Air Date 3/7/2025
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
Corruption, for those who indulge, isn't just a perk of power. It can also be a method for maintaining it. And Trump is not even bothering to hide the corruption he's working to facilitate, or how it's geared towards supporting his desire for unchecked power.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes Trump's Terms, The Real News, Amicus, the Brennan Center for Justice, All In with Chris Hayes, Democracy Now!, the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, and the Brian Lehrer Show.
Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections: Section A, The cabinet of greed; followed by Section B, Quid pro quo; Section C, Corporate interests; and Section D, King Trump.
President Trump's second administration and Project 2025 - Trump's Terms - Air Date 2-11-25
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: Back in April 2023, without a whole lot of fanfare, a conservative political operative named Paul Danz laid out what was [00:01:00] basically a political battle plan.
CLIP: What we're doing is systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: It was called Project 2025, a 900+ page blueprint for a future conservative president, because it's worth flagging that at this point, President Trump had not yet locked down the Republican nomination, to hit the ground running on day one. It outlined a suite of very conservative policies that would, for example, outlaw the mailing of abortion pills and abolish the Department of Education. It even suggests a return to the gold standard.
Democrats saw this as a vulnerability for Trump in the 2024 campaign, and so we saw social media videos like this one from then president and then candidate Joe Biden.
JOE BIDEN: Project 2025 will destroy America. Look it up.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: We saw Saturday Night Live's Kenan Thompson on the stage at the Democratic National Convention holding up a giant bound copy of the plan.
COMMERCIAL: You ever seen a [00:02:00] document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: After the plan became a Democratic talking point, Trump repeatedly disavowed Project 2025. Here he is on Fox News.
DONALD TRUMP: I have no idea what it is. It's a group of extremely conservative people got together and wrote up a wish list of things, many of which I disagree with entirely, they're too severe.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: But now that Trump is in office releasing his own detailed plans, a lot of them are strikingly similar to the ones laid out in Project 2025. And one of its chief architects was just confirmed to head the critical Office of Management and Budget. Here's Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
CHUCK SCHUMER: And make no mistake about it. Russell Vought is Project 2025 incarnate.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: Politico has been looking into where Project 2025's ideas are showing up in Trump's early executive orders, and this past week, they published a breakdown of 37 different examples. Megan Messerly covers the White House for Politico and joins me now. Welcome.
MEGAN MESSERLY: Thank you.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: So, let's start with that list. What are some of the areas where we have seen the clearest echoes of Project 2025 in the [00:03:00] action of the White House?
MEGAN MESSERLY: The biggest category is in the area of social issues. And that's obviously a broad bucket of things like school choice and banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, prohibiting transgender troops from serving in the military. But we've really seen this cover a broad swath of policy areas from social issues to immigration and government staffing, energy, foreign affairs, the economy. Like it really touches every area of President Trump's executive orders so far.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: It wasn't just a policy plan, though, as well. This was a database of potential administration staffers. This was a conservative bench of people who are motivated to quickly dismantle big chunks of the government that they don't like. Have you seen that play out in the first few weeks of this administration?
MEGAN MESSERLY: Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the list in Project 2025, there's this lengthy list of folks who contributed to the project. And there is significant overlap between this list and the folks who are now joining President Trump's administration. Many of them are former administration officials themselves, and [00:04:00] we're seeing them go back in for Trump 2.0. Some of them are even joining his cabinet. Russ Vought, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget. His pick for CIA, John Ratcliffe. His border czar, Tom Holman.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: And it is fair to say that Vought did write a big chunk of this plan.
MEGAN MESSERLY: Absolutely. He authored a whole chapter, in fact, on the executive office of the president. Vought is known for being really in the weeds, these nitty gritty details of really how to use executive branch authority to the fullest extent and even press that in terms of some separation of powers issues. He has this whole belief about impoundment, this idea that the president doesn't actually have to spend the dollars that Congress allows the federal government to spend.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: I want to stick on that for a moment because this seems like this is going to be a big fight of the Trump administration.
We saw this proposed freeze on federal funding. It got a lot of attention. It was challenged in court immediately. The administration eventually walked it back, at least for now, but they made it clear we want to do this again. You're saying that Vought has written about this, has talked about this, this idea that Congress appropriates the [00:05:00] money, the executive branch, in his view and clearly in the view of many people in the Trump administration, doesn't necessarily have to spend it, can choose not to spend it. This is something that was in the plan?
MEGAN MESSERLY: So if you look at the plan, he lays out this theory of the case. I will say he doesn't go quite as far in Project 2025 as he has in other writings in fully laying out his legal theory here on impoundment, but he makes very clear in Project 2025 that he believes that Congress has delegated far too much authority to what he refers to as "the fourth branch of government," the administrative state, the career bureaucrats.
And so that's reflected in the federal funding freeze that we saw. A lot of folks I talked to, though, say the rollout of that freeze obviously threw Washington into chaos before the White House walked that back. But folks now close to Vought are telling me that they expect him to find a clear cut case where this can actually go to court and potentially make its way up to the Supreme Court to determine whether or not they agree with the argument that Vought has made, that the president does have this authority to say no to congressional spending edicts.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: What [00:06:00] is the White House saying right now? Because as we laid out, there was such a clear disavowal of this during the campaign. And as you have reported, yet so much of it is actually part of the action plan.
MEGAN MESSERLY: Exactly. When we've asked them specifically about the overlap between many of these executive orders and Project 2025, we haven't gotten a lot of direct response. But in general, the argument that we're hearing now from the White House is this idea that, if you look at Project 2025, a lot of these are just longstanding conservative ideas or things that President Trump himself did do during his first term. And so I think the argument there is, okay, yes, these ideas may be in Project 2025 but these are also just reflective of President Trump's priorities.
SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: Have you -- it's still early, Democrats are clearly struggling with how to respond politically to all of this. Democrats seem to think this was a powerful argument during the campaign. Perhaps it wasn't because they lost. Have you seen, have you come across this? Have you looked at this at all? Are Democrats focusing in on this again in this moment?
MEGAN MESSERLY: They are. I think it's to be determined what the impact of that is. I think a lot of the American public, this label of Project [00:07:00] 2025 did stick in their minds. When I was on the campaign trail, people were bringing it up to me of their own volition. So clearly that messaging really broke through and that's why Democrats were leaning so heavily on it.
On the other hand, President Trump is moving forward. He is now elected. So if there are any concerns about Project 2025 from Democrats, from members of the American public, those aren't the folks that hold the levers of power right now. And so it's full steam ahead from the Trump administration.
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was protecting you from corporate greed. It's gone now. - The Real News Network - Air Date 2-18-25
AARON STEPHENS: This agency was created after the financial crisis in the late 2000s. This is an agency that is meant to hold banks and corporations and financial institutions accountable for malfeasance. It advocates for consumers when they are wronged. This is an agency that, for instance, somebody who, has been paying their mortgage on time, but the bank has been misapplying those payments as late, and then their house got foreclosed on, they go to the CFPB, right? And the CFPB is the one that steps in and says, actually, you guys were in the wrong here. We're going to keep this person in their house, right? They are the people on the street advocating for consumers.
So [00:08:00] getting rid of an agency like that is going to leave millions of Americans without somebody to go to. And I want to just point out some of the numbers here. The CFPB has returned over $20 billion to consumers. It has a billion dollar a year budget, and it has returned over $20 billion to consumers, just on actions against corporations that have taken advantage of them alone.
You have folks like Wells Fargo that have been taken action against and they've had to pay back $2.5 billion for misapplying mortgage payments, like I mentioned before. And a lot of other actors, that are quite frankly in the tech space, which Elon Musk is very related to, that are seeing action taken against them as well.
And so you can see the through line there. Not having this agency protect consumers will mean that corporations will have a much, much easier time stealing from consumers and not having any kind of retribution against them.
MAX ALVAREZ - HOST, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK: And it's, I guess this is more, as much a disclosure as anything, right? Because it's very hard to sit here as a journalist, as [00:09:00] Editor-in-Chief of the Real News Network, talking about this. But I'm also someone whose family lost everything in the financial crisis. I've been open about this my whole media career. It's where my media career started. We lost the house that I grew up in.
This agency was created because so many millions of families like mine got screwed over in the 2008 financial crash. And now here we are 15 years later being told that like shuttering this agency is a win for, I don't know what, efficiency?
AARON STEPHENS: For who? If you talk about efficiency, again, I'll point out $20 billion return to consumers, billion dollar a year budget. That's efficient to me, right? And we're talking about an agency that is literally dedicated to protecting consumers. So the only thing that I could say this would be efficient for is helping big corporations take advantage of people, right? There is no other reason to go after an agency that is dedicated to making sure that people have a fair shake in a financial system that is usually difficult to navigate and sometimes, [00:10:00] unfortunately, as we've seen many, many times in the past, takes advantage of consumers, right? And there's no reason to go after an agency like this other than to make it easier for those folks to do that.
But there is a really important story that is not probably going to be as told, which is that there are civil servants that dedicated their lives to basically saying, you know what, and like many of them have very similar stories to you, right? I saw somebody get taken advantage of, my family got taken advantage of, and now I've dedicated my life to fighting for consumers, and this is the agency that I'm part of. All of those people got an email that said, your work's not important, stop doing it. And so that's why so many workers showed up on Monday because and their message was very very simple It was we just want to do our job. We just want to protect people. Let us do our job. You've got hundreds of people that they're probably not making as much as they might be able to in the private sector, and they're doing their best to try and protect people and they're just basically being told this isn't important anymore
As part of a larger plan, we're seeing the same playbook at different agencies. I'm not going to be surprised as Elon [00:11:00] Musk goes and attacks Social Security, attacks the Department of Education. These are services that affect working families everywhere across the country and you don't see him having the same kind of vitriol to a large corporation that's taking advantage of people.
It's very clear that what's going on right now is they are dismantling the agencies that are protecting people just to give tax breaks and give an easier time for billionaires to take advantage of consumers.
Let's talk through some of their playbook, right? Because what Elon Musk and Donald Trump will do is they will find one little line item budget thing that they know they can message on and they will say, look at this inefficient spending. And it'll be like $10 million in a budget of a billion. And they'll say, look at this inefficient thing. This is the thing that we're cutting. And then they won't talk about the millions and millions of dollars going to help consumers. But that's the thing they'll talk about, so that way they can message to folks, No, look, we're cutting, and we're being efficient.
But the reality is that they're saying that publicly, so that way, behind the scenes, they can cut the things that help people. And I think that the CFPB is -- and one of the reasons why we are so passionate about it is because there are so [00:12:00] many stories of people being helped by this agency. And I, I'll give another random example, although there are literally thousands, people that went to a for-profit college that was not accredited. Large loans for this, and the CFPB helped state AGs sue that for-profit college, which led to not only money going back to those folks, but also loans being forgiven. Those are people that would have been in debt for probably the rest of their lives for a degree that wasn't even accredited. And that's the CFPB. That's what they're doing.
And one of the reasons why I think centering this agency in this fight is a very, very good thing to do is because there are thousands of stories of people really going out there and seeking help from the CFPB and that agency doing the right thing.
One of the rules that they most recently announced, which is a great rule, which is now being attacked by congressional Republicans is their medical debt and credit reporting rule. You're talking about folks that, for those who don't know, when you have a medical, an amount of medical debt, it goes on your credit report, and it can significantly impact your life in the future. Not being able to get a mortgage, or not being able to get a car. And sometimes those procedures are just not things that you can control. [00:13:00] And the statistics have said it, and the studies have said it over and over again, having medical debt does not actually have any real determining factor on whether or not you're going to be paying back car loans or house loans. And it really doesn't affect anything. In fact, Experian has even said that publicly. And the CFPB said, you know what, this should be something that we address. We should not have medical debt have something that reported on their credit report. And there are thousands of stories of people saying, I had a procedure done in the '90s, it was out of the blue. I couldn't control anything about it. And now, 20 years later, I can't get a house. I have two kids and I can't get a house. Those are the people that are affected by closing this agency. And so I think centering those stories is really, really important in this conversation.
And just talking about really, who is Elon Musk and Donald Trump on the side of? Is it on the side of that person that is trying to get a home for their two kids? Or is it on the side of the banks that just want to make sure they can make every last dime out of these consumers? And I think the answer is fairly clear to that.
