unfortunately, ProPublica shows that it's even worse than what I reported back then.

Working people pay a larger share of their income in tax than the wealthiest of the wealthy. The top marginal tax rate on labor income is almost double that of capital gains.

A system in which people who gross about $330 a week pay a much higher tax rate than someone who makes billions each year is not just regressive; it's an outrage.

Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011. He doesn't dispute that.

Bezos was not alone. Multi-billionaires Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn and George Soros all pulled off the same trick at least once in recent years, ProPublica reported after analyzing the IRS data. Warren Buffet pays less in tax than millions of Americans, something he and Soros have said is wrong.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and owner of the financial data and news business bearing his name, paid over five years an income tax rate lower than that of the poorest half of American taxpayers.

Bloomberg Pays Just 3%

On his income tax returns, Bloomberg reported making $10 billion. Yet, he paid just 3%.

The bottom half of income taxpayers averaged $17,200 of income in 2017 and paid 4%.

A system in which people who gross about $330 a week pay a much higher tax rate than someone who makes billions each year is not just regressive; it's an outrage. It violates principles of taxation that date to the Old Testament and ancient Athens.

I couldn't help but notice that my wife, a charity CEO, and I pay a higher income tax rate than Bezos, Bloomberg and Buffett.

By the grace of Congress, those billionaires get to take unlimited losses when they make losing stock investments while Jennifer and I—and you—can deduct only $3,000 a year. So even if my wife and I live into our 90s, we will die with losses we never got to deduct.

That's just the kind of unfairness Professor Dorothy A. Brown compellingly demonstrates in her insightful and readable new book The Whiteness of Wealth.

Until now, the Wealth Defense Industry—armies of accountants, lawyers and wealth managers who specialize in using trusts, tax loopholes, off-shore corporations and foundations to benefit their 0.05% clients—tricked people. They pointed to posted tax rates, not actual rates paid by the super-super-super rich, and asserted with cherry-picked data that the rich pay a lot.

Salaried Workers Pay More

The granular data ProPublica obtained proves that the tax rates Congress puts in the law and the tax rates people pay only match up for working Americans in the bottom 99.5%.

Congress taxes workers much more heavily than billionaire capitalists who, ProPublica showed, can live income tax-free.

All of the people ProPublica wrote about are white men. Professor Brown of Emory University shows how our existing tax system favors wealth above income and discriminates against Black Americans. The design of our tax system plays a significant role in the vast wealth disparities between white Americans and people of color.

ProPublica's reporting backs her up. It showed that for most Americans, annual income taxes far exceed yearly increases in wealth.

Good Debt

At the apex of American wealth, you can live tax-free, as I showed many years ago. That is thanks to rules favoring the rich, loopholes Congress refuses to close and minimal enforcement of our tax laws against the plutocrat class.

One simple technique is borrowing against your assets. Congress doesn't count that borrowed money as income.

For example: Let's say you're a 60-year-old founder-CEO holding $10 billion of stock in your company, which grows in value at a modest rate of 5%, or $500 million, a year. You determine that you can live comfortably on $50 million a year.

You then borrow that money, putting that much of your holdings up as collateral.

Do you see where this is going? You can borrow and live on $50 million a year every year for the rest of your life without paying a cent of federal income tax.

It gets better. The IRS determines interest rates on intra-family loans. The current rates are next to zero, less than even our modest inflation rate. Given that, why would anyone sell stock and pay a 20% tax rate to buy a yacht or a new jet when they can borrow against themselves almost interest-free and watch their stocks keep rising in value?

Hunting for the Leaker

The Biden White House announced late Tuesday that law enforcement is hunting for the leaker, who faces up to a decade in prison.

Whoever dared to do this should be hailed as a national hero on a par with Darnella Frazier, the fearless teenage girl with a steady hand who last summer recorded the slow, agonizing murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

We should be building statues to honor this leaker, if he or she is ever identified, just as we should erect one to honor Remy Welling, the IRS corporate auditor whose leak to me 17 years ago proved corruption in the Silicon Valley stock options system.

Thanks to ProPublica and its source, maybe Americans will at long last wake up and realize that our federal income tax, as currently designed, is a massive subsidy system for the super-rich.

And the source of those subsidies for Bezos, Bloomberg, Buffett, Musk and other multibillionaires? That would be you.

Lots of luck right now trying to find a bicycle for under a thousand dollars. And if you insist on building a new house right now the price of lumber will be dear, adding perhaps $4,000 to construction costs for a typical home.

But don't assume that ruinous inflation is on the way. It's not. These are just temporary bumps and those who just wait a bit will see prices fall back.

It may be hard to appreciate this given all the scary stories in the news about inflation, stories that often lack context and nuance. But don't be scared.

And don't pay attention to the brief ups and downs in the price of stocks because half of American stock trading is done not by investors but by traders whose computers move so fast they can be in and out of a stock in less than a second. Besides, stocks don't make goods or services so they aren't part of the economy that creates jobs and produces paychecks.

Yes, the news is full of unsettling stories about inflation, but if you read carefully, you'll notice that the talk is about prices rising perhaps 4% this year. Not a big deal.

Indeed, the highest inflation rate ever in our country was 29.8% in 1778. Since 1913, the highest rate was 19.7% in 1917, according to Investopedia. In 1946, inflation was 18.1%

In 1979 and 1980 combined, prices rose by a quarter. Now that would be scary today, but that is not what is happening.

Post-WWII Boom

This is more like 1946 when soldiers and sailors came home and wartime rationing left huge deficits in people's demand for goods. No cars or trucks had been built in America, other than to prosecute World War II, since 1941. People were getting married, so they needed homes and apartments and there was a boom in babies that lasted until the end of 1964. That made prices soar even though the economy fell into a brief recession as we moved from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy.

That was then; this is now. The pent-up demand from the pandemic is for only 15 months, not almost four years as in the 1940s.

Also, today, we have 8.2 million fewer jobs than before the Covid pandemic. We should have added another three million or so jobs since the coronavirus first appeared in America. That means millions of households are struggling just to pay the rent and eat. But for the social safety net spending under both Trump and Biden, we would be in a very deep recession. Instead, our economy grew 6% in the first quarter, roughly double the growth under Trump in his first three years.

Working, Spending Less

At the same time many millions of households, a large majority of them, continued working. Their spending fell, however, because they didn't have to go into work. They stopped going out to restaurants as they ate at home. Dry cleaners saw their customers evaporate. These people deferred spending on vacations and big purchases like cars and trucks.

Some of those who kept on working paid down or paid off their debt. Others added to their savings. In both cases they are primed to spend. That will mean a surge in consumption, but it won't last.

'Price Indifferent'

These folks can afford to be what economists call price indifferent. They may not be happy about it, but if the price of a bicycle doubles, they can just hand over the money. That won't go on for long. Bicycles are still being manufactured and once the surge in demand is fulfilled retailers will no longer be able to charge premium prices.

For the 12 months ending in April overall inflation, before adjusting for seasonal factors, was 4.2%, according to the government Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's the highest rate in this century, but it's not ruinous.

Used Car Prices Zoom

Prices of used cars and trucks accounted for a third of the inflation in the past 12 months. These prices were up 10% in April, the government reported. Prices surged because people who have put off buying used vehicles rushed to market as the economy and jobs began opening.

The prices of some foods are up right now because after 15 months of limited mobility, some shortages of crop workers and weather, both droughts and deluges. Trump's tariffs that savaged the price of American soybeans and enriched Brazilian soybean farmers also played a role.

These are temporary effects. We always see such temporary effects after a major shock to the economy.

We still have a shortage of money in the hands of most Americans. Purchasing by those who were able to save a great deal more during the pandemic in the short term is causing this blip of inflation.

Think Peaches vs. Plums

This is pretty much the same effect we see when bad weather ruins the peach crop and prices rise so much that many people decide to eat plums, apricots or apples instead. Likewise, when a bumper crop of peaches hits the market and prices fall, people by fewer plums, apricots and apples.