The Gangster Presidency - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick - Air Date 2-15-25
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: So I've [00:14:00] been slightly snarkily describing executive orders as letters to Santa, right? They're not binding on their face. They are directives to agencies about new priorities. But these are being treated, as you say, like a fiat from the King. And then the authority of that is cited to say, well, you know, the King said that we have to turn off the taps on this or that, or we have to end DEI wherever we find it. And so I would love you to just tell me really explicitly, in a normal administration, what an agency would do with a really broad sweeping EO. In other words, what would the regular procedure be to try to effectuate something? Because as you said, President Biden had some big swing EOs.
SAM BAGENSTOS: So usually, first, and this has been the case since the Kennedy administration, before the EO were to go out, the Justice Department would review it and make sure that there was actually authority to do the [00:15:00] things in the EO, that the President has authority to tell the agencies to do whatever the President's telling the agencies to do, and that the agencies would have authority to carry it out. And that clearly hasn't happened here. Even if DOJ has looked at these EOs, clearly there are so many provisions where there's no authority that they're just not applying the approach that they've undertaken since President Kennedy.
So, that's number one. Usually when you get an executive order—and I've been on both sides of this process, both the drafting of them in the White House and also receiving end at an agency—when you get an executive order, you look at it and you say, Okay, well, so this is the president telling us that we have to apply our statutory authorities consistent with a particular policy. What room does the statute give us? What room has Congress given us to do this? How hard would it be to implement these things? Let's figure out a process for trying to implement the President's policy consistent with what Congress has [00:16:00] told us.
What we're seeing right now is this just incredibly ham handed, reckless effort to take what the President said and just do it yesterday. So, President says I don't like equity. I'm against "gender ideology". And so you have the apparatchiks throughout the government going through with a control F looking for the word "equity" or looking for the word "gender" in any grant application, in any grant notice, in any program, in anything on a website and saying, Okay, we're taking it down. We're taking the money back. We're not spending any more money on this because it's inconsistent with the edict about what's the right way to talk about things in the world. That's just not the kind of thing that happens in any functioning government.
And like we can talk a lot about norms. I'm really happy to talk about past norms, but that's not the fundamental problem here. The fundamental problem here is we need a government that works.
The [00:17:00] people through decades have elected officials who have passed laws that create a government to solve problems for the American public, to make sure that people get health care, to make sure that people are protected against predatory actors in the economy. And if what you do is come in and say, I'm just going to take that all down because I just don't like governance or I just don't like the words that people are using, then what that's going to do is mean that people are going to live shorter, worse lives, and I think fundamentally that's the important thing. And we as a society have decided we want an effective government to protect people, to provide for people's needs, to make sure our healthcare system works, to build infrastructure, to prepare us for the next economy. And all of this breaking of norms, why it matters is because it subverts all of those democratic decisions we've made through the years.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: And maybe this goes without saying, Sam, but it's not just norms because it's also a [00:18:00] breaking of laws. it's also, as you say, some of these don't go by way of the Office of Legal Counsel the way they should have, right? There's a systematic failure to check if something is lawful. It's almost as though the presumption is not only have we lifted off without looking at the norms, we actually don't care whether the law provides for this or not, because we've decided that the President's priorities supersede that.
But there's one other piece I want to talk about. The other paradox of this just implosion that we have seen in the last couple of weeks of the federal government is that they've made the choice to just shutter agencies the way you would do a hostile takeover, where they just... they could have said to Congress, just turn off the lights. We don't like USAID, we're not super fond of CFPB. Like, they've tried to do this before, but instead of saying in some world in which they actually could do this lawfully, they just bring in this like unelected [00:19:00] centibillionaire who just with a bunch of guys and some code are just shuttering entire entities.
And, so I want to flag some reporting on Thursday night that came out of Wired that says that, Elon Musk promising, standing at the Resolute Desk, promising maximal transparency on the DOGE website, which it turns out is just being kind of run out of X.
So I think it matters for our purposes, and I need you to help illuminate why, that this is done entirely extra governmentally, Sam, because it's very fast and it's hard to catch that this sort of embodies a maximalist theory of executive power. But it's not confined to the agencies themselves. It's just a guy running around with no accountability in a non existent agency with a bunch of kids who may or may not have read-only clearance. That is significant, but help me understand structurally why.
SAM BAGENSTOS: Yeah. I think it's of great concern for all the reasons that you've talked about and many more. [00:20:00] So, we have this very powerful individual, Elon Musk, who has very substantial business interests that relate to the federal government, who has been given the keys to the most sensitive systems within the federal government. He has been given the power to turn on and turn off particular payments to particular entities, and he is using that in some ways as a blunderbuss just to shut down entire agencies, which means we have examples of people who are providing aid to prevent infectious disease that could ultimately come back to the United States, who are being stranded in potentially war torn areas because their money has been shut off for them so precipitously.
We have this agency USAID being basically shut down, notwithstanding that Congress created it. That's a big deal. The power to turn on and turn off these payments can be a tool of vindictiveness and oppression, but also it can be a tool of corruption. Elon Musk [00:21:00] is a major government contractor. He relies on government business and so do his competitors, right? And so he is now taking the power without any accountability, without any transparency to decide, yeah, we're going to turn off the spigot on the competitors. We're going to turn on the spigot on these things. That is incredibly dangerous.
And, the fact that at the same time, President Trump is getting rid of the ethical checks, getting rid of the head of the Office of Government Ethics and appointing a political appointee, Doug Collins, his Secretary of Veterans Affairs, as the acting head, trying to fire the special counsel who's designed to enforce the bar against using the government for political purposes. And again, appointing a political ally as the acting head there, right? This is all of a piece of creating a massive risk of corruption and then hiding anyone's ability to find out what's going on.
Trump's Theory of Power - Brennan Center for Justice - Air Date 2-5-25
WILFRED CODRINGTON III - MODERATOR, BRENNAN CENTER: And so you just mentioned three different [00:22:00] areas that you wrote about. I'm going to start with the TikTok bite dance order. Around the country and around the world, everybody's been following this roller coaster that has been this divestment law. Can you talk about that order, what Trump is sought to do, how he's trying to intervene with the act of Congress in that regard?
TREVOR MORRISON: Sure. So last year, Congress passed a statute that you just referenced, requiring that either the parent company that owns TikTok, namely ByteDance, that either it divest its ownership of TikTok, or if it didn't, then, effective January 19th of this year, TikTok had to cease operations within the United States. The reason for this is a concern that ByteDance is controlled or subject to control by the Chinese government. And therefore, through that control, the Chinese government could potentially gain access to private information of TikTok users, and use that for purposes that would be contrary to the United States' national security. So a data privacy and national security [00:23:00] concern.
This was challenged, on First Amendment grounds, and the Supreme Court held only three days before Trump was inaugurated, that the statute was constitutionally valid. It rejected TikTok's First Amendment challenge to the statute. And then it went into effect on January 19th, one day before Trump was inaugurated.
Trump had asked the court to pause the effective date of the statute so that he could try and negotiate a resolution to the issue, presumably by identifying a buyer for TikTok who was not affiliated with China. And by executive order, he basically did that. So the court upheld the statute. The statute took effect. But then by executive order, Trump just announced the statute is not going to take effect for 75 days. That'll give me time as a dealmaker-in-chief to go potentially find a buyer or to figure out some other resolution to the national security concerns here.
But he gave no justification at all for what gives the president the power to just suspend or say, cancel a statute. I would emphasize, this is not simply a [00:24:00] matter of the president saying, as a matter of executive prosecutorial discretion, we will under-enforce the statute for a period of time. He actually directed his Attorney General to issue letters to the platforms that platform TikTok, telling them that during this 75-day period, nothing that they do in relation to TikTok violates the statute. When of course it does violate the statute.
That is an assertion of a prerogative by the president to rewrite the law. And what everyone thinks about his policy preferences to negotiate a resolution to this in some other way, that policy preference can't be translated into law unless and until Congress amends the law, or repeals the law, or at least the president comes forward with some account of his constitutional power that would justify ignoring it.
All he has said really is that He's the president. The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces and has responsibility for national security, and he thinks that this issue should be resolved differently. So he's suspending the law to give him a chance to resolve it differently.
The president in our constitutional [00:25:00] system does not have that authority. A system that gave legislative and executive power and judicial power to one person will be a different kind of system. And the executive order, I think, can be read to reflect a preference, the part of the Trump administration that he'd be viewed as having all of that power.
WILFRED CODRINGTON III - MODERATOR, BRENNAN CENTER: Okay, so he's not setting enforcement policy priorities like previous presidents. He's trying to nullify this statute. It's gone to the Supreme Court. Now what? What happens next?
TREVOR MORRISON: Yeah, that's the tricky part. And the answer to that kind of question will vary depending on the executive order. What the Supreme Court said in that decision that I referenced is that there is not a First Amendment problem with the statute. So TikTok's challenge to the statute lost, and therefore actually took effect.
As I say, I think the president does not have the lawful authority that he is now asserting to suspend operation of the law. The question is, can that asserted power by Trump be challenged in the [00:26:00] courts? In principle, it could. But in our federal court system, the mere fact that an issue is really important, and could use some judicial resolution, doesn't necessarily mean that the courts can get their hands on it. We need to be able to identify a party with standing to sue Trump's suspension of the law. And thus far, no one has come forward to bring that challenge.
And so we have, in my view, an illegal suspension of the TikTok statute, and so far no judicial resolution.
See Trumps blatant quid pro quo with Eric Adams play out live on Fox News - All In w Chris Hayes - Air Date 2-14-25
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: We are right now in the midst of the biggest scandal of the Department of Justice. Since Watergate in the 1970s. So far, seven prosecutors have quit the DOJ in protest of Trump's corrupt deal with New York City's Democratic Mayor Eric Adams. In what can really best be described as a blatant quid pro quo, the charges in Mayor Adams federal bribery case have been conditionally dropped for now, in exchange for his full cooperation with Trump's plans for immigration enforcement and mass deportation.
In New York City. Now yesterday, six career prosecutors, people [00:27:00] who signed up to work for Donald Trump resigned, rather than help facilitate such obvious corruption by dropping the charges. This morning, a seventh DOJ official, a man named Hagen Scotton, the lead prosecutor on the case, joined them. In a letter to Trump's acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, Scotton called the deal with Mayor Adams a serious mistake, and he insisted that no system of ordered liberty can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges or the stick of threatening to bring them again to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.
Adding that any assistant U. S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to follow your motion.
But it was never going to be me. The formal filing to [00:28:00] drop those charges was finally submitted about an hour ago following an intense pressure campaign by the man you see there, Emil Bove, to find lawyers at the DOJ's Public Integrity Office, that's the folks that prosecute public corruption, that would be willing to sign the requisite motion.
Now he finally convinced a trial lawyer near retirement, as well as a supervisor at the criminal division, to agree. But here's the thing, a judge still needs to sign off on the whole thing. Now, we should say, Mayor Eric Adams denies the charges against him, insists his deal with DOJ was totally above board.
In a statement today, he did not explicitly deny a quid pro quo, but he did deny any trade of my authority as your mayor for an end to my case. But even that denial is difficult to square with the language that Bove himself used in his initial letter demanding the Southern District of New York drop the pending charges against Mayor Adams, so that he can quote, devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.
Bove obviously understands how that could sound like, well, [00:29:00] a quid pro quo, which is why he went out of his way to add a very funny footnote, preemptively insisting, it is not one. Citing an earlier memo from SDNY, as Mr. Bove clearly stated to defense counsel during our government, the government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams assistance on immigration enforcement.
Heh heh. Perish the thought, where'd you get that idea? Except, federal prosecutors literally asked the judge to dismiss the case against Mayor Adams. Everyone can see what's going on here. Of course, this all started earlier this week when Danielle Sassoon, she was Trump's pick to serve as the acting U. S. Attorney for SDNY. She's a prosecutor with sterling credentials among conservatives, clerk for Scalia. She, in response to being ordered to drop the case, sent a letter offering her resignation directly to the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, right, bypassing Bove, who'd sent her this instruction, writing that, Adam's attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo.
Indicating Adams would be in a position to assist with the department's enforcement priorities only if the indictment were [00:30:00] dismissed. Adding, rather than be rewarded, Adams advocacy should be called out for what it is, an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.
In that same letter, Sassoon outlines a particularly damning anecdote in which Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting with Adam's lawyers and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting's conclusion. Like, why are you writing things down, lawyer from the justice department?
Probably worth stressing here, it's standard practice for prosecutors to take notes at a meeting like this, and that demanding they refrain from doing so and then confiscating their notes? is not a sign that everything you're doing is on the up and up. Bove responded to Sassoon's letter with a blustery 8 page letter of his own yesterday, where he admonished her for refusing to drop the charges, accused her of participating in a partisan witch hunt against an elected Democrat?
Bove also mentioned by name two Assistant U. S. Attorneys under Sassoon, who worked on the case, and [00:31:00] basically directed them to contact his office if they were willing to drop the charges. And it was one of those attorneys that he name checked. Hagen Scotton, the guy I quoted a moment ago, who resigned today and told Bove to go kick rocks.
There's one more back and forth in letters between Sassoon and Bove I think is worth highlighting because it gets to the nut of the point. A perfect encapsulation of just how corrupt, how rotten this deal is that Trump is offering Mayor Adams. Sassoon in her letter invokes the case of Michael Flynn.
That was Trump's former national security advisor in his last administration. And in short, Flynn was indicted for lying to the FBI. He pleaded guilty to the charges. Then Trump's DOJ, under Attorney General Bill Barr, demanded the charges be dropped anyway after he pleaded guilty. Now, the judge overseeing the case refused to dismiss it, but the whole thing eventually went away when Trump stepped in and simply pardoned Flynn on his way out of office.
In her letter to Bove, Sassoon points out that the president could just do the same thing now, noting that With Flynn, the president ultimately chose to cut off the extended and embarrassing litigation over dismissal by granting a pardon. [00:32:00] Bove responded to that with some more bluster, basically admonishing Sassoon for daring to question Trump's authority.
Don't tell the president who to pardon. Let's linger here for a second because that example raises an important point, right? All this is happening because Trump did not pardon Adam. In fact, we have reporting in the New York Times that Adam's explicitly sent a letter asking for a pardon. He didn't get one.
That kind of gives the game away, doesn't it? Because it's not as though this president is particularly shy about wielding his pardon power, considering that on day one he pardoned 1,600 January 6th rioters, including a bunch of folks who have since been re-arrested for other crimes, others who've committed violence.
He pardoned a guy that was running like, the biggest drug trafficking website in the world. Pardoned him. Trump intentionally did not just pardon the mayor, which would be fully within his rights. Instead, what he chose to do was to dangle freedom in front of him, in exchange for his preferred policy outcomes in New York City.
The conditional dropping of the charges on a possibly temporary basis was the quid, right? [00:33:00] Well, today, as all this is developing, in the shadow of this scandal, today we got the quo. We got the quo when Mayor Adams went on a media tour along with Trump's so called border czar, where he was forced to insist he is a willing participant in Trump's immigration crackdown and deny the existence of any sort of shady dealings.
MAYOR ERIC ADAMS: Think about my attorney, Alex Spiro, one of the top trial attorneys in the country. Imagine him going inside saying that the only way Mayor Adams is going to assist in immigration, which I was calling for, since 2022, is if you drop the charges. That's quid pro quo. That's a crime. It took her three weeks to report in front of her a criminal action. Come on, this is silly.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Now, that denial, again, was a little undercut during that very same interview when Trump's border guy, sitting next to him on the curvy couch, issued a not so veiled threat against Adams if he doesn't do what the big boss wants.
TOM HOMAN: I came to New York City, I wasn't going to leave without [00:34:00] nothing. I did the last time, and I told him I'm not leaving until I got something. And now I've got him on the couch in front of millions of people, he can't back away from this now, right? If he doesn't come through, I'll be back in New York City, and we won't be sitting on the couch, he'll be in his office, up his butt, saying, where the hell is the agreement we came to?
The Billionaires Government Branko Marcetic on Trumps Complete Betrayal of His Base - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-27-25
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: First, respond overall to this highly unusual cabinet meeting, and then talk about the role of Russell Vought, who we don't usually see in front of the cameras, but who has played such a key role behind the scenes.
BRANKO MARCETIC: I think the cabinet meeting shows the tenor and direction of the Trump administration, which Trump had campaigned on fighting for the forgotten American, for fighting for the working class, he said that he was going to fight Washington corruption. And then before he'd even been inaugurated, we saw him basically handing over the reins of government, not just to Elon Musk, but a whole host of billionaires. Now of course, you have 13 billionaires in cabinet [00:35:00] positions, running the government. It's a complete betrayal, I think, of the people who voted for Trump in the vain hope that he was actually going to solve some of the problems that were bedeviling them, and, really, really gives to lie to this entire rhetoric that we've heard for the last few years.
With Vought, I think it's interesting because Musk gets all the attention, and, deservedly so, but, in many ways, I liken Musk to the private contractor, or the consulting firm that's brought in to basically do the dirty work of the people in management. And, that's Russell Vought.
Vought's normally known as the Project 2025 guy. He's known as a Christian nationalist, a hardcore social conservative. All of that is true. But I think that the more important thing about Vought is, his entire career's history, and he's a guy who, most accurately to describe it, he is an anti-government radical. He is someone who [00:36:00] sees government as the biggest problem in people's lives. He sees everything that has been done, basically, since the Great Depression and the creation of the New Deal state, that has lifted people out of poverty, that has made it so that people aren't being preyed on and poisoned and otherwise hurt by greed, by corporate greed. He sees all of that as a tremendous, profound mistake that needs to be reversed. And that has been his life's goal.
He sees Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, he thinks these programs should be eliminated or privatized. He has actually spoken to The Heritage Foundation. He said, You know I may not be into cutting Social Security and Medicare right now, but that's purely a strategic decision on my part. We want to basically start with the cuts that Americans will feel the least, things like foreign aid, and then eventually we will build up to the point where we can really take on these programs. Vought is such [00:37:00] a disbeliever in the importance of government in people's lives, that he thinks even the construction and repair of roads and highways is illegitimate and dangerous for the government to do.
And so this is really very much what's driving, I think, what we're seeing from DOGE and a lot of these attempts to just completely dismantle the federal government. It's part of a longstanding political agenda of this man that I think does not line up with what the US public wants. I think it doesn't really line up with a lot of what even Trump voters in this last election want.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Talk, Branko, about the memo that was distributed on Wednesday, that if you can continue to say, shocked so many, that directs agencies to submit their reduction-in-force plans by March 13th. It's not just about laying off employees.
And also, the bigger picture is, the amount of money that the federal budget goes to federal workers is tiny. If you're talking about [00:38:00] saving money, the fact that they're focusing completely there on these 2, what, .3 million federal workers who are in such agony right now. Tell us about the memo.
BRANKO MARCETIC: I mean, that shows you the entire game. It's not really about saving money. Spinning cuts and the deficit have been used by Vought -- and not just Vought, many, many, right wing voices over the years -- as excuses to try and basically dismantle the modern administrative state. That's what they want to do. That's what Vought has been pretty open about wanting to do.
And so using the deficit is just an excuse. Vought's budgets that he made both when he was serving in the House, and also now when he was heading the Center for Renewing America, at the same time as they make these ruthless, ruthless cuts to the programs that people rely on, and call for the mass firing of federal workers. They also want to keep in place massive tax cuts for the rich that [00:39:00] Trump passed. And this was the same thing back in the 2000s when Vought's mock budgets kept in place Bush's tax cuts.
So the idea here behind that memo is to start dismantling and make these agencies basically dysfunctional. Because that in itself is going to help create the groundwork for further dismantling and possible privatization in the future.
If government becomes dysfunctional, if it seems to not work, if it doesn't seem like it's actually serving the interests of people, then you can come through and say, well, look at that. The fact is government doesn't work. We should just sell this off to private corporations and let them do it.
That's what Vought has wanted to do with the Postal Service, for instance, for many years. There was reporting also that, that they're going to be starting to slash the workers from the Social Security Administration. To me, I think that's clearly an attempt by stealth to start to undermine Social Security.
They can [00:40:00] say, well, we're not going to cut it now. We're going to do as Trump is saying and leave it alone. But what they're basically aiming to do is to make the Social Security program function badly, so that down the line, a few years from now, when J. D. Vance is president, or whoever else, they can say, look how bad this is working now that we've fired all these people. This should just be privatized as we wanted to do 20 years ago.
D.C. Gutted. Grassroots Galvanized. - Ralph Nader Radio Hour - Air Date 2-22-25
RALPH NADER - HOST, RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR: Listeners, sometimes it's really helpful to listen to C-SPAN, which records the actual hearings at Congress unedited because you get a flavor of how tough some Democratic members can be during this Trump period, even though the leadership is in the minority and is still trying to figure out how to overcome the Trump dictatorship.
I was listening the other day and Congressman Greg Casar from Texas was given 5 minutes by the Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of the Oversight Subcommittee, on the DOGE [00:41:00] so called department and here's how he used his 5 minutes. Pretty amazing.
REP GREG CASAR: This subcommittee is supposedly about looking into waste, fraud, and abuse. So I'd like to start talking about independent inspector generals, who are supposed to be looking into waste, fraud, and abuse. Mr. Talkov, do you know how many inspector generals at agencies that were investigating Elon Musk's companies have been fired by the Trump-Musk administration?
HAYWOOD TALCOVE: No.
REP GREG CASAR: It is five. Ms. Royal, the Inspector General of the Department of Labor had 17 open investigations into Tesla and SpaceX. Do you know what the Trump-Musk administration did to that Inspector General?
DAWN ROYAL: No.
REP GREG CASAR: They fired him, and I think y'all know. Mr. Whitson, the Inspector General of the Department of Transportation was investigating Tesla. Do you know what the Trump Musk administration did to that Inspector General?
STEWART WHITSON: No.
REP GREG CASAR: They were fired. The Department of Defense's Inspector General was looking into SpaceX. Mr. Hedtler, [00:42:00] do you know what the Trump-Musk administration did to that Inspector General?
DYLAN HEDTLER-GAUDETTE: I believe he was fired.
REP GREG CASAR: Thank you. I think everybody on the panel knows what the answer to these questions were. The U. S. Department of Agriculture Inspector General was investigating Musk's Neuralink. Mr. Talcove, now I'll ask you again, under oath, do you know what Mr. Trump did to that Inspector General that was looking into one of Musk's companies?
HAYWOOD TALCOVE: No.
REP GREG CASAR: He was fired. The inspector general at the EPA was repeatedly taking on Tesla. Mr. Hedtler, since it seems that you're answering the questions that everyone knows the answer to, do you know what the Trump-Musk administration did to that inspector general?
DYLAN HEDTLER-GAUDETTE: I believe he was also fired.
REP GREG CASAR: Also fired. At least five inspector generals that were looking into Elon Musk's companies were fired by the Trump-Musk administration. These inspector generals who are independent, protected by law, they are the people that find the waste, fraud, and abuse and found many of the cases of waste, fraud, and abuse that have been brought up today, fired because they were looking into Elon Musk.
At the NLRB, [00:43:00] the National Labor Relations Board, which is supposed to protect workers from getting their unions busted by folks like Elon Musk, made functionally broken by the so called Department of Government Efficiency that really is the Department of Government Efficiency for Elon Musk, not for you. They are trying to shut down the Department of Education, the Department of Labor.
You know what Elon Musk doesn't seem to be looking into? His own contracts. Again, I'll ask you, Mr. Talcove, do you know how much money a day Mr. Musk will receive from the federal government for his contracts?
HAYWOOD TALCOVE: No.
REP GREG CASAR: The answer is 8 million a day. Just last year, Elon Musk was promised 3 billion dollars from close to 100 contracts with the federal government. Ms. Royal, do you know how much the average person in this country who survives on Social Security, one of our seniors who's worked their entire life, about how much they have to survive on a day?
DAWN ROYAL: I do not.
REP GREG CASAR: $65 a day. We're not looking into Elon Musk's 8 million [00:44:00] dollars a day. This subcommittee, chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene and the House Republicans, is looking into your grandmother's $65 a day.
Let me be clear. I think we would all support taxpayer savings. Look into money we might needlessly send to billionaires and big corporations, find taxpayer savings and send it back to your hard working family. But instead, what House Republicans and the Trump-Musk administration want to do is they want to look into your kids' lunch money, your kids' teacher's salary, into your grandparents' Social Security. They want to take that money and give it out in billionaire tax cuts and they're talking about that in committee tomorrow, in budget committee tomorrow. They just released their plan.