The key reason inflation is not going to turn long-term and ruinous is the huge excess cash held by those toward the top of the income and wealth ladders. They have far more cash than can be profitably invested. Just a year ago there was serious talk the banks might start charging people to hold their cash, which we have seen in a very limited fashion in Europe.

America is so awash in cash, though highly concentrated cash, that banks pay a tiny fraction of 1% on savings accounts. If you have $25,000 in your bank it may pay just 20-cents interest each month.

That's because demand for cash in the business world is extremely weak compared with the oceans of greenbacks being held in checking, savings and money-market accounts.

Every day, banks pitch mortgages to people with solid credit scores at about 2% interest. Back in the early 1980s, mortgages ran 12% to 14%.

So, if all the flowers budding in the warming Spring weather are making you desire a new bicycle, just hold off for a bit. Ride your old bike, arrange to borrow your neighbor's or take a walk. As soon as the people who are price indifferent have fulfilled their demand for new bikes, prices will fall back.

After the failed union vote at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, the critical postmortems ignored a reality that may result in another election: Amazon cheated.

And Louis DeJoy, the Trump-era holdover dismantling the U.S. Postal Service, helped.

A National Labor Relations Board hearing on Friday will consider a request for a new vote sought by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The union complaint alleges a campaign of intimidation to pressure employees to reject the union.

The labor board has a long history of looking the other way when given evidence of cheating by employers in union elections. But this time may be different because of who helped cheat — from local on up to national officials.

The Jeff Bezos company installed a drop box to collect votes on company property despite being told by the labor board staff not to do so.

Drop boxes were placed with the connivance of the service led by DeJoy. Former President Donald Trump installed this high-rolling donor to worsen mail delivery during the fall presidential election Trump was hellbent to win. Less mail, less votes; less votes, less competition, perhaps.

Here, we use the pejorative connivance because the drop box installed inside Amazon's Bessemer parking lot did not carry any postal insignia.

Amazon can leverage the Postal Service because Amazon has fattened it.

The Postal Service generated nearly $4 billion in revenue from Amazon in 2019 and counted an eye-popping $1.6 billion of that in profit. The volume of business Amazon delivered grew bigly last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This reliance on Amazon for high profits likely explains why, beyond his well-documented anti-union animus, DeJoy would help Amazon fight the union.

A pro-union worker, Jennifer Bates, told reporters last month that colleagues at the Bessemer Fulfillment Center were reluctant to deposit ballots in the mysterious drop box that suddenly appeared in the parking lot.

Workers Feared Amazon

"Some of the people are afraid to put them in there," Bates said. "The 'yes' voters feel that Amazon will probably try to steal their ballots."

Labor lawyer Brandon Magner tweeted: "If Amazon did install these mailboxes, or if they exercise control over the mailboxes, such as having a key to the ballot box, that would clearly merit setting aside the election if the union were to lose."

During the voting, from Feb. 8 to March 29, Amazon demonstrated just how crucial controlling the Bessemer warehouse parking lot — and what went on inside it — was to the company.

'Coercion and Intimidation'

The union made the following claims:

• Amazon hired police officers to patrol the parking lot and surveil interactions between employees and union organizers. The constant presence "created an atmosphere of coercion and intimidation thereby interfering with the right of employees to a free and fair election."
• The company used local government officials to change policies governing employees exiting the workplace. Amazon got the timing on a traffic light located outside the facility changed so union organizers wouldn't have much time to approach departing workers.
• Workers were forced to sit through hours of mandatory indoctrination meetings. These sessions, often are used by companies to scare workers into believing their jobs will disappear if they vote for a union. The tactic is often effective with workers who have not yet experienced the benefits of collective bargaining.

Without a union, individual workers have no power. And while some who voted against the union told journalists after the vote that Amazon paid them well, the issue is whether it should pay them even better along with improving their benefits and work rules.

Record Profits

Last year, Amazon reported a profit of $24.2 billion before taxes, up from $13.9 billion in 2019 and almost 10 times its 2016 pretax profit.

Amazon pays little in federal income tax. In 2020 its "effective federal income tax rate of just 9.4%, less than half the statutory corporate tax of 21%." So said Mathew Gardner of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy earlier this year when Amazon announced its latest financial success.

Amazon has been so successful that a dollar invested when it first sold stock in 1997 has now grown to $2,300, making it one of the most fantastically profitable investments even in this era of high profits in high tech.

While the company doesn't want to share more of its gains with the blue-collar Americans whose labor makes its profits possible by quickly fulfilling orders, it does lavish money on its executives. One reason to favor the top is that the way Amazon pays executives provides a stealth financial and tax subsidy.

Costly Stock Options

The company showered so many valuable stock options on its highest-paid people that the tax savings alone came to more than $600 million last year, Gardner calculated.

Stock options save companies on corporate income tax. The companies get to deduct their value even though the cost is borne by existing stockholders. The stockholders' share of the company is diluted by the new shares given to executives. In other words, it's a tax deduction that costs the company nothing.

Options are also a form of compensation that cost the company nothing, unlike the hard cash it must pay out to rank-and-file workers like those at the Bessemer warehouse.

What's most troubling about this union election is that a federal government corporation worked with management against the workers. That's a troubling sign of authoritarianism.

Remember Amazon worked in concert with the Postal Service to install the drop box to collect ballots on company property. The service acted after staff at the labor board, the federal agency tasked with protecting the rights of American workers in the private sector, told them they couldn't do it. But just as it pressured workers, Amazon pressured the service into pleasing Bezos, the richest person in America.

No Answers

Dave Partenheimer, a postal public relations manager, would not talk about who ultimately gave the go-ahead to install the drop box in the Amazon warehouse parking lot.

Partenheimer declined to say whether the service knew that the labor board already denied Amazon's request for such a drop box. He also declined to identify who ultimately approved installation.

Instead, Partenheimer reiterated an earlier statement about a "Centralized Box Unit [CBU] with a collection compartment" being "suggested by the postal service as a solution to provide an efficient and secure delivery and collection point."

The labor board isn't talking about the drop box either, at least not while it considers the 23 separate objections filed by the Retail Store, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

Labor board spokeswoman Kayla Blado declined to comment on whether the Postal Service has the authority to supersede her agency's decisions. She would not even confirm that the agency did, in fact, deny Amazon's request to have a ballot drop box installed on its property.

DeJoy Strikes Again

The persistent controversy about the drop box and the Bessemer vote overall, however, parallels the madness that surrounded mail-in ballots during the last presidential election. DeJoy ordered the removal of mail sorting machines in the run-up to the vote, while the rest of the Trump administration whined about the supposed inability of the Postal Service to properly deliver ballots.

Trump also complained throughout his four years in office that the Postal Service was subsidizing Amazon. This was to advance his attacks on the aggressive reporting by The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, but whose newsroom he has never influenced according to the top editor and reporters working there.

We now know that the prices Amazon paid generated outsized profits for the Postal Service, exposing yet another Trump lie only a few Americans, like DCReport readers, know.

Fought Mail-in Votes, Then Didn't

At first, Amazon fought hard to block mail-in voting in the General Election. It dismissed the potential dangers of in-person voting during the pandemic. Then it reversed course and challenged the ability of the Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots in a timely fashion. Taken together it was a classic case of Amazon talking out of both sides of the company's mouth.

Lisa Y. Henderson, the labor board's acting Region 10 director, dismissed the company's contradictory arguments in January and ordered that balloting be conducted by mail.

How the labor board rules, and whether the long list of federal rules that hobble union organizing, will be addressed by President Joe Biden's administration. Decisions will be crucial to whether Americans as a whole prosper, or we continue to create inequality through policies that tilt heavily to the side of business owners and investors.

The struggle between American workers and the bosses has been, and continues to be, fantastically lopsided.