So, let me be clear: when Republicans talk about government efficiency in this Congress, they're not looking into billionaires who don't pay their taxes. They're not looking into billionaires who get rich off of government contracts. They're not looking into Elon Musk firing watchdogs who are supposed to keep them accountable. They're looking at cutting your public schools. They're going straight for your social security. [00:45:00] They're coming straight for cancer research. They're coming straight for the Department of Education. They're not looking at big tech. They're not looking at big pharma because those people fund their campaigns.
If this committee were serious about rooting out waste from our federal government, then today's whole hearing would be about how Musk and Donald Trump are firing the independent watchdogs who've done this work for decades. Instead, my Republican colleagues' actual goal on this committee is to distract from Trump and from Musk's corrupt war on accountability.
This will not be a subcommittee dedicated to making government efficient for everyday people. It's about helping Elon Musk and Donald Trump be as efficient as possible and robbing our government and handing out our government services to it to the rich. So this seems that this subcommittee is, [interrupted by MTG] just like the agency it's named after, a total sham.
CLIP: The gentleman's time has expired. The American people are 36 trillion dollars in debt. It certainly seems reasonable that someone has been fired.
RALPH NADER - HOST, RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR: Yeah, yeah. 36 trillion dollars in debt due to the Republican tax [00:46:00] cuts with George Bush and Donald Trump and due to bloated military empire funding budgets and on and on. So, listeners, this is the kind of address you should spread the word about, and that's why we played it verbatim for you.
Elie Mystal On The Peoples Checks and Balances - Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast - Air Date 2-21-25
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, BRIAN LEHRER: A DAILY POLITICS PODCAST: So, talk more about what ways of fighting back, by people concerned about all of this, that you might be keying on. Wendy brought up one in her call, and I think you're in the camp that says the Democratic elected officials have been too timid.
There have been some public protests this week, but not really mass protests. Not even the things we saw at the beginning of the first Trump term. There are some no buy days scheduled. or this one. I saw a story in the Substack by writer Parker Malloy, celebrating former NFL player Chris Kluwe, I think you say it, who announced, to the police that he would commit an act of non violent civil disobedience to protest anti trans bigotry in the administration, and so laid down [00:47:00] and went limp and forced them to carry him out.
This was in Huntington Beach, California. And it got some press. It got press in sports media, if not general media. Strictly non violent, but civil disobedience. And I'm really just asking what you hope people will do or what you think as, an analyst could be effective if you're in the camp that criticizes elected Democrats for being timid.
ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, so Chris Kluwe, the, punter, and, just remember, Brian, when we're talking about he, how he got press, because he was a sports person, he's a punter! He ain't no quarterback, right? He was a punter, and he was able to get some heat, some press from his actions.
Imagine what that would look like if that was half of U. S. Congress. Imagine how much press it would get if half of U. S. Congress was literally laying down trying to block some of these, Trump appointees, some of these Trump, orders, physically. How much press would you get then? If it wasn't just random [00:48:00] punter from the New York from the Minnesota Vikings, right?
So when we talk about Democrats being too timid, not only am I talking about just their lack of message discipline and their kind of inability to, their inability to make the case, their inability to highlight. some of the people who are being fired for absolutely no reason, their inability to highlight the stories of pain and suffering and harm that's beyond all that.
I'm also talking about their timidity and inability to literally generate the kind of stunts that would get a lot of the press talking and whatever. So that's what I want the Democrats to do. Understanding that the Democrats have no actual power right now, right? and, because they have no actual power, that is, we have to be realistic about that.
My, my book, the one that you mentioned that's upcoming, is all about laws that Democrats could overturn if they ever get power again, right? And I think that talking about these laws is a good way to argue that they should have power again. But let's be clear, they can't do anything that I say in my book right now.
Because they [00:49:00] have no power. So it's gotta be more stunt based, more that kind of resistance for regular people who aren't famous punters, right? who aren't, who, aren't, elected officials who don't have, the kind of platform that's going to generate media attention. Us, basically, we have to do it collectively.
We have to take collective action. And yeah, the, protest here and there is, nice. I'm always for, I'm not a big marcher myself, I always do think that marching, is, helpful. What I think is most helpful is the economic stuff. Like these people need to feel it in their pockets.
and that, and to make economic boycotts work, you need massive collective action, right? I know in the Black community, we're really trying hard to get people to boycott them. Yeah. Target, right? It's Target has abandoned its DEI policies, but Target is interesting because Target spent a whole lot of, it's been a decade saying, Hey, Black people, we love you.
Target spent a decade basically like Tom Cruise and Jerry Maguire, right? We love Black people. Show me the money. That's Target for the [00:50:00] past 10 years until Trump gets in charge. And now all of a sudden, actually, we hate DEI. So you know what, Target? You don't get my buck, right? And when I go, when I'm buying back to school supplies, I'm going to Office Depot, I'm not going to Target no more, right?
That kind of mass, and Target's, stock prices are actually going down. But that's the kind of collective economic action we need, to where we can, where our wallets can make a difference. That needs to, happen. And the final thing that I'll just point out is that Trump's approval rating, our approval ratings are the highest he's ever been.
He's still underwater, he's still lower than most presidents are, in their first month after in office. But for Trump, they're the highest they've ever been. And so it's, and so Trump is going to keep doing this as long as his approval ratings are high. And so at some, core level, people need to understand What the problems are and how, what Trump is doing is going to affect them.
I think the messaging needs [00:51:00] to be much more focused on how this is going, this is hurting or going to hurt you personally, because the people who have the empathy to understand, to be outraged when things hurt other people, all those people already hate Trump. It's the people who are selfish and can only appreciate things when it happens to them that we need to work on now.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, BRIAN LEHRER: A DAILY POLITICS PODCAST: On the DEI and your neo apartheid argument for what Musk especially is trying to impose, People will hear that and they'll say, well, especially supporters of them will hear that and they'll say, no, they're trying to remove any racial preferences. This is what they say in all their official language and have everybody compete just on the basis of Merit, and so that's not apartheid, that's removing racial preferences, what do you say back to that?
ELIE MYSTAL: Firing people who already have jobs without looking at the performance record because they are Black or Brown or disabled or gay or whatever is [00:52:00] racist, is bigoted, straight up. Show me please the White guy they've fired from the government without looking at his performance. You can't find one. Haven't I? So, miss me with the 'it's not really racist'. Oh, it's explicitly racist.
Now, in terms of the larger issue with DEI, Brian, I ain't fighting for DEI. DEI was a White man's solution. DEI was invented by White folks to help them comply with the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause and the Civil Rights Act, right? The 14th Amendment says you have to give equal protection of laws to all people regardless of race. The Civil Rights Act says that you can't be discriminatory in hiring. White employers were like, we don't know how to do that. Well, no, just hire the best person. No, no, no, we're just gonna always hire the White guy. Just that's how we go. So we're gonna create this whole other thing. That's gonna force us to hire Black people because we ourselves, the employers, cannot be trusted to do it fairly. And so people are like, all right, and I guess that's what we're doing today. So now that White employers are like, actually DEI is terrible, we shouldn't do fine. [00:53:00] Y'all made it up. Y'all can unmake it up. The question is still remains. How are you going to hire people fairly? How are you going to hire people on merit and what level of accountability will there be if you don't. That's what I'm fighting for. I'm not fighting for DEI. I'm fighting for the application of the Civil Rights Act. I'm fighting for the application of Equal Employment Opportunity Act, right?
Tell me Employer, tell me Target, tell me Meta, tell me Bezos, how you are gonna go about making sure that you hire the best person for the job and not the best White person for the job? The best applicant for the job, and not the best applicant who happens to be a grandson, grand niece, grand nephew of your CEO for the job. And what's gonna happen to you when you fail? What's the legal recourse that I have as a qualified Black man to hold you accountable when all you do is hire Chip Westinghouse III because you like playing squash with his daddy? Where's that lawsuit, right? That's the question, not DEI. [00:54:00] And so far, the White people in charge have yet to provide me with a frickin answer.
Note from the Editor on the impact of corruption
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with Trump's Terms laying out the role of Project 2025. The Real News explained the impact of dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Amicus looked at the impact of Trump's executive orders and how they're being received. The Brennan Center for Justice looked at Trump's theory of power through the lens of the case against TikTok. All In with Chris Hayes laid out Trump's clear quid pro quo with New York Mayor Eric Adams. Democracy Now! explained the impact of Trump's billionaire cabinet and the role of Russell Vought. The Ralph Nader Radio Hour highlighted a speech from Representative Greg Cassar on the systematic deconstruction of the government's anti-corruption enforcement abilities. And the Brian Lehrer Show spoke with Elie Mystal about what kinds of actions are needed to resist. And those are just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive sections.
But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get [00:55:00] access to bonus episodes featuring our team of producers, and enjoy all of our shows without ads. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support (t here's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.
And as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show, our upcoming topics that you can chime in on include the resistance to Trump, such as it is, and the international reshuffle as Trump effectively switches sides in Russia's war on Ukraine.
So get your comments and questions in now for those topics or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or also now findable on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal with the [00:56:00] handle bestoftheleft.01, and there's a link in the show notes for that. Or you can simply email me to [email protected]
Now as for today's topic, I just wanna drive home an important point that I think might be a common misconception about corruption. Corruption, as I mentioned at the top, isn't just about using power for self enrichment. It's also about maintaining that power.
People, probably no one in this audience, but some people believe a couple of wrong things about corrupt and/or authoritarian leaders.
First, there's the long held misconception that authoritarian governments are better at management and efficiency, demonstrated by the old claim from Mussolini that he made the trains run on time. The reality of authoritarians is that they require sycophants and enablers to be installed everywhere in the government, which means well qualified people get weeded out.
Obviously, that's not a great [00:57:00] strategy to get the best results from a government. But that misconception drives people to think that they're making a sort of trade off, right? They might think to themselves that they don't love the idea of some of the aspects of a strict authoritarianism, but at least there'd be the relief of all the benefits of a well run government to appreciate. Nope. That's a lose-lose you just signed up for, because the idea of an effective government under authoritarianism is a lie.
Something similar goes for corruption. There's a disheartening perspective among some, probably no one listening, but some, that if the rich and the powerful are getting even more rich thanks to their power, well, as long as things are going well enough, then it's not really worth worrying about. This is the misconception that corruption is sort of a perk of power. It's apart from, or in addition to, running the [00:58:00] government. But it's not. Corruption becomes entirely wrapped up in the effort to maintain power once it's been won.
Authoritarian governments today look and feel different than they did a hundred years ago, and that means that they're managed differently than they were in the last century as well. Hitler and Mussolini had iron grips on all aspects of society, including the corporations that drove their economies and war machines.
Unsurprisingly, those dudes gave that whole system a pretty bad reputation, being mass murderers and dictators that curtailed almost all freedoms from their societies, et cetera, et cetera.
So, when people today want to be authoritarian rulers for life, they have to go about it a bit differently so that there's still an air of legitimacy to their rule.
In the article, "The New Authoritarianism" from The Atlantic, Stephen Levitsky, author of How Democracies Die, explained the new form of modern authoritarianism, saying, quote: "Rather than [00:59:00] fascism or single party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism, a system in which parties compete in elections, but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition." End quote.
So if we take that description as granted, and of course he provides half a dozen or more examples from around the world of countries that run this way, it then stands to reason that an aspiring autocrat looking to build a competitive authoritarian state would have to use the power of government to, as Levitsky just put it, tilt the playing field against the opposition. There's a whole list of ways this is done in myriad sectors of society, but you'd better believe that the corporate sector is one of the big ones, and corruption is the tool by which control is exerted. The writer explains, quote, "State institutions may be used to [01:00:00] co-opt business media, and other influential social actors. When regulatory bodies and other public agencies are politicized, government officials can use decisions regarding things such as mergers and acquisitions, licenses, waivers, government contracts, and tax exempt status to reward or punish parties depending on their political alignment. Business leaders, media companies, universities, foundations, and other organizations have a lot at stake when government officials make decisions on tariff waivers, regulatory enforcement, tax exempt status, and government contracts and concessions. If they believe those decisions are made on political rather than technical grounds, many of them will modify their behavior accordingly." End quote.
So when you hear about a sketchy business deal or an investigation of a corporation being dropped by the government, it's not just about [01:01:00] enrichment or kickbacks or paying back friends, it's about manufacturing behavior modification through the gangster-like approach to friends and enemies.
Now in a different article, this one from NPR, the headline, "Trump agencies drop dozens of Biden-era cases against crypto and other companies," it said that, quote, "The Trump administration is going soft on corporations that break the law by moving to pause or drop investigations of companies accused of foreign bribery, safety violations, unfair labor practices and environmental crimes." End quote.
And at least two of the cases mentioned relate to large cryptocurrency exchanges that had been under investigation but no longer are. And it's pointed out that crypto spent millions in political donations for the 2024 elections.
So on one hand it's the demonstration that companies seen as friendly to Trump will be effectively [01:02:00] immune from prosecution. And on the other, there's that implicit threat that the opposite is also true.
And that would be bad if that's where it ended. But that form of corruption always blows back on the general public. A staffer from Public Citizen is interviewed who lays out the stakes. Quote, "Trump is handing out 'Get Out Of Jail Free' cards to corporate law breakers. The consequences for the public when corporations face a diminished threat of enforcement are disastrous." Then the same person, responding to the absurd mirror world idea from Trump that these investigations were being dropped because the Justice Department had previously been weaponized against these companies, the person says, quote, "Punishing corporations for violating the law isn't weaponization. It's how agencies protect the public from ripoffs, pollution, illegal firings, and workplace [01:03:00] retaliation, and the full range of dangers that stem from corporate greed." End quote.
And I just want to point out that anger at corporate greed and corporations in general is already at a near all-time high. And Trump has just indicated that he's more than happy to throw the general public to the wolves for the sake of attempting to entrench his own power.
SECTION A: THE CABINET OF GREED
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics today. Next up, section A, the cabinet of greed, followed by section B, quid pro quo, section C, corporate interests and Section D, king Trump.
Elon Musk's role in government raises conflict-of-interest issues - Trump's Terms - Air Date 2-21-25
DONALD TRUMP: Members of Elon Musk's Doge team are continuing their march through government agencies on what they say is a mission to find fraud and wasteful spending. Musk himself is often seen at President Trump's side, who praises him frequently. And Elon Musk has done an amazing job, I have to tell you.
Him and his super geniuses, you know, these are Seriously high IQ people. Musk is [01:04:00] classified as a special government employee. That's a role created by Congress in the 1960s that allows parts of the federal government to bring someone on for a specific role on a temporary basis. He is also a tech billionaire.
And as NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports, the line between those roles is blurry.
CLIP: We've got one more surprise. In case this wasn't enough, I'm gonna let Elon do it. Elon Musk was a surprise guest at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, D. C. yesterday.
And as part of his introduction, the President of Argentina walked out on stage to give him a red and chrome chainsaw. President Malay has a gift for me. Musk waved it excitedly. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.
Taking a chainsaw to bureaucracy is what Musk claims to be doing with his project known as the Department of Government Efficiency. But last [01:05:00] week, when he met with Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, it wasn't initially clear whether he was there as a member of the Trump administration or as the CEO of Tesla, which is looking to expand in India.
Breaking news coming in. We're getting a reaction from Prime Minister Narendra Modi after his meeting with Elon Musk. He's taken to social media platforms to say it was a delight. Presenters on India Today speculated about whether they had discussed Tesla. A White House official says Musk met with Modi in his personal capacity.
Later, though, he was in the Oval Office for Trump's meeting with Modi. In frequent posts on his social media site X, Musk ping pongs between talking about his work slashing government and promoting his business ventures, many of which have government contracts or are regulated by federal agencies. But Trump and Musk dismissed concerns about possible conflicts of interest in a Fox News interview with Sean [01:06:00] Hannity.
I mean, I haven't asked the president for anything ever. And if it comes up, how will you handle it? Well, you won't be involved. Yeah, I'll recuse
DONALD TRUMP: myself if it is. If there's a conflict, you won't be involved. I mean, I wouldn't want that, and he won't want it.
CLIP: That did not assuage the concerns of Don Fox. He was the top lawyer at the Office of Government Ethics during the George W.
Bush and Obama administrations. Musk
SPEAKER 2: seems to be in a position with the White House's consent that he can just change hats by the hour because it suits him.
CLIP: The White House says Musk will file a confidential disclosure of his financial interests with the Office of Government Ethics by the end of next month and has been briefed on ethics requirements.
As a special government employee, A temporary role. He doesn't have to divest from his businesses. But he is supposed to recuse himself when necessary. Fox says there's little indication the normal process to avoid conflicts is [01:07:00] being followed.
SPEAKER 2: The thing that the public should be concerned about is, well, we don't know.
Is he looking after our interests as taxpayers and citizens, or is he looking after his own business interests?
CLIP: These questions about Musk come up as Trump just fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, along with other watchdogs. Richard Brafault specializes in government ethics at Columbia Law School, and describes Musk as basically a walking conflict of interest.
Whatever the guardrails, and I guess that phrase guardrails has been used a lot, but whatever. The guardrails are there in terms of preventing public officials from engaging in self dealing. Enforcement seems to be gone. A White House official not authorized to speak about this publicly dismissed the criticisms as partisan, saying there is no concern in the White House about whether Musk will follow strict ethics rules.
Trump Calls Zelensky a Dictator While Crowning Himself King - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 2-21-25
BRAD ONISHI - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Okay, why are people obeying in advance? So we can talk about, uh, you know, tech companies and others in the private [01:08:00] sector. I want to talk about Congress and a piece of vanity fair. Cash Patel was just, you know, confirmed as head of the FBI. So Here's a piece of Vanity Fair by, uh, sorry, let me grab the,
all right. Gabriel Sherman. Sorry, Gabriel. I had it written down and I lost it. All right. So piece of Vanity Fair, Senate and House Republicans know Trump will orchestrate the running of a primary challenger backed by Elon Musk's unlimited resources. If a member defies, defies Trump. Dan, again, just real quick, why do you not?
Allow unlimited campaign contributions. Why do you not allow individuals to simply bankroll elections and, and, and campaigns because the richest man in the world can look at every member of Congress and say, if you go against our agenda. I'll put 100 million into making sure your primary challenger wins [01:09:00] next, next election.
This is not true, by the way, in places like the United Kingdom or Germany, where there's like severe limits on how much money can be put into these campaigns. Okay.
Let me keep reading. In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don't rubber stamp his actions. They're scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo like stuff, a former member of Trump's first administration tells me.
According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina Senator Tom Tillis told People that the FBI warned him about credible death threats when he was considering voting against Pete Hecks nomination for Defense Secretary. If you all remember, Tom Tillis was the one that, that signaled he, he probably was, was going to stand up to the Hegseth nomination.
He listened to, to women who had been victims of domestic abuse and violence. He was the one that [01:10:00] basically promised those who had been victims of Hegseth himself, I'm not going to let this guy go through. And yet he did, right? Tom Tillis ended up being the guy that, that made, made it all happen. So, one of the things that comes out in this piece, Is that Hillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book, Snakes in Suits, when psychopaths go to work.
I'm not going to read the entire piece, Dan, and I'm not going to, like, belabor the point. The point is this. We've already talked at the top of this show about Trump allying with Russia and Putin. And abandoning Democracy, abandoning the ideology of democracy, abandoning allies who are democratic governments and leaders across the world.
We then talked about Trump proclaiming himself a King and taking the entire executive branch under his absolute control such that our, our [01:11:00] economy, our trade, our securities, our banking are all at the whim of him and Elon Musk. I want to fill out the picture if you are a congressperson right now, and you stand up to Trump, whether it's not putting cash Patel through or voting against something in the house that Trump puts forward, not only will you get primaried and have 100 million spent against you so that you lose, you're going to get Gestapo like threats.
Dan, this is the man that pardoned 1500 January 6th rioters. This is the man that let the people who attacked our capital after he incited a coup out of jail. Do you think? That like, this is above him, right? And I just want to add one more dimension to this about Kash Patel, which is not really a focus of today.
Kash Patel is now the head of the FBI. Patel is a man who has talked about going after political enemies. [01:12:00] He's a man who has talked about finding those in the, in the media who are anti Trump and putting them in jail. Kash Patel is somebody who is a raving conspiracy theorist. Dan, Tom Tillis. Says the FBI warned him about credible death threats when considering voting against beat HEGs F.
Hey Dan, next time someone has that decision in front of them, it may not be the FBI warning them about credible death threats. It may be the FBI sending the warning themselves. That is what Kash Patel as the head of the FBI means. Are you all with me here? Tom Tillis heard from our intelligence community, Hey, there's credible death threats against you right now.
The next time someone's in that position, it may be the FBI saying, Hey, Tom, you're going to vote the right way. You know, you are, I mean, like, you know, we don't wanna like have to come [01:13:00] back, you know, I mean, right. Do you all see what's at stake here now that Cash Patel's, head of the F-B-I-I-I go now there's a direct line here to Elon, Dan and I, I can, I can take us there, but you wanna jump in here on cash or on Tom Tillis or the fact that one of the reasons no one in Congress will stand up to Trump, including Republicans, is they're afraid they might get death threats against themselves or their family.
Do you know what kind of like governments have that structure? Dan? It's not democracies. It's not where the rule of law works. It's not where everybody gets a fair shot. It's called something else, so anyway. Thoughts
DAN MILLER - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: here? Yeah, so gonna take a hard line here and say cry me a river, Congress people. Like, just cry me a river.
Cause, you know what happens to Congress people who don't get re elected? They go into the private sector and they make tons of money. Like, when is the last time somebody talked to somebody who lost in a primary and what, they're collecting unemployment? Like, they always land on their feet because that's how our government and our system and our country is [01:14:00] structured.
So number one, I am so tired of hearing Congress people cry about, well, I might lose an election, so I'm just not going to have any principles of any kind or stand up to anything or I'll talk to people off the record and I'll say these things because I'm just like, so what? So you lose a primary. So what?
So what? Like, what happens to you? Nothing. Credible death threats. That's awful. It is. It's awful. But guess what you're doing, congresspeople, when you let this? There are millions of Americans who have the threat of death and all kinds of things hanging over them right now because of the policies of the Trump administration, and that's what you're aiding and abetting.
And those people don't get warnings from the FBI. They don't have protections. They don't have Camp, uh, you know, Capitol Police, or Secret Service, or anything else that they can lean on. They don't have the resources to go into the private sector and make a quarter million or half a million dollars a year in some cushy job where they can hire their own security people if they really need to do that.
They don't get to do any of that. [01:15:00] So you sit in your offices being a part of the Washington problem that you say that you're opposed to while you enable this administration to actively threaten the lives of millions of Americans. And you do it because what, because you got some nasty emails or because, because you're not going to be in Congress anymore and you'll go out and you'll make more money than most of us will ever dream of making.
Like, I just, I have zero sympathy. For the GOP crybabies who want to say like, you know, always off the record or, you know, behind closed doors or unnamed sources or whatever, about how hard they have it as the ruling party under the dictatorial Trump. I just don't want to hear it. Just leave. Fine. Just leave.
Just go do something else, but stop with the crybaby stuff as you punish immigrants and you punish trans people and you punish women and you actively threaten the lives of millions of people. You are complicit. In this, you are leveling death threats against Americans by enabling this [01:16:00] administration. So I just Obviously, it really worked up about this, but I just, I am so tired of hearing people cry and whine about, well, Musk is going to come after us and there's going to be somebody with lots of money.
Fine. Do something else. Leave Congress. What is your worst case scenario? You're not in Congress anymore and you go to your cushy law firm job where your name gets put up as a partner and you make boatloads of money for not doing anything all the time ever. Yeah. That's rough. Really rough. Really rough fallback option for you.
How Kash Patel Came to Loathe the Media and Love Trump - On the Media - Air Date 2-19-25
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: So when does Donald Trump enter the picture and what exactly do you think Trump came to see in Patel?
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: Part of his kind of deal with Devin Nunes when he came to work with him was If I do this and complete my job, I would like you to promise that you'll recommend me for a job on the National Security Council in the White House. Devin Nunes stays true to that, he does recommend him, and essentially peddles to Trump this line that Kash Patel has [01:17:00] now developed.
I am the only thing standing between you and the deep state. I've uncovered their lies, I will continue to uncover their lies. Well, to Donald Trump, this sounds Great. Actually, Kash Patel getting on the National Security Council was not that easy though because you had people like National Security Advisor John Bolton who really did not want someone with as little experience as Kash Patel on his team.