The Economic Policy Institute's Unequal Power Project, for instance, notes an "inherent imbalance in bargaining power between employers and employees" that creates "a lack of freedom in the workplace."

Pro-union workers at Amazon's Bessemer warehouse remained undaunted after losing the initial vote, declaring, "This battle has just begun."

"I'm not discouraged," Linda Burns told reporters after losing the vote by a more than 2-to-1 margin. "This is the beginning. [Jeff] Bezos, you misled a lot of our people. We're going to fight for our rights."

Co-worker Emitt Ashford said if the labor board does order a new election, "We would see a change in the tide now that people have the information."

"We would win," he said.

Money laundering, both for terrorist finance and tax evasion, threatens national security. Now a private group that watches the quality of anti-money laundering efforts has put forth a smart plan to modernize and upgrade our government's capacity to track illicit cross-border financial transactions.

This is news you will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

Global Financial Integrity has a plan, and it's a good one, to better America's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. FinCEN, as it's known, is a critical government agency housed at Treasury and staffed heavily with IRS financial sleuths. It doesn't get nearly the respect or budget it deserves.

Global Financial Integrity is itself an underappreciated Washington nonprofit funded by a host of sources including the Ford Foundation and five governments, though not the United States. On a budget of not much more than $1 million per year, it has done solid work calling attention to the growing problem of illicit finance.

At least $40 trillion of illicit money sloshes around the globe…maybe $50 trillion.

Jim Henry, DCReport's economics correspondent, has spent decades documenting the flow of illicit money. He estimates from analysis of official banking and trade documents that at least $40 trillion of illicit money sloshes around the globe. The total may be $50 trillion.

To get an idea of the gigantic size of that bag of corrupt money consider this: Henry's lower-end estimate almost equals the combined annual economic output of the world's two largest economies, America and China.

Global Financial Integrity, in a report titled "Enhancing National Security by Re-imagining FinCEN," makes these recommendations:

1. Give the FinCEN director a seat on the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council (NSC) to raise the agency's stature within the national security community.
2. Create within FinCEN a National Anti-Money Laundering Data Center for advanced data collection, synthesis, analysis, and distribution to law enforcement for AML activity.
3. Establish a "Manhattan Project" to identify, develop and use state-of-the-art technologies needed to fulfill the technology for that data center.
4. Launch within FinCEN a National Anti-Money Laundering Training Center which will be an anti-money laundering knowledge and education hub for FinCEN staff, financial institution regulators, law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels and for both state and federal prosecutors.
5. Create a Strategic Analysis Team to examine emerging and long-term trends in money laundering methods and computer technologies to counter those threats.

Those are superb ideas all. But will Congress care?

A core problem with hunting for terrorist finance is that the tools used to sift through billions of transactions involving trillions of dollars are the financial equivalent of trawling the ocean bottom for cod. Trawlers catch plenty of cod, but they also drag in many unwanted species.

Tax Cheats Off the Hook

The George W. Bush administration was averse to a serious hunt for big-league tax cheats. It disconnected from a nascent movement by major countries to coordinate their tax policies, a boon to tax cheats. It even refused to hire 80 more IRS investigators to hunt for transactions by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the wake of 9/11.

Source: UN Office on Drugs and Crime

The official excuse was that taxpayers couldn't afford an extra $12 million in spending. That is an absurdity when trillions were being spent on the wars in Afghanistan, still underway, and Iraq. But the funding denial made perfect sense if you knew that anti-money laundering nets catch tax cheats along with terrorists. And since the political donor class is rife with tax cheating, catching tax cheats can be inconvenient for politicians in power, and fellow party members, as a Congressional staffer recently reminded me.

In writing about money laundering in casinos since 1988, in my coverage of taxes since 1995, and on terrorist finance after 9/11, I developed a deep appreciation for the unsung work of FinCEN – and recognition of its weaknesses.

More People, Better Tech

What is needed now to strengthen FinCEN: more staff, super-sophisticated computers on par with the National Security Agency, and, most of all, adding a seat for FinCEN at White House National Security Council meetings.

A FinCEN director once told me that given enough time and resources his staff could find a single $19.99 credit card transaction anywhere in the world. The 9/11 attacks were cheap, costing only about $100,000. We shouldn't forget that relatively small expenditures can be used to cause enormous harm.

To find the little transactions behind big attacks in the future FinCEN needs enormous computer power to separate golden nuggets of fact from the massive overburden of routine financial transactions. FinCEN also needs to be set free to find not just terrorists, but tax cheats.

With trillions of dollars of illicit money in the hands of criminals, kleptocrats, and terrorists, and hundreds of billions of dollars of federal income taxes evaded each year, it's long past time to upgrade FinCEN.

As Dr. Bandy X. Lee's frequent publisher, we, the editors of DC Report.org. believe she has made vital contributions to our understanding of public mental health and the damaging effects of a deeply mentally ill individual, Donald Trump, holding the most powerful position in the world.

Trump's delusions, which are well-documented and go back decades, have resulted in the spread of baseless conspiracy theories, numerous acts of deadly violence and the failed attempt to overthrow our government on Jan 6. These assaults continue although there are indications that some Trump followers who embraced his delusions appear to be recovering from their own temporary loss of rationality and mental well-being.

Yale University fired Dr. Lee, an established professor on its medical school faculty, citing the misnamed "Goldwater Rule." That policy directs mental health professionals to hold their tongue about the mental well-being of officials, something American citizens do every day around their kitchen tables, in public forums and on national television. To deny the citizenry the insights of educated mental health professionals is more than absurd, it is an attack on the very principle of American democratic self-governance.

Trump's delusions, which are well-documented and go back decades, have resulted in the spread of baseless conspiracy theories, numerous acts of deadly violence and the failed attempt to overthrow our government on Jan 6. These assaults continue although there are indications that some Trump followers who embraced his delusions appear to be recovering from their own temporary loss of rationality and mental well-being.

Yale University fired Dr. Lee, an established professor on its medical school faculty, citing the misnamed "Goldwater Rule." That policy directs mental health professionals to hold their tongue about the mental well-being of officials, something American citizens do every day around their kitchen tables, in public forums and on national television. To deny the citizenry the insights of educated mental health professionals is more than absurd, it is an attack on the very principle of American democratic self-governance.

All Americans should be deeply disturbed at Yale's implicit attack on robust public debate by punishing Dr. Lee and seeking to intimidate other well-informed mental health scholars about our elected leaders and their fitness to hold office. This is especially so for any president because his finger is on the nuclear button.

We have published more than 40 articles by Dr. Lee and expect to carry more of her work. We believe every one of her opinion columns and interviews falls well within the boundaries of the highest standards of responsible journalism. Her writing also advances our mission, which is to cover what politicians do, not what they say, and to encourage citizens to act like the owners of our government.

Lawsuit Filed

On Monday, Dr. Lee filed a lawsuit against Yale for wrongful termination, as the student-run Yale Daily News reported today, March 23.

Her complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Connecticut, asserts that "Yale violated its contractual obligations to Dr. Lee and violated the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Yale further committed the tort of negligent misrepresentation by not adhering to its policies on academic freedom, upon which Dr. Lee had relied."

We hope that the trustees and academic leaders at Yale University cease their attack and acknowledge their error and that they embrace the fundamental principle of American democracy which depends on rational and reasoned debate, not dogma like the misnamed "Goldwater Rule."

Her lawsuit notes that the American Psychiatric Association reinterpreted its "Goldwater Rule" shortly after Trump became president.

'Gag Order'

"The reinterpreted Goldwater Rule created a gag order, recommending that its members not comment on public figures… even where there is a responsibility to society to protect public health," unless these politicians have submitted to psychiatric evaluation, her complaint states, noting that the APA is a voluntary professional organization of psychiatrists, not a regulatory body with government powers. She was last a member of that organization in 2007.