So it did take a lot of push and pull before he was actually installed. But once he was in, I was told by colleagues of his on the National Security Council that he Was really kind of phenomenal at angling to get in front of Trump, making sure he was crossing paths with him at all times and perpetuating this line that he was his guardian within the White House against the deep state.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Fast forward to the nomination, which has. Led to unearthing many comments that Patel has made about the FBI [01:18:00] and the media here. He is talking with Steve Bannon on the War Room podcast last December.
KASH PATEL: We will. Go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.
We're going to come after you, whether it's criminal or civilly. We'll figure that out.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: What do you make of this very alarming threat that he's issued?
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: I think Kash Patel is somebody who you have to take deadly seriously when it comes to statements like that. A really instructive anecdote to keep in mind is that toward the end of the Trump administration, Kash Patel in his position as Chief of Staff to the acting Secretary of Defense, Became really enthralled by the so called Italygate conspiracy, which is related to Trump's election fraud conspiracy theory.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: This is like an extremely convoluted subplot of like the larger [01:19:00] conspiracy theory that satellites and military technology were used to rig the election for Joe Biden in 2020.
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: It's not for the casual election fraud conspiracy theorist. And in his position, he is able to get it up to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to say, we need to send people to Europe to talk with these men and try to investigate the two men who were behind, theoretically, the Italygate conspiracy.
The fact that he was able to get that far and was stopped only because some of his own colleagues in DOD and other agencies said, no, I don't think we should do this and I'm not going to do this. He has not been shy in roles far less powerful than that of FBI director, of using his sort of Whim driven theories or QAnon related fringe.
conspiracies to put them at the centerpiece essentially of the work that he is doing.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: So what would [01:20:00] it even mean to act on these threats of the FBI coming after members of the press?
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: The end goal is always the same, that Kash Patel will use his power to collate all the supposedly incriminating documents, emails, memos that they are convinced will bury the deep state, essentially, and show to the American public just how corrupt they are.
I don't know, on a procedural level, how that works when you are director of the FBI, whether Kash Patel would see himself as basically an intelligence gatherer, an evidence gatherer, and then present them to the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and ask her to initiate a case.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You found through speaking to people who know him and had worked with him that he had a lot of trouble finding work after the first Trump administration.
This might explain [01:21:00] Why he's leaned so hard in the intervening years into commodifying his association with Trump. Can you tell us a little bit about his side hustles and sort of what he's been doing with his time?
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: Sure, he starts cobbling together various other income streams in large part through the selling of cash branded merchandise.
A lot of the proceeds of which he says goes to a foundation he started called the Cash Foundation. The mission of which is to really vague and details of which are very hard to come by even in filings with the IRS and The merch I should say really runs the gamut. You have your cash crew polo tees. You have your cash scarves Rhino tanks basically anything that can be branded with K a dollar sign h there's cash wine
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: that felt very trumpian to me
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: Yes,
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: six bottles of official cash wine for two hundred and thirty three dollars and ninety nine cents
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: as of this [01:22:00] recording I believe it's sold out.
There was a market for it. It would seem another thing he does is he writes books Two of them are children's books. Actually the first one the plot against the king is a really vividly illustrated rendition of the russiagate conspiracy wherein You have King, Donald, for Donald Trump. You have Cash, the wizard.
And you have Duke Devin, Devin Nunez. And the shifty knight, Adam Schiff.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: And don't forget Hillary Queenton.
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: I could not forget Hillary Queenton. Never. It's quite a wild ride. And again, Cash, the distinguished discoverer, the wizard, is in the end the hero. He is the one that uncovers just all that the Shifty Knight and others have done to try to ensure that Hillary Queenton is chosen on choosing day and not King Donald.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: I've seen many people recently quoting from his book, Government Gangsters, the [01:23:00] one that you studied so closely for your piece. There's this, like, grudge list at the end of the book, I believe, where he kind of lists off all the quote unquote corrupt people that are in his crosshairs. It includes Anthony Fauci, it includes former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr.
It's a fairly broad tent of people that have wronged him or upset him in one way or another. What names on there stood out to you?
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: Names actually like Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder stood out to me because I think they go to show how Deep his grievances run from his time in the Obama administration works working as a prosecutor at DOJ You know, he frames his book in that way to say that that was his first major exposure to the deep state the corruption of high level bureaucrats in the federal government and so I think Sort of names from a past administration or people who didn't, who never worked directly in contact with Donald [01:24:00] Trump just show again how deeply he has kept these resentments, how long he has nursed them and when he does have power, the deep well that he has to pull from in terms of grievances.
Rachel Maddow on Billy Long Five things to know about Trump's pick for IRS commissioner - The Rachel Maddow Show - Air Date 1-4-25
BILLY LONG: hi, hey, and who get 25.
When you get $30,000 out of 30. 35? 40. Able to buy 45. 45 today, I a thousand to buy 60.
RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: And so behold, the literal. Auctioneer, a man who talks fast for a living, uh, who Donald Trump has picked to be his commissioner of the IRS. Here are five things to know about Trump's IRS choice, former Republican Congressman Billy Long.
Thing number one, on the qualifications of Billy Long to be head of the IRS. Is Billy Long a CPA, a Certified Public Accountant? Is he an accountant? No. Does he have any background at all in any kind of accounting? No. Bookkeeping? No. Finance? No. How about math? [01:25:00] No. Is he a tax lawyer? No. Does he have a college degree?
No. Has he ever managed a large organization of any kind? The IRS has 85, 000 employees and a 12 billion dollar budget. Ever managed a large organization of any kind? No. No, he has not. In addition to his work as an auctioneer, he has been a realtor, he's also been a radio talk show host, and he once ran a mini golf.
That said, Billy Long has also moonlighted as a quasi professional poker player, which prompted this rare political headline from Poker News. Quote, President elect Donald Trump taps longtime poker player to head the IRS. So Billy Long has none of the qualifications for the job that every other IRS commissioner has had in the whole modern history of this agency.
But he did serve in Congress. While he was in Congress, [01:26:00] did he serve on any of the tax writing committees? No, he did not. But he did get an award while he was in Congress, and it was an award related to taxes. It was called the, quote, Tax Fighter Award from something called the National Tax Limitation Committee.
What is the National Tax Limitation Committee? When Forbes magazine went to look into it, they found that the website for this organization now points to What appears to be a gambling website based in Thailand. That makes it harder to figure out the selection criteria for this particular award. But Billy Long won it.
While he was in Congress, he did repeatedly introduce legislation to abolish the IRS, to in fact abolish the income tax as a thing, and instead replace it with a huge 30 percent sales tax on everything you buy. If that sounds familiar, it's because [01:27:00] this very expensive idea was ginned up by the Church of Scientology in the 1990s.
It has been kept alive by Republicans like Billy Long ever since. Thing number two. While he was in Congress, Billy Long did do one other tax related thing, which has to do with puppies, which sounds awesome, but it's When he was first elected to Congress, voters in Billy Long's home state of Missouri considered a ballot measure to improve conditions for dogs and puppies, puppy mill, dog breeding facilities in that state.
And it was basic kindness stuff. Um, the measure said that dogs needed to have food and water and housing and some way to exercise and run around. And the people of Missouri voted for that. God bless them. But when the Humane Society said that they, too, supported that measure, Billy Long, [01:28:00] newly in Congress, demanded that the IRS should launch an investigation into the Humane Society.
He demanded that the IRS should strip them of their non profit status. Now, in the end, his demands were not heeded. He did not succeed in getting the IRS to crush the Humane Society as retaliation for its efforts to protect But if he were in charge of the IRS, presumably he could now get that wish, which brings us to thing.
Number three. I mentioned that Billy Long mostly just has his auctioneer school degree. He has no background or training in anything substantively related to the IRS. But caveat, look at his Twitter bio. He can see it says at the top there, Congressman Billy Long CTBA. If you say it fast, it kind of sounds like CPA, but it's not.
It's not [01:29:00] a CPA certified public account. It's A-C-T-B-A. What is A-C-T-B-A? He says that it stands for Certified Tax and Business Advisor, CTBA, certified Tax and Business Advisor, which sounds very fancy. Is that a real thing? No, that is not really a thing. Headline, Billy Long, Trump's nominee to lead the IRS, touts a credential that tax experts say is dubious.
Quote, the designation is offered by a small Florida firm, Excel Empire, which was established just two years ago and only requires attendance at a three day seminar. Tax experts say they have never heard of CTBA as a credential in the tax profession. So, not a credential in the tax profession, but as a credential to be in charge of all taxes in the United States of America?
Sure. Why not? You said it. [01:30:00] Uh, the company from which Billy Long seems to have purchased this thing that sounds like CPA, if you mumble, they do list someone as their chief tax planner and tax attorney. But that is a person who let his law license in Ohio lapse 19 years ago and apparently never regained it.
So he appears to not be a licensed attorney of any kind, nor a licensed investment advisor. But his company will sell you that same CTBA, C P A, C T, C T B A credential that they sold Billy Long for somewhere between 30, 000 and 4, 997, depending on whether you catch the sale. Uh, the quote, tax attorney at this company, who again is not a licensed attorney, also reportedly invented a whole other new title besides CTBA.
Uh, so if you want to step it up a notch from the fake credential of [01:31:00] CTBA, you can also select the title, um, tax master. They will also proclaim you tax master, which also sounds amazing. We reached out to the tax master guy for comment, but he declined to answer our questions. That said, Billy Long himself apparently has not yet achieved the Tax Master title from this Florida company.
He hasn't paid for it or gone to the seminar or whatever, but maybe when he's head of the IRS, they'll give him that designation as an honorary degree. Thing number four. Go back to the Twitter bio for a second. Uh, there's something else there besides the not a real thing, fake CTBA tax credential. Right there in his Twitter bio, it says, Quote, DM me to save 40 percent on your taxes.
Seriously, that is still there right now on his Twitter bio, even after he has [01:32:00] been named to be IRS Commissioner by the incoming president. DM me to save 40 percent on your taxes. What that's about is this. Here's the current IRS Commissioner testifying in Congress. And what he's doing in this testimony is he's actually asking Congress to get rid of one particular tax program to close down a specific tax program because it had produced what the IRS called a quote, gold rush of bogus tax claims.
And that one particular tax program, which the IRS wants shut down because so many people are applying to it. In bogus terms, that is what Billy Long does for a living now at this company that he promotes. Now, two of its leaders were banned from working as securities brokers. But when COVID came around, they decided to start a new outfit that, among other things, promotes this particular.[01:33:00]
The New York Times describes the company as taking a quote, expansive view of who is eligible to get money from this program. Billy Long certainly seems to. He, for example, says that you shouldn't listen to your CPA if your CPA tells you that this is a tax program for which you do not qualify.
BILLY LONG: When people walk in and say, Hey, this auctioneer real estate broker, former congressman told me I'm going to get $1.2 million back.
Uh, you're my CPA. Why didn't you tell me that they out? Uh, instantly the reflex reaction is to go to bashing the, oh, it that, that's a, that's a joke. That that's a fake deal. That's not true. You're, you're gonna have to pay all that money back. You'll get audited. You know, they just come up with any excuse.
They can't, they,
RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: they come up with any excuse when your your CPA. Tells you, you know, if you do this, you're going to get audited. You're going to have to pay this money back. You do not qualify for this thing. You [01:34:00] know, it's just any excuse. Forget your CPA. Come talk to Billy. We reached out for comment to Billy Long and also to the company that he works with.
We have not heard back. But I should tell you, the IRS has just warned that one of the quote, worst of the worst tax scams that taxpayers should be on the lookout for Is people telling you that you qualify for this tax program when in fact you don't?
BILLY LONG: You know, they just come up with any excuse they can.
RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Come up with any excuse. The IRS does this list every year. They call it the Dirty Dozen. Compiled annually, the Dirty Dozen lists a variety of common scams that taxpayers may encounter. Quote, don't fall prey. Says the IRS, uh, for the current dirty dozen list, it's, uh, what the IRS calls phishing and smishing scams.
They also have this big description about fake charities trying [01:35:00] to scam people. But number two on the latest IRS dirty dozen list of so called worst of the worst tax scams. Is this one. Beware of aggressive promoters who duped taxpayers into making questionable employee retention tax credit claims.
That is the tax program that is a big enough multi billion dollar fraud magnet that the IRS recently took the unprecedented step of setting up a backseize system, setting up an oh wow I didn't mean it system where people who have been duped by scammers into believing they were eligible for this thing when they weren't.
People can actually take back their filing from the IRS without getting into trouble for it. The IRS also really did ask Congress to shut this whole program down because it has been such a magnet for fraudsters. The IRS on its website right now warns this quote, employers should be wary of advertisements that advise them to [01:36:00] apply for money by claiming the credit when they may not qualify.
The billionaires who run the world (and why they're psychos) - Red Flag Radio - Air Date 2-23-25
CHLOE - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: I think, um, Musk's kind of, he's probably always had, I'm sure, um, you know, far right political ideas. By his kind of more open, uh, adoption of, you know, racist rhetoric and conspiracy theories and, um, celebration of Trump kind of tracks a lot with his interests as the owner of Tesla. Like one of the big things, like you can literally follow his trajectory by like looking at his old tweets.
Um, but was his response to the lockdown because the, he was part of the kind of radicalization of just like, they're taking away our freedoms, like any attempt. Uh, by state governments and the federal government, um, in the U. S. uh, to, uh, put in any measures to protect people's health and, you know, restrictions to try and suppress, uh, the COVID 19 pandemic.
Musk was really hostile to this because it negatively impacted on Tesla factories and You know, if you want to make money selling cars, um, and there's a [01:37:00] good reason to think that like, uh, you know, Musk is increasingly not competitive with China, um, then you have to, uh, you know, deregulate, um, you know, push down our labor conditions, uh, have speed ups, um, try and lower wages.
Uh, that, uh, was totally, you know, any kind of health measures to try and suppress COVID was totally anathema to someone who's trying to make a lot of money selling cars.
EMMA - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: Yeah. Didn't he just start up one of his factory or a number of his factories again, in, um, opposition to the COVID health measures and just like, yeah.
And I think that was a moment as well where he. was able to associate himself with Trump, who was still president and like invited him to the White House or something at that point. And kind of, they saw kindred spirits, uh, on the right.
CHLOE - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: Yeah, much like, um, much like, uh, Clive Palmer, you know, being the capitalist to try and sponsor uh, the lawsuit against the Western Australian government to try and force them to open up during the pandemic.
Like, there's, you know, [01:38:00] uh, you know, a lot of capitalists just are right wing and have racist ideas because of their own ideology, but it fits in with their position as the capitalist class to kind of always want to kick down. Um, you know, always oppose any forms of regulation that limit their ability to exploit workers, to make a profit, uh, to sell, you know, the movement of commodities, etc.
So, yeah, we had our own version of that with kind of Clive Palmer being one of the faces of the capitalist class campaign against, um, health measures during the pandemic. But that was, uh, you know, one of Musk's, uh, one of the things that really, uh, pushed Musk to the center of that whole, uh, you know, right wing world, um, as well as just, like, wanting to remove any, uh, fact checking on Twitter or any idea that, like, people can just run around being open Nazis and spreading anti Semitic conspiracy theories.
EMMA - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: Yeah, exactly. Um, I think he just is a really right wing, this is kind of obvious or whatever, but he just is a really right wing racist guy. Like, it obviously all suits his, um, [01:39:00] economic interests, but people like Elon Musk, I think, are ideologues. Like, he is really He's not purely driven by just the immediate profits of Tesla.
He's driven by a worldview, um, that, you know, wants a, a completely deregulated and unhinged capitalism tramping on the face of ordinary people forever. He wants, you know, a race, a more racist world, a more misogynistic world and so on. So I think he's been able to use his economic power to try to shape the world in that direction.
Peter Thiel time. All right. So, Chloe, what have you learned about Peter Thiel, which I know, I know nothing about?
CHLOE - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: I just don't even know where to start. Like, I feel like this guy is like, you know, Elon Musk is a more famous Trump backer now, kind of part of the tech bros from Silicon Valley that have kind of Trumpified.
Uh, kind of marching, um, in that direction, but Peter Thiel was the early adopter. Like, so he was, you know, the first Trump [01:40:00] presidency, the kind of billionaire from that Silicon Valley world that, unlike most of those billionaires who kind of still backed the Democrats at that time, uh, was a supporter of Trump.
Um, so like Musk, they actually made their fortunes from the same company, which was PayPal. Um, so, you know, someone was going to become a billionaire out of that, the kind of dot com moment where. you know, having a verifiable payment system online. Um, and they kind of accumulated a whole bunch of companies doing the same thing to kind of make PayPal the predominant one, eventually sell it to eBay.
Um, but yeah, Peter Thiel is an interesting capitalist because he is such an ideologue and has been from the very get go of his career. And I just think it's remarkable that both he and Musk come from a background of growing up in apartheid South Africa. Um, they're part of what, uh, The media dubbed the PayPal Mafia, which is like a bunch of tech guys from PayPal who made their fortunes who all had connections to apartheid South [01:41:00] Africa.
It kind of makes you the perfect capitalist in a way if you're just like willing to You made your money from like almost slave like conditions of Um, Black Africans or, you know, you, you come from that world. You grew up in like the open apartheid system. And Peter Thiel has, you know, gotten, uh, some criticism in the media because, um, he writes a lot.
He actually puts down his reactionary ideas, um, in essays and things. And he has And you've read all his essays now. I've read a couple of them. Um, they're, yeah, terrifying, um, but he, as an adult, describes South Africa as a sound economic, uh, system, um, under apartheid. Um, so he, uh, briefly, uh, when he was young, when his dad was working there, uh, studied at an elite all white school, um, in South Africa.
As a young high schooler, he got really into Ayn Rand. Um, I don't know if listeners are familiar with Ayn Rand. She was a Russian born American. so called philosopher, um, and novelist. Um, she was really the poster child for [01:42:00] extreme libertarian, laissez faire capitalist ideas, as well as like extreme McCarthyist.
And just like
EMMA - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: anti communism. Hating the poor. Absolutely. And like, and also just a kind of propaganda about how the capitalists were awesome, intelligent, ubermensch. It's like, yeah. Um, Nietzsche on steroids.
CHLOE - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: Yeah, so her novel Atlas Shrugged, um, it's like the bible for Silicon Valley tech pros because it's all about how, you know, the titans of industry, rugged individualists just like pursuing their own selfish, um, motives are actually like the, you know, ones, um, you know, uh, bettering society, um, through their, uh, genius and brilliance.
But not actually through helping. No, no. Deliberately through their selfishness. The poor people are
EMMA - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: scum who deserve everything that they get. Um, yeah. And like the world is basically only exists for the self aggrandizement of these rich people.
CHLOE - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: This is Peter Thiel is like one of the, um, you know, big kind of Ayn Randian, uh, guys in Silicon [01:43:00] Valley.
Um, and this influenced him when he studied philosophy, um, when he went to university. So, one of Peter Thiel's essays, um, which he wrote, uh, inspired by the response to 9 11, um, is called The Straussian Moment, and this essay makes Clash of Civilizations look soft, um, in it, um, so Uh, in it, he, um, welcomed the return to U.
S. unilateralism in military deployment. Um, and he called for a return to pre enlightenment thought. So, the enlightenment, he saw it as a bad thing, and he said that, uh, today mere self preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew. to think strange new thoughts and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the enlightenment.
And basically [01:44:00] he wants to return to holy wars. Um, so he talks about, uh, when bin laden declares war on the infidels, the Zionists and the crusaders, um, you know, we shouldn't respond in half measures. Um, so this is like the most like visceral clash of civilizations. kind of politics, um, that, you know, is openly Islamophobic.
So he writes his essay, and at the same time, he leverages his PayPal wealth to build Palantir, which is his spy tech company that he created, one of the biggest, um, Uh, contracts is, uh, for the Palantir is with the U. S. Defense Department, um, and the CIA. Um, and this is literally like, you know, big techs, um, private big techs involvement in mass surveillance, uh, both of the civilian populations and, you know, spyware for, for states to kind of carry out, um, espionage, um, on other states.
And, uh, by the way, Palantir is still around. It's gotten a massive stock surge, um, since Trump, uh, entered, uh, the White House. Um, and to. [01:45:00] quote, uh, recently from the current CEO, Alex Karp, um, he said that the company exists to quote, power the West to its obvious innate superiority.
SECTION B: QUID-PRO-QUO
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B quid pro quo.
The Billionaires Government Branko Marcetic on Trumps Complete Betrayal of His Base Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-27-25
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And, of course, if you're talking about privatizing the Postal Service, um, or Trump taking over the U. S. Postal Service, that also has a great impact on voting. But I want to ask you about The Washington Post reporting the Federal Aviation Administration's close to canceling a 2.
4 billion contract with Verizon and awarding the work To Elon Musk's Starlink, the contractors for work to overhaul a key communication system in nation's air traffic control system. Meanwhile, a separate investigation by The Washington Post has revealed Musk has built his business empire on 38 Billion dollars in federal funding via government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the past two decades.
And the Post reports [01:46:00] the total number might be even higher because it's not known how much Musk Companies has received in classified work for the Pentagon and other agencies. Not to mention he pushed out the head of the FAA, right, in charge of Aviation. We've had one accident after another. He pushed him out because he didn't, like he would be fined and also was raising questions about his, um, uh, rockets bursting in air over places like Turks and Caicos, Bronco.
BRANKO MARCETIC: I mean, it's, I I don't know what other word you can use for this other than corruption. Uh, it, it, it's, you know, Washington has long been a place where. Uh, donors, uh, end up getting a, a, a tremendous amount of say over government policy, where they are able to use that to push their own business interests.
Um, both parties do it. It's Frustration with that, I think, is one of the reasons why Trump won in 2016 and why he continues to have [01:47:00] appeal with people when he says he's going to take on the swamp and Washington corruption. And yet here we have the Trump administration engaging in the exact same kind of corruption, uh, and swamp like behavior that it claims to be fighting, except on overdrive.
I mean, I don't think that we have ever seen anything quite this naked before, where, uh, the world's richest man gives a campaign. What, 280 million, um, and then is basically just, just a point, a role is carved out for him. He's not even, uh, uh, confirmed by any, uh, elected officials and is allowed to just basically Go through and, and, and start dismantling things from the inside while also then fattening his own pockets, um, from the same public money that he claims that he is trying to, um, root out waste and fraud from.
I mean, it's, it's, uh, it's pretty astounding. Um, I don't think we've seen anything like this before.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: In this last minute, we have, I want to ask you about Ukraine. Ukrainian [01:48:00] President Zelensky, headed to Washington, D. C., will sign a deal at the White House on Friday, giving the U. S. access to Ukraine's rare earth minerals and other resources.
Trump was asked about Ukraine during his first Cabinet meeting. Mr. President of Ukraine, can you tell the world a little bit about what type of security guarantees you're willing to make?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I'm not going to make security guarantees beyond, uh, very much. We're going to have Europe do that because it's in, you know, we're talking about Europe as their next door neighbor.
But we're going to make sure everything goes well, and as you know, we'll be making a, uh, we'll be really partnering with Ukraine in terms of rare earth. We very much need rare earth. They have great, rare earth. We'll be working with, uh, Secretary Burgum and with Chris, and you'll be working on that together.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Bronco Marchetti, it's your final comment. We just have 30 seconds.
BRANKO MARCETIC: Um, you know, I think this continues the, the plundering of Ukraine, uh, that has been going on. [01:49:00] It's been bipartisan policy for, for years now, uh, to, to use deepening, um, U. S. military involvement in the country and, and, and economic dependence on the United States as a way to get Ukraine to, uh, uh, do a host of damaging neoliberal reforms that, that are contrary to the interests of the actual Ukrainian people.
And this is just, you know, again, it's, it's that on overdrive.
Quid pro bros - Today, Explained - Air Date 2-25-25
NOEL: Katie Honan is a senior reporter at the nonprofit news site The City. She also hosts the F-A-Q N-Y-C podcast. Yesterday, minutes before Katie went into a press conference with Eric Adams we reached her in the rotunda of City Hall to ask her about the life and times of New York’s mayor.
KATIE HONAN [The City senior reporter]: Eric Adams is like a real New York story. He's a former police officer. He often talks about his, his path to the NYPD.
<CLIP> ADAMS: As a 15 year old, I was arrested and beat by police officers. But I also learned how to turn my pain into purpose: I became a police officer, NYPD reformer…
KATIE: And he was a very [01:50:00] activist police officer, challenging a lot of the racism within the department for a member like himself, as a Black police officer. And then he became a state senator representing neighborhoods in central Brooklyn, and then the borough president of Brooklyn. So when he ran for mayor in 2021, it was on a public safety message that really, especially towards the later months of the election season, really resonated.