Dr. Lee says, and we agree, that the APA's new interpretation of the rule is "in conflict with [the] duties, responsibilities, and role in the interest of public health in light of her belief that Donald Trump posed a dangerous threat to this country and the world. For this reason, she held an ethics conference at Yale in April 2017 with some of the most respected members of her profession. This conference initially had approximately two dozen attendees and then drew national attention and led to the public-service book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President."

That book became a New York Times bestseller.

While Yale did not sponsor the conference, Dr. Lee discussed the conference in advance with Yale, and Yale provided an auditorium without charge, making her firing all the more incoherent and indefensible academically, politically and morally.

Dr. Lee's more than 40 opinion pieces and interviews, some of them co-authored by other eminent authorities in mental health, can be read by clicking on this DCReport.org link.

DCReport is a reader-supported nonprofit and advertising-free public service journalism organization led by former senior and widely respected journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and other serious news organizations.

The pocketbooks of electricity customers across America are under renewed assault by politicians and friends in the electric power generation business.

Unless America restores a sound economic and legal principle that has protected both consumers and electricity companies for more than a century, Texans and the rest of us can expect bigger and bigger electric bills and possibly more ruinous price gouging.

Odds are you haven't heard that in the news. No one announced it, and most journalism is about covering official announcements. At DCReport we look at facts and decide what we think you need to know. Policies and facts affecting how much you pay for electricity each month are typically news only after a crisis, not as an ongoing news story.

Regulation of electricity is based on the principle of "just and reasonable" rates. That means consumers pay prices they can afford while investors are assured a reasonable profit, typically a 10% or so return on their assets. Half the states still follow this principle, but half do not.

'Unjust, Unreasonable'

This principle is so thoroughly enshrined in American law that courts have held that when a utility earns a single dollar more than earned, the profit is "unjust and unreasonable."

Texas politicians last week delivered the latest blow to this sound economic principle following the winter freeze debacle that left millions without power and, eventually, water.

Texas electricity producers charged an extra $47 billion during the Feb. 14-19 freeze. Only $10 billion of extra charges were imposed in all of 2020.

It turns out that a third of these extra charges were bogus. Yet amazingly, Texas regulators plan to let power producers keep the $16 billion they improperly overcharged.

$550 for Every Texan

The overcharges average $550 per Texan. Steal that much just once in the Lone Star state and you can get a fine of up $2,000 plus a six-month stay at the local sheriff's gray-bar hotel.

Harsh as Texas is on criminals, it goes all soft and fuzzy when it comes to businesses ripping off millions of people for $550 each.

The mistake enabling the overcharges was made by the grid operator, the Energy Reliability Council of Texas. Six of the council's seven members, who do not live in Texas, said they were resigning.

The $16 billion of improper overcharges took place during the final 33 hours, the company that monitors compliance with the Texas rules revealed. Not correcting this "will result in substantial and unjustified economic harm," wrote Chris Bivens, a vice president of Potomac Economics, the Texas market monitor.

$9,000 per Megawatt Hour

Ironically, about $1.5 billion of the overcharges were paid to electric generating station owners to produce electricity in freezing weather, according to Potomac Economics.

For those 33 hours producers sold power at the maximum allowable price of $9,000 per megawatt-hour. The average cost of producing each megawatt ranges from roughly $11 to $37 dollars depending on what fuel is used.

During the freezing weather, the costs of generating power did not go up much or at all. But so many power plants shut that those still running were allowed to boost their prices sky-high.

The typical residential customer in America uses electricity by the kilowatt. For a megawatt, a unit 1,000 times greater, the typical residential cost is in the range of $130.

But Texas electricity generators charged almost 75 times that much. Price markups on that scale are so one-sided that the law treats them as unconscionable, and judges often refuse to enforce such contracts.

Too Complicated

Correcting the overcharges would just be too complicated, Arthur C. D'Andrea, the Texas Public Utilities Commission chairman, announced. "It is impossible to unscramble this sort of egg," D'Andrea said last week.

That's nonsense. It's actually easy.

Letting the excess charges stand would also be bad for attracting digital industries to Texas, a major goal of Gov. Greg Abbott. His administration is courting Silicon Valley firms because California housing prices are so high it's hard to attract young workers. But digital industries require electricity that is both reliably available and predictably priced and Texas just proved it can't deliver.

Electricity shortages are almost certain to worsen in the next few years, as we reported on Feb. 19.

Evidently, PUC chairman D'Andrea didn't get the governor's memo on bringing digital firms to Texas.

Regulation is a dirty word to Abbott and other top Texas officials, Republicans all. But because of its unique nature, electricity regulation is crucial because the modern world runs on it and it is created and used in the same instant.

Electricity is what most distinguishes us from the ancients. People in ancient Athens, Rome and other cities had paved streets, lodging houses, restaurants, retail shops and even resorts. What they lacked were the electrons needed for automobiles and jetliners, night lighting, elevators, refrigerators and computers.

Texans Facing Bankruptcy

Some Texans are faced with depleting their savings, drawing money from their retirement savings, mortgaging their homes or filing for bankruptcy even though they used the same or less power during the freeze as on other days.

The Texas rules, which I've warned about for 15 years, are clear, the failure to follow them was blatant and the plan to let producers keep the $16 billion of overcharges is unfair, unnecessary and, if litigated, likely to be found unconscionable.

It's reasonable to wonder whether the regulators, all political appointees, made a convenient mistake, in effect subtly telling generating plant owners:

"Fellas, stuff your saddlebags with all you can and ride over to the bank with your ill-got gains while we sightless sheriffs take a nap."

That may sound cynical, but utility regulation is a revolving door everywhere. Commissioners who set electricity rates and grid rules overwhelmingly come from the executive offices at utilities where they return after their stints as public officials. Consumer advocates are as rare as snow in Houston.

The Ghost of Enron

The problem with electricity overcharges extends far beyond Texas, but it began there in the mid-1990s with lobbying by Enron, the fundamentally corrupt energy price manipulator that later went bankrupt.

Enron persuaded the Texas legislature in the mid-1990s to fundamentally change the way electricity is financed and sold. The idea was that while distributing electricity is best done by a monopoly so multiple power lines are not needed everywhere, there's no natural monopoly in generating power. That's more than reasonable — on the surface.

Eventually, half the states decided to replace vertically integrated electric utilities which generated, transmitted and distributed electricity. Instead, independent firms would generate power and bid to sell it to distribution companies in so-called single-price auctions.

Enron argued that when there was more demand for power than expected prices would spike and those spikes would attract new investors who would build more power plants and in the long run prices would come down.

'Single-Price' Auctions

I've yet to meet a businessperson eager to invest in a business where it takes years to go from concept to operation with the expectation that future profits will be smaller than today.

The biggest flaw in the Enron idea, however, is that idea is that doing the opposite is faster, cheaper and comes with less risk while virtually guaranteeing fat profits. You can read our DCReport stories here and here as well as here and here.

Enron sold Texas lawmakers on "single price" electricity auctions.

Here's how a single-price electricity auction works. The grid operator, in this case, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, calls for bids to supply power for periods that can be as long as a year and as short as a few minutes. Bidders offer to sell power at whatever price they chose.

When bidding closes, everyone whose bid is at or below the price needed to supply all the juice the market needs wins. The winning bidders also get the highest price bid. So even if the average bid was, say, $100, if the highest winning big was $9,000 then every winner gets the $9,000.

Lose-Lose Deals

That means a hydroelectric dam operator with costs of maybe $120 per megawatt-hour can bid one penny to ensure their bid is a winner and then collect thousands of dollars. So, when they throw open the floodgates to make turbines spin, it's almost as if greenbacks instead of water flow like Niagara Falls.

What Wall Street investors figured out, as I did, was another flaw in the Enron plan.

Owners of a single power plant must bid low enough to make sure their electricity is purchased, but owners with a fleet of electricity generators can bid strategically to jack up prices.

Experiments with college students, simple bots and actual bidding records showed years ago that this is exactly what happens, as explained my 2007 book, Free Lunch.

There are rules against this kind of manipulation, which is why grid operators hire independent market monitors like Potomac Economics. But some market monitors have been less than diligent while others have had their advice ignored as right now in Texas.

On top of this, in one of his first official actions as president in 2017, Donald Trump signaled to Wall Street that fleet owners were pretty much free to manipulate electricity markets, the subject of the second story DCReport published.

As for unscrambling that egg, the task that Texas PUC Chairman D'Andrea says is too hard, here is one way of several ways to restore fairness.

The Texas PUC can reject charges that exceed the pre-crisis price during those 33 hours. The independent power producers all keep detailed time and price records and can issue revised invoices. They can also sue the state if they want, knowing they risk being tossed out for trying to enforce unconscionable contracts.

Undoing the improper excess charges involves accounting and math but since, unlike the ancients, we have electricity to power computers it's not all that hard to make the calculations necessary to uphold the just and reasonable principle.

We have stunningly good news today: Wages in 2020 grew at by far the fastest rate in the last 45 years.

The bad news: It's a statistical anomaly caused by Donald Trump's lethal mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. The scourge wiped out almost eight million jobs held by lower-paid workers and only two million better-paying jobs.

The worse news: Two Republican senators who publicly profess their Christian faith to win over voters want to oppress millions of people trapped in poverty. With straight faces, they call their plan the Higher Wages for American Workers Act.

The good news starts out this way—in 2020, average wages grew a stunningly robust 7.2% over the previous year.

More than 80% of the 9.6 million jobs that disappeared in the pandemic paid in the bottom quarter of wages. Wipe out those jobs and the statistics on wages show an increase.

That's by far the greatest one-year growth in wages in the past 45 years. In fact, it's 80% more than the fastest previous year's wage growth, analysis of Census data shows.

Typical Pay

The better measurement, however, is the median wage. It indicates what the typical worker makes. The median marks the halfway point in wages with half of workers making more, half less. The median wage grew 6.9%, a new report by the Economic Policy Institute shows.

EPI is a nonprofit research organization that advocates for poorly paid workers and regularly issues The State of Working America report with lots of interactive graphics. I've checked its work and always find it rock solid.

The obvious question is how could wages skyrocket during a pandemic that created the worst joblessness since the Great Depression? How could wages rise at all since by the end of May more than 42 million Americans, a quarter of those with any paid labor, had filed for jobless benefits?

Just beneath the surface, we find a compelling and distorting fact: More than 80% of the 9.6 million jobs that disappeared in the pandemic paid in the bottom quarter of wages. Wipe out those jobs and the statistics on wages show an increase. What's surprising is that the increase is only about 7%.

America's low-paid jobs are disproportionately held by women, especially those with children and little education, and by minorities. In real terms, these groups have been losing ground for years even as the economy keeps growing.

But by killing their jobs, at least until the pandemic is over and recovery is complete, the data in wages paid were distorted by the fact that most of those who are out of work were in the bottom half of the pay ladder.

Forgotten Americans Forgotten

What was it that Trump promised The Forgotten Men and Women? Oh yes, "The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer." Well, he forgot about them and in addition to a real jobless rate of about 10% plus more than a half-million Americans needlessly dead. Had Trump followed sound public health advice, as we saw South Korea do, the coronavirus butcher's bill would be only about 10,000 dead Americans.

So how to alleviate the misery of America's working poor?

Senators Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) say they are coming to the rescue. In a display of chutzpah and cluelessness that is extraordinary even for rich white men in high government positions, they call their bill the Higher Wages for American Workers Act.

Their bill's provisions are at odds with their professed devotion to a religion that imposes as a core duty alleviating the suffering of the poor. Cotton is a Methodist. Romney belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Cotton and Romney say the Biden administration plan for a $15 minimum wage in 2025 is way too much money. They propose a minimum wage of $10 an hour in 2025.

How much higher would real wages rise under the Cotton-Romney plan?

$12 A Week

Given the expected rate of inflation, that $10 an hour in 2025 would mean about 30-cents more in real pay than the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. That's $12 a week more for a full-time week. The current minimum wage has been in place since 2009 under legislation signed by President George W. Bush. Inflation since 2009 has shaved roughly a buck off each hour's minimum wage.

Measured back to President George W. Bush, the Cotton-Romney plan leaves workers worse off in 2025 than in 2009.

Now watch the news and see if the record rise in median and average wages is reported. Where it is, pay close attention—especially in reports by Fox News and its like—whether they say the increase is a statistical anomaly or proclaim a miracle wrought by Trump.

Having read this at least you won't be fooled.

Let's put in perspective the atrocious conduct of freshman lawmaker Margorie Taylor Greene. She is the pistol-toting congresswoman from Georgia who wants to put a bullet in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's head.

Any private employer would have fired Greene immediately. Failure to do so would expose a private company, a nonprofit or any other employer to ruinous damages. What if Greene reached into her purse and used her Glock, or if a fellow QAnon fan were to fulfill these homicidal impulses.

Any decent human being would get a court order to keep Greene from being on the loose with a gun in her person.

But Greene works in the people's House. Under our Constitution, she can't be fired; she can, however, be expelled.

Our Constitution requires a two-thirds majority vote to expel Greene. That will happen only if 59 of the 211 House Republicans have the basic human decency to expel a member with murder, religious bigotry and anti-Semitism in her heart, a lethal weapon in her purse and a stated desire to overthrow the government in which she serves.

Expulsion, however, almost is certainly not going to happen.

It's not what the Republican Party's de facto leader, Donald Trump, wants. Trump endorsed Greene, untroubled by her racist and anti-Semitic screeds and her spouting of QAnon craziness.

Examples? Labeling Democratic Party leaders as pedophile cannibals was one. Another was her inane assertion that California's wildfires were caused by a Jewish space laser financed by the Rothschild banking family.

Unrepentant Trump

But why would this, or anything else Greene has done, dissuade Trump? He is so self-centered and disloyal that he tried, and failed, on Jan. 6 to overthrow our government.

That attack on our Capitol left five people dead, including two police officers, and 140 police injured. In this Trump is like Greene – he is utterly unrepentant.

We now know that the attack on our Capitol and the hunt to kill Pelosi, then Vice President Mike Pence and others was the result of premeditation by rebels. Planning began just days after a large majority of American voters decided by Nov. 3 that Joe Biden would be our next president.

We also know that Trump riled up the crowd that January morning and told them he would go with them to the Capitol. Then he ducked out, hiding out in the White House, gleefully watching on TV the attack.

Trump was so enthralled by the mob violence on his behalf that he wouldn't take his eyes off the TV to answer frantic telephone calls from members of his own political party who feared they were about to be executed.

What better evidence that with Trump, like every other mob boss and dictator, loyalty is a one-way street?

Coward Kevin McCarthy

As Trump plots revenge and hopes for a return to the White House, his ally is traitor Kevin McCarthy. The California Republican who is House Minority Leader could whip votes to oust Greene. But if he did, he might well be ousted as minority leader.

McCarthy is so weak he cannot bear the thought of that humiliation; cannot imagine being stalwart in defense of our Constitution. News reports indicate Trump uses a sexist epithet to describe McCarthy who only confirms the implication of the disgusting term by his conduct.

McCarthy shares with Trump the ability to speak out of four sides of his mouth. He muddies otherwise clear waters about where he stands, what he believes and what he will do.

Of all the scoundrels that Trumpism has inflicted in America, few will be judged more harshly by history than McCarthy. He is a coward who chose loyalty to Trump ahead of his office. He is doing Trump's bidding by helping Greene cling to the office she does not deserve.

Five Members Expelled

Only five House members have ever been expelled, three for joining the Confederacy and waging war on the United States, two for corruption.

Greene clearly fits under the rebellion category. She is no less a traitor than John B. Clark and John W. Reid of Missouri and Henry C. Burdett of Kentucky, who all stood with the slave-owning Confederacy in 1861.

Any Republican who votes to keep Greene is making clear that they are as vile and disloyal as she is. A vote to retain Greene is a vote of utter disrespect for our Constitution and a violation of each representative's oath to defend our Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Harassing a Fellow Lawmaker

Greene is utterly unrepentant. Last week, Greene and her staff harassed a co-worker of equal rank, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.). It's significant that Greene is white and spouts racist tropes while Bush, who represents St. Louis, is Black.

Greene, in a tweet, said Bush was the agitator. So did Greene's chief of staff, promising he'd release a video to prove it. No video has appeared.

Bush told MSNBC that Greene approached her from behind while "ranting loudly into her phone" and "not wearing a mask." Bush said she called out for Greene to put on her mask, as House rules require, prompting Greene and her staff respond by berating her.

Bush is having her Congressional office moved away from Greene's. Providing Bush with armed escorts seems within the bounds of reason.

It is terrible to have to brand an entire political party this way, but it is what the facts demand. This is a tragedy not for the GOP so much as America, where our Constitution hangs as if by a thread and the Republicans are sharpening scissors.

What happened to Republican lectures about the need for those in high office to have moral standards? How about Republican themes of taking personal responsibility?

The awful truth is that those were never principled stands, just mere slogans no different in substance than the catchy phrases and jingles used to sell bubble gum and shampoo.

Featured image: Screengrab of Marjorie Taylor Greene campaign video

Donald Trump is out, but parts of the Republican Party warmly embrace his dark legacy of white supremacy, the crazy QAnon conspiracy and civil war wrapped in faux Christianity.

Like Trump, these fake Christians reject turning the other cheek in favor of threatening or promoting violence.

The problem here isn't partisan politics, but public mental health. DCReport has covered extensively the mental-health debacle thanks to Dr. Bandy X. Lee, Harper West and other experts on how delusions spread like viruses, with Trump being a carrier.

The evidence of craziness seems to be found entirely in the Republican Party. We looked for, but have yet to discover any Democratic Party leaders pushing baseless conspiracy theories or urging civil war.

Readers who have found such material, please send links via our DCReport Tipline.

Here are some of the ways that Republican leaders reveal their affinity for the anti-democratic nature of Trumpism and QAnon, its attendant conspiracy theory:

• In California, the Sacramento County Republican Party elected to its Central Committee a Proud Boys member who has advocated violence.

"Illegal immigrants should have their heads smashed into the concrete," a 2018 post by an antifascist group quotes Perrine as saying.

Perrine didn't deny this call to violence, he only insisted that he's not a racist.

He told the newspaper, "They can call me a Nazi all they want, and I know I have plenty of friends of all races that don't always agree with me, but they still love me.

"The Proud Boys that I affiliate with are all working men, all married men, they all have good jobs, they all believe in God."

Only after The Bee reported this did some Republicans in the California capital come to their senses and demand Perrine's ouster.

• Oregon's Republican Party this month aligned itself with conspiracy theories as well as denouncing all 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the murderous attack on our Capitol.
• Texas' GOP uses a QAnon conspiracy phrase—We Are The Storm—in its new logo.

The slogan comes from a poem, not crazies, according to the Texas party chairman, Alan West. He is the former congressman from Florida and retired military officer known for making bizarre statements. In 2011, he wrote, "When I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool."

Arizona GOP for Trump, Still

• Arizona's GOP retweeted messages in December asking if people were ready to die for Trump and his baseless claim that he really won in 2020. The original Stop The Steal tweet was deleted, but the party's official Twitter account still refers to a person who says he's ready to die for Trump. It states: "He is. Are you?"
• You might think that the party leadership in the Grand Canyon state, long a bright red jurisdiction, would examine its position after Democrats won both U.S. Senate seats and Joe Biden beat Trump in Arizona.

While the GOP added registered voters in 2020, it lost in ballots cast. Instead of reassessing, however, Arizona's Republican leaders decided to enforce Trumpian purity. On Jan. 23 the Arizona GOP censured three leading Republicans for not embracing Trumpian madness: Gov. Doug Ducey, former U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain. The widow of Sen. John McCain said she considers the censure a badge of honor.

Party leaders also re-elected the erratic and autocratic Kelli Ward as the Arizona GOP leader. She said her party suffers from "people who have been namby-pamby, lie down and allow the Democrats to walk all over them."

The party retweeted a menacing message. It is one of many from a Republican who holds himself out as a Christian despite tweets that are aggressively contrary to New Testament teachings about love, doing good to others and turning the other cheek:

"The Arizona Republican Party is still Trump country in all districts. Weak self-righteous sanctimonious Rs are on notice."

"Satan-Worshipping Pedophiles"

Arizona state Sen. David Farnsworth acknowledged last fall to the Arizona Mirror, a news website, that he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory but with a twist.

He said some Republicans have joined the top Democrats who, he imagines, run a global Satan worshipping cabal of pedophiles Trump is singlehandedly trying to bring down. Farnsworth told audiences that Arizona's Department of Child Safety is covering up, or complicit, in child sex trafficking.

Meanwhile, the FBI says QAnon is a domestic terror threat.

Other delusional beliefs so deeply and broadly infect the Arizona GOP that its leaders blame antifascists for joining in when our national Capitol was violently invaded by a murderous mob of Trumpers on Jan. 6.

• Mentioned earlier, the Oregon Republican Party went further. It adopted a resolution asserting, "The violence at the Capitol was a 'false flag' operation designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans; this provided the sham motivation to impeach President Trump in order to advance the Democratic goal of seizing total power."

That's as crazy as QAnon.

• Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who riled up the Capitol mob, and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida also falsely blame the Capitol attack on antifascists.

Antifascist Nonsense

The FBI calls that nonsense, but you don't need law enforcement to know that the idea is ridiculous.

Saying Trumpers and Antifa jointly attacked our Capitol is like saying Trump is in league with Bernie Sanders. Believing, as the Oregon GOP leadership does, that the insurgents were lefties posing as Trumpers moves the party well into the realm of delusion.

• In Hawaii, the official Republican Twitter account claims war is being waged against its members' values. And its relentless attacks on news organizations that check facts and correct mistakes include many fabrications.

Witness this Inauguration Day tweet: "Will you be joining PBS in calling for internment and re-education camps also?"

Nothing in the news clips it tweeted came close to substantiating the tweet, nor did the full PBS report.

There is a glimmer of hope that reality plays a role in the Hawaii GOP. On Sunday, Jan. 24, the state party's communications vice-chair, Edwin Boyette, resigned after sane Republicans complained about his tweets supporting QAnon.

Building a Theocracy

It's not just Trump purity that many GOP influencers are pushing. There is also their brand of Christianity, which promotes racial animosity, hatred of Democrats, intolerance and would subvert our Constitution to create a theocracy.

Consider Jenna Ellis, one of Trump's television lawyers who was paid at least $173,900 by his campaign. Ellis has met with GOP leaders in several states making fact-free claims that Trump won in November.

Ellis has a long and well-documented history of just making self-aggrandizing claims. She has a checkered career and her accomplishments are negligible, but Trump got one look at her on television and was enchanted.

Some principled Republicans see no future in a party swaddled in craziness. On Monday Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, a conservative with a level head, announced that he won't seek a third term in 2022 because of what he called partisan gridlock.

While it's true that compromise is rare on Capitol Hill, intransigence traces back to anti-taxer Grover Norquist declaring, "Bipartisanship is just another name for date rape" and Trump repeatedly retweeting QAnon-supporting craziness.

Like Flake, a Libertarian whose family founded Arizona, Portman would face a primary challenge from the crazy wing of the GOP if he seeks third term.

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America is entering a very dangerous time. For his next 11 weeks in office, Donald Trump will be in a position to exact revenge, a word that by his own account is his entire life philosophy. We should all hope that he goes into one of his down emotional periods for an extended time so that lethargy, not blind rage, dominates his behavior until Jan. 20.

Through phony charges of ballot-box stuffing, firing officials, issuing pardons to friends and family and other acts Trump can do great damage between now and Inauguration Day, when his shield against criminal prosecution vanishes. He can also hobble the transition to a Biden administration.

Trump's first act of post-election political vandalism came in the wee hours Wednesday morning. He claimed the election was being stolen (video at 8:00) through "a major fraud on our nation." He has yet to show a scintilla of evidence to support that lie.

One of the most destabilizing things Trump could do is refuse to release, or severely limit, funds to pay for the transition to a Biden administration.

That's the kind of immoral rhetoric that damages faith in democracy and furthers the goals of Vladimir Putin who aims to undermine every major democracy because he considers self-governance a joke.

Three Firings

On Friday, while the election outcome was still uncertain, Trump abruptly removed three high-level officials, two women, and a man of color.

In a reckless move, Trump forced the resignation of Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who since 2018 had run the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency whose duties include keeping high-grade radioactive elements, known as fissile material, out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states. Trump's Energy Secretary, Dan Brouillette, wanted to cut the budget for this work while Gordon-Hagerty sought increased funding.

Senator James Inhofe, a far-right Republican from Oklahoma, criticized the Trump administration for going soft on keeping nuclear materials from rogue states and terrorist groups. "People who should be doing all they can to support the critical work of the NNSA are instead trying to undermine it," Inhofe said in September.

After Gordon-Haggerty was ousted, Inhofe challenged the competency of Energy Secretary Brouillette, a rare break with the obsequious deference to Team Trump by Republican lawmakers over the past four years. The firing, "demonstrates he [Brouillette] doesn't know what he's doing in national security matters," Inhofe said.

Trump also fired Bonnie Glick, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in what appears to be a move to ensure that Islamophobes exercise greater power in the agency.

The third appointee, Neil Chatterjee, was demoted, from the chairmanship of the powerful Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to being just one of the five commissioners. Running diversity training, which Trump generally banned by executive order, was behind the demotion, Chatterjee told the Washington Post. "Guilty as charged," he told EE News.

However, it wasn't diversity, but Trump's love of dirty coal that was behind Chatterjee's demotion, both Green Tech Media and The Wall Street Journal reported. Chatterjee had supported a tax on carbon, which economists across the spectrum have said for years would be the most efficient way to create incentives that speed the shift away from fossil fuels.

Spewing More Pollution

In his remaining weeks, Trump can also speed his many actions to spew more pollution under the guise of ending overly burdensome regulations. That's an issue DCReport has covered intensely for the last four years.

One of the most destabilizing things Trump could do is refuse to release, or severely limit, funds to pay for the transition to a Biden administration.

The General Services Agency is charged with funding the office needed to prepare for a new administration, including hiring hundreds of temporary workers, many of whom will end up working in the Biden administration.

And he could really hobble the new administration by refusing to provide or limit the availability of FBI agents and other investigators to run background checks on the roughly 4,000 political appointees of the incoming Biden administration.

Let's hope the next 70 some days are marked by golf, lazily watching Fox and Trump's now well-known executive incompetence so that the vandalism he does commit is random and repairable come 2021.

Joe Biden just won more votes than anyone else in American history, but the next four years may go down in history as the stymied presidency. That's because it looks highly unlikely that the Democrats will get a majority in the Senate, leaving the chamber under the iron-fisted control of Mitch McConnell, patron saint of polluters and profiteers.

Even before noon on Jan. 20, 2021, Donald Trump will be in a position to do enormous harm that will complicate the Biden presidency. Indeed, we should expect Trump is already looking for ways to use his last eight weeks in office to punish our nation—or at least the states that voted for Biden.

In a major power grab, Donald Trump signed an executive order on Oct. 21 that asserts he has vast new authority to punish federal employees with demotions or firing without cause. It's a Trumpian assertion of a right to cronyism and personal fealty to him.

This executive order purports to grant Trump dictatorial-like power over thousands of career federal managers and executives. They are now at risk of losing their jobs and careers unless they blindly follow Trump's agenda with abject loyalty to his whims.

This Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In The Excepted Service, if allowed to stand, largely will overturn an 1883 law that was passed to reduce corruption among federal government executives by creating a career civil service based on documented merit. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, passed in 1883 in the unexpected presidency of Chester A. Arthur, covers most federal employees, who earn promotion via competitive exams.

Instead of patronage positions, these civil servants are protected from demotion or firing for political reasons, though they can be disciplined for serious misconduct.

In effect, this would extend the rules governing the roughly 4,000 political appointees each president is entitled to hire — people who serve at the "pleasure of the president" — to apolitical career managers and executives.

The executive order states "faithful execution of the law requires that the President have appropriate management oversight regarding this select cadre of professionals."

In common language, this means Trump claims the ability to fire career public servants via Tweet. His executive order ignores 137 years of law and personnel regulations, allowing him to run roughshod over job protections for career government employees. Under the order, he can fire them on a whim.

Who is affected

One of the most prominent federal employees affected by this change is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert. Trump first admired Fauci then called him an "idiot" and said last week he would fire him except for the political uproar it would cause. The order also covers officials, scientists and staff of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

This creation of "Schedule F" employees effectively gives the president the power to fire any current employees working in the broad categories as managers and executives covered by his order. He can treat them the same as private-sector workers whose employment, absent a personal or union contract, is "at-will."

Federal employee unions promptly denounced the order even though it is aimed at management, not line workers. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said he will develop legislation that would restore protections for federal employees. Boyd, whose district is in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, represents more federal workers than any other member of Congress.

If Trump's order stands it would be a major expansion of presidential power. Under threat of loss of employment and reduced or no retirement benefits, department heads might bend to Trump's mercurial whims. Any department head who pushes back would be subject to immediate discharge even if Trump's instructions were illegal.

The long-term consequences for our government would be disastrous. Many civil servants took federal jobs because they favored stable employment and a focus on their professional interests. Removing that security would make recruiting talent more costly and less successful. And for what? To satisfy the petulance of Donald Trump?

Whitlock case relevant

Trump acted just as DCReport published its investigation into the firing of Warren S. Whitlock, one of the highest-ranking civilians in the U.S. Army. Part One Why This Man Lost His Top Pentagon Civilian Job and Part Two Out On The Street After Two Secret And Illegal Investigations detailed the racism and machinations behind the removal of Whitlock, an equal opportunity and diversity specialist with a track record of successful changes to discriminatory government actions and policies. The broader impact was explained in Racism In The Pentagon And Higher.

In the Whitlock case, there is clear evidence of discrimination and unlawful termination. In future cases any possible protection someone like Whitlock may assert will not exist if Trump's executive order stands. Trump and the department heads he names will not need any reason whatsoever to fire anyone who is re-classified as an at-will worker.

"You're fired!" is of course the signature line of Trump's faux reality television shows that made him famous. Those who watched carefully noticed he sometimes fired the best performing person and praised those whose performance made them likely candidates for leaving the show. Not aired were scenes in which he demeaned people, ogled women including making one twirl for him, and engaged in other boorish sexist behavior.

The executive order reclassified many federal employees from regular civil service status to "excepted service" status if they are involved in policy-determining, policymaking or policy-advocating.

It's difficult, having studied the man for 32 years, to imagine a federal Qualifications Review Board would accept Trump a senior executive service member.

Political termites

A related strategy Trump undertook in 2017 to impose his will on career civil servants was detailed in my 2018 book It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America. Trump put in key management positions, the very lobbyists and executives who had worked against those agencies, contradicting his campaign promise to "drain the swamp" of special interests. Because they eat away at the substance of our federal government silently and generally unseen by the public I called those appointees "political termites."

This newest power grab by Trump is more of the same with a major addition. People who never signed up for tenuous employment at the pleasure of the president would become at-will employees with no job security.

This is exactly what the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was supposed to prevent. That law was enacted when Vice President Chester Arthur unexpectedly became president after the assassination of James A. Garfield just six months into his term in 1881.

President Arthur had been a major gear in the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine in New York. His cronies scurried down to Washington licking their chops at all the graft they anticipated. To their shock, Arthur told his longtime pals to never again darken the White House. Arthur promised to run a clean administration, which he did, abandoning the old "spoils" system of hiring cronies and party loyalists and embracing the creation of our merit-based federal civil service.

Trump's executive order will certainly be challenged in federal court. But unless and until some judge blocks it, this executive order is in effect.

After three days of Kabuki theater, a television mini-series produced by the Senate Judiciary Committee, did you learn anything that Judge Amy Coney Barrett didn't want you to know?

Really, it's not hard to frame questions that produce informative answers, including when the response is a dodge. Let me show you, starting here:

Judge Barrett, you testified your judicial philosophy is to follow the law as written. Can you please cite examples of where the law required you to render a decision contrary to your personal beliefs?

Notice how that is framed. Barrett can't swat it away, as she did so many questions as hypotheticals. It asked her to speak about the decisions she already rendered.

Judge Barrett, have you contemplated whether in a childbirth gone awry you would sacrifice your own life to save that of your youngest child, leaving your other children sitting behind you motherless, or whether to live so that your children would grow up under your care with one less sibling?

As a relatively new judge, appointed by Donald Trump to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals three years ago, Barrett has not written all that many opinions. Were the judge to respond that she has yet to encounter that issue here's the follow up:

Judge Barrett, have you given thought to how you would deal with that conflict, especially an irresolvable conflict, between your most deeply held beliefs and the law?

Framing Matters

Again, notice the framing. The question is not what you thought but have you thought about a conflict between personal beliefs and the law.

Were the nominee to say that she had not pondered this—which would be preposterous — then the line of inquiry shifts to how deeply she has thought about the law. If she says she has indeed thought about it the question to ask is, "What did you conclude, if anything?"

Next question:

Judge Barrett, have you talked in your Notre Dame law classes and other forums about resolving conflicts between personal beliefs and Supreme Court rulings your students must work under with when they become lawyers and jurists?

That's a question Barrett might try to slough off with the "I don't recall" diversion. To deal with that ask this:

Well then, Judge Barrett, let's assume I'm not a senator, but the most serious student in your class and that I hope to become a trial court judge or, like you, an appellate court judge. So, what do I do, professor, when confronted with a wide chasm, or worse a complete contradiction, between the law as decided by our Supreme Court and my beliefs?

Following Your Own Advice?

The goal here is to get her to talk about how she analyzes such conflicts as well as her advice. And if she gives her advice the obvious follow up is short and sweet:

Would you, Judge Barrett, always take your own advice?

How that question is answered — candidly, philosophically, or evasively — would give senators and the public insight into what is going on behind the mask that Barrett, like all judicial nominees, wears during such hearings.

I could go on with more questions like this but the point I want to make here is that nothing like this emerged from three days of hearings in what is supposed to be the most exclusive deliberative body in the world, the American Senate. Their questions indicate our senators don't respect that.

That so many bad questions were asked was unsurprising, but also shocking given that most Judiciary committee members are lawyers. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a subsidy grabbing Republican, is the Senate's only pig farmer. The rest of them ought to know how to ask useful questions.

Judiciary Committee members in both parties should ask questions that probe the souls of nominees — simple, direct questions stripped of rhetorical filagree. Their questions should force nominees to instantly choose between dissembling, looking idiotic to other lawyers or telling the truth.

We would be wise to castigate every member of that committee, in person if you attend a political or social event, for making novice lawyers on their first day in a courtroom look good.

There's one other question I would have asked. It's based on my own life experience as the father of eight now grown children:

Awful Choices

Judge Barrett, obstetricians in troubled deliveries sometimes must make an awful choice between saving the life of the mother or the child. How would you weigh that choice?

Again, the framing is how to make a choice, not what choice.

Concise follow-ups would note that each year about 700 American women die in childbirth. So do about 21,000 of roughly 3.8 million infants.

More questions:

Judge Barrett, are laws that restrict the freedom of choices that doctors, the mother, or if incapacitated her spouse, make during troubled labor a proper exercise of the police powers of the state?

If the doctors conclude that someone will die why should the crude axe of state police power be applied at all?

If there is any role at all for exercising the state's police power in these tragic situations please articulate it.

Whatever her answer, smart follow up questions should focus on freedom, including the freedom to decide who will die. Framing questions in terms of liberty versus policing powers would be illuminating about the nominee's thoughts.

Another follow up:

Judge Barrett, have you contemplated whether in a childbirth gone awry you would sacrifice your own life to save that of your youngest child, leaving your other children sitting behind you motherless, or whether to live so that your children would grow up under your care with one less sibling?

If that sounds cruel let me note Barrett chose to use her children as props. She could have had them stay home playing with dolls and footballs.

Again, notice that the frame is not what would you decide, but have you thought about this. And trust me these are real-world questions that physician and parents must decide, preferably in advance, but all too often in the unexpected moment.

Asking Better Questions Lessons

Here's a recommendation to make all Congressional hearings less Kabuki theater and more a service to us, the people who own our government.

Every member of Congress, in both parties plus independents, should not ask another question until they have sat through a class, including role-play exercises, on how to frame questions.

Congress already has the perfect expert to teach this — Rep. Katie Porter, Democrat of California.

The freshman lawmaker, a former University of California Irvine law professor, frames only smart questions during House Financial Services hearings. No matter how witnesses reply, Porter is ready to follow so that we the people learn about the integrity of each witness or lack thereof.

Porter questions are free of flourish. Porter never preens. Instead, her five-minute examinations are packed tightly. Whether in interrogations designed to embarrass a mandarin like Jamie Dimon of Chase Bank or subtle sideways approaches that sneak up on the witness like the velociraptor who surprises the big game hunter in the original Jurassic Park film, she gets revealing responses.

Smart woman. Would that our senators were half as smart in asking questions.

Featured Photo: Screenshot from Washington Post television of Judge Amy Coney Barrett with most of her children at Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Ten House Republicans who fashion themselves policy wonks are out with their diagnosis of what ails the American worker. Their proposed cure is a future that would be brutish, nasty and short.

The Hobbesian, dog-eat-dog policies the Republican Study Group proposes would enhance the power of those born to privilege, just so long as nothing knocks them off their comfortable perch.

The report proposes:

1. No forgiveness of student loans even though our federal government authorized students to borrow huge sums to attend worthless commercial schools that went bankrupt, leaving them with no degree, just debt. The Republican plan lacks even the mercy provisions for debtors written into Hammurabi's Code almost 4,000 years ago, which wiped away debts when storms, war or corruption ruined a borrower's finances.
2. A turn away from comprehensive higher education, especially liberal arts, to focus on technical skills and employability. Forget about developing the rigorous and thoughtful minds that enable young people to become informed citizens.
3. Throughout, the report makes recommendations that would require a larger federal government workforce to police workers, students, poor people and immigrants.
4. Empower workers by further weakening, if not eliminating, unions. The Republican Study Group report calls for workers to have more freedom to negotiate directly with their employers, a solution in search of a problem. "Our approach would unleash the full potential of the American people by refocusing labor policy to provide workers more control over their own future," the report states. Given that individual workers are mostly commodities, that's the equivalent of urging that each grain of wheat in a silo be free to negotiate whether it goes into the grist mill first or last.
5. Get tough on the poor and immigrants, who are portrayed as greedy thieves who shirk work, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. The poor and hungry get the blame for high levels of what the report artfully calls "improper payments" despite evidence that mostly these are screwups by federal agencies, not applicants. Not a word, by the way, is said about thieving defense contractors, farmers and other business operators even though a link in the report is full of examples where such businesses benefit from fraud, waste and abuse.