<CLIP> PBS: The next mayor of New York will confront an economy battered by the pandemic, as well as rising rates of gun violence and homicide, that have made public safety the top issue for many voters.
<CLIP> CBS NEW YORK: And as the city nears a full reopening, a lotta people are worried that surging gun violence could make it more difficult to attract visitors…
<CLIP> ADAMS: This is a critical time for New York. We’re facing a pandemic of crime, inequality, and injustice.
And that is how he became the city's 110th mayor – of New York City.
NOEL: Before we get to the events of the [01:51:00] past couple of weeks, what's his reputation as mayor been? What do New Yorkers think of him?
KATIE: It's funny, when I speak to the friends of mine who don't pay attention to politics, I think because the mayor himself talks about his personality and his, his own word, which is swagger.
SCORING <Triangle Time>
<CLIP> ADAMS: When the mayor has swagger, the CITY has swagger…
He has his own message about who he is – you know, we all have stories about ourselves that we share. His, however, was very easily debunked. You know, his big thing is, ‘I'm a vegan mayor.’
<CLIP> ADAMS: When you’re eating the soul of a living being, you are also internalizing all the trauma when that animal is killed.
A few months into his tenure in 2022, he's going out to dinner and the waiter saying, ‘Yo, he ordered the fish,’ you know, which is not vegan. So there was that.
NOEL: <laughs>
<CLIP> REPORTER: I just want to clarify something: How often do you eat [01:52:00] fish and other animal proteins?
ADAMS: I eat a plant-based centered life. Some people wanna call me vegan. Vegans eat oreos. And they drink Coca-Cola. I don’t.
KATIE: And I think even his partying, it became a negative because people are like, ‘Why are you not, like, out doing your job? Why are you out at clubs with French Montana, a rapper? Why are you out of these private clubs?
<CLIP> TIKTOK: French Montana. In your friend group. Is not a good sign. Monsieur Montana? <laughs>
He has such a large personality. His clothing, it's – everything's embroidered. It says Mayor Adams, in case you don't know who he was…
NOEL: <laughs>
KATIE: …on his hat, on hit jacket. His phrase is “get stuff done.” There's GSD everywhere. So that's what we see of the colorful character of Mayor Adams.
<CLIP> ADAMS: This is New York. It’s a PRIVILEGE to live in New York. And the leadership should have that swagger. That’s what has been missing in this city.
[01:53:00] SCORING OUT
NOEL: When do things start to go south for him legally?
KATIE: Well, we found out that the investigation into him started in 2021 when he was still a borough president. But we saw it publicly… I would say it was the fall of 2023 when his top fundraisers’ home was raided by the feds. That morning, the mayor was on his way to Washington, D.C., to meet with the Biden administration to talk about the asylum seeker crisis, which – it continues to be, it’s sort of winding down now, but it was for years a large issue in the city financially and just in terms of organizing, in terms of what the mayor had to focus on, a lot of it was taken up by the asylum seeker crisis.
<CLIP> ADAMS: This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City. We’re getting 10,000 migrants a month.
So the mayor flies to DC and then immediately returns. And all we knew initially was that he had to return for, quote, “a matter.” So that was when we realized there might [01:54:00] be… <laughs> an investigation into the mayor. And then we saw a trickle of this until September 2024.
<CLIP> FOX 5 NEW YORK: A Bronx neighborhood, swarming with FBI agents earlier today. Records show the address involved is owned by a top aide to Mayor Adams.
<CLIP> ABC7: We have just learned that FBI agents seized New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ phones and an iPad earlier this week…
<CLIP> FOX 5 NEW YORK: The FBI raiding the homes of at least 5 people in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, including two of his deputy mayors, the schools chancellor, and even – reportedly – the NYPD commissioner.
And then in late September, the mayor himself was indicted on five counts, including bribery and wire fraud.
NOEL: What are the details there? Bribery and wire fraud. What was going on, allegedly?
KATIE: The mayor, allegedly, in short, was helping out the Turkish government…
NOEL: The Turkish government!
KATIE: The Turkish government, expediting a building that they have in Midtown, getting the fire permit expedited. You know, these things… It's New York City, it's a big city, and things take a lot of [01:55:00] time.
<CLIP> US ATTORNEY DAMIAN WILLIAMS: We also allege that the mayor sought and accepted over $100k in luxury travel benefits. These benefits included free international business class flights, and opulent hotel rooms in foreign cities.
And in addition to that, there was supposed to be a superseding indictment – so additional charges filed – but we don't know if we're ever going to see those.
NOEL: Okay. And once he's charged, what does he say?
<CLIP> ADAMS: My fellow New Yorkers. It is now my belief … <duck>
KATIE: The mayor immediately recorded a video and he said, I have done nothing wrong. This is a political attack. I'm being targeted. His phrase was:
<CLIP> ADAMS: <duck up> I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, I would be a target. And a target I became.
Because he says he was targeted by the Biden administration because he was critical of their lack of help financially in New York City for the asylum seeker crisis. I'll point out that the investigation predates the asylum seeker [01:56:00] crisis. And you can repeat that to the mayor as much as you want but he's never going to listen to it.
NOEL: <laughs>
KATIE: He insists that he is a pure victim of political persecution, and he's continued to say it. And this is a kind of a, a note that's been picked up by a lot of, particularly right-wing outlets across the country.
<CLIP> FOX NEWS, JESSE WATTERS: He was one of the ones that spoke out against Biden, and if you speak out against Biden, you get punished. Menendez spoke out, got punished. Adams spoke out, got punished. Trump got more than punished.
The Gangster Presidency Part 2 - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick - Air Date 2-15-25
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: I read Bové's letter to Sassoon that came out on Thursday night very much as an implicit threat to also investigate her, to investigate the lawyers that quit. So let's just be really clear.
It's not just that these people are losing their jobs. They're also now subjecting themselves, as you said, taking themselves out of a career path that is a rocket to success. They're also subjecting themselves to the You know, investigative and prosecutorial power that Bove is [01:57:00] threatening. I want to make explicit what Dale Ho, who has been on this podcast, is the judge tasked with sorting this out.
Presumably at some point, um, somebody is going to pull the trigger and file a motion to dismiss the Eric Adams charges. And then this goes to Judge Ho in New York. And you've now said. He certainly has, it's well within his rights to investigate and interrogate why this is happening. And I would love for you to give us a sense of the scope of what he could possibly do to put this to rights.
HARRY LITMAN: Sure. I mean, what he could possibly do is very broad and we'll see, and it's now a high profile matter. But the legal charge that he has is to find that it is in the interest of justice. And I think again, and this is the great letter that you read from, you know, if it had been put [01:58:00] in the realm of raw politics or a pardon or whatever, then the notion would be, well, that's politics, but it has been put in the realm of law and an implicit.
Um, not so implicit, an assertion, uh, and a very threatening one, as you say, from Beauvais to Sassoon, you have violated your oath and we are going to investigate you. I mean, uh, you know, a judge, I think perceives immediately that he or she needs to call it true and figure out, what happened. So even if at the end of the day, there would be a possible way in which Ho could say, I'm not going to dismiss it.
That would be pretty extreme, but to actually look into it, that would be normal. And I think there's a little wrinkle here, Daya, because at this point, you can't expect Adams to speak to why this is. political and rank, nor the department. So I see him as potentially, he certainly has the [01:59:00] power appointing someone to make those arguments.
Supreme court does it all the time. And so I think that the claims from the prosecutors and from Beauvais will come into play. There'll be an effort to put Beauvais on the stand. The department will try to resist that, but it'll be ugly and always underneath. To me is the notion that the department now under its new leadership is scared of resistant to the truth coming out.
The truth being that this wasn't ordered for typical or even. Vaguely appropriate reasons, but was raw politics. And there's the whole other theme here where it would appear that Adams was coached by Beauvais to make the right offer. I'll really play ball on immigration. If you'll dismiss the cases, that's a whole extra layer of corruption.
[02:00:00] That's the sort of thing that, oh, I think will. Have every right to look into, and I don't see why he wouldn't. I'll just add the whole way things have gone down since the January 6th pardons, uh, which so insulted the entire bench of the, uh, very respected bench, bipartisan bench of the DC district court.
I think the district court judges in this country. Really see in the Trump administration, a great sort of disrespect for the law and see themselves as, you know, maybe the only bulwark to at least push back, scrutinize, get the facts out. So, you know, hoe better than I do, but I expect that this is going to move to a hearing with real evidence of what happened and what didn't.
And. That's just bad for the department and the posture that it's in.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: I think that what you're [02:01:00] saying, Harry, and it's a great place to land is that no matter what emerges from this, the quid pro quo here is that if Eric Adams continues to be the mayor and continues to do what he did, as you noted, Harry, on Fox News on Friday morning, which is say.
I get to be the mayor as long as I do the immigration dragnet I promised. There's nothing more corrupt. You can laugh about it on Fox, but that is quid pro quo corruption and the promise that he will be removed if he fails to do that. So. This isn't just a New York story. This isn't just an immigration story.
This is a stark promise that we will keep you out of jail if you do what we want. And if that doesn't scare the face off everybody, this is no different in that sense from the Saturday night massacre. This isn't a local New York mayoral corruption story. This is a promise from [02:02:00] DOJ that you either play ball.
And do what we say we could put you in jail. I don't know how to put it more starkly than that.
HARRY LITMAN: Yeah, look, you play ball and not on the field. We're supposed to play it on. This is the broader, almost dragnet of Trump's politics. By the way, this has been happening. Uh, so basically Trump had a lawsuit against CBS saying that Kamala Harris interview was slanted and he has put his handpicked FCC chair in to basically say, we're going to scrutinize your efforts to try to do this huge profitable merger.
Uh, but we're going to look into how nice you're talking about Trump. There's no other way around it. That's got the exact same structure. As the impeachment did the abusive use of government power held hostage to Trump's private interests. And that just washed by in a moment, which returns me to the [02:03:00] point, you know, I think the sort of main meta point that we're discussing here, does this have purchase with the American people?
And I'll just repeat, you know, I am from DOJ and I want to say within DOJ. Everyone assistance all over the country. This is a body blow. It's going to hurt them going before judges. They're ashamed. This is exactly what they're schooled in not doing the reason they came to the department. But even leaving that aside, you know, I think the themes of corruption and there are multiple layers, as you say, and just the.
Bullying, you know, 22 people now in a room who's going to do the right job, the really sort of nasty, overbearing, insulting, threatening aspect to it. To me, that rings home to people generally, even if they're not schooled in the sort of DOJ way that [02:04:00] is now coming through in the letters so much what people see their jobs as being about.
Trump LEGALIZES Bribes From Foreign Countries - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 2-11-25
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Trump signed an order pausing enforcement of a law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the FCPA. And this is a real problem, what he's doing here. I mean, you know, embracing Rod Blagojevich and Eric Adams, two corrupt Democrats, and saying, okay, everything's good with you guys.
He's just embracing corruption. I, 30 years ago or thereabouts, I was working for an international relief agency, Salem International, and, uh, we went, myself and Horse Fund Hire, we went to, um, Haiti to talk about, you know, acquiring some property there, some land there, to run a program, a relief program, you know, for, for extremely impoverished people.
And we met with the, with, uh, with the, the minister, I forget his actual [02:05:00] title, but he was kind of the equivalent of, of the home secretary or the, the, you know, the, the state, the, the secretary of state, you know, he, he, the guy who deals with other governments and things like that. And, uh, very friendly guy.
Uh, and, you know, in his office in the, in the capitol building there. Um, I think it was in Port au Prince. And, uh, the first thing he asked us for was a bribe. And we just had to say, I'm sorry, we don't pay bribes. You know, we, we operate in countries all over the world, mostly third world countries. Um, but you know, we don't pay bribes.
And, and he was like, then you can't, you can't do your work here in Haiti. And, you know, we will stop you. And by Ending the law again. Now, this was a German organization, so they weren't covered by this American law. Now, if, if we had been an American charity, I could have simply said, I'm sorry, I'm an American.
I can't by law do this. Now, do you want our help or not? But now every tin pot dictator in the world is going to be [02:06:00] saying to every business, you know, they're going to be saying to Coca Cola and to Ford motor company and whatever, Hey, you want to sell your cars? You want to sell your, your, your soft drinks.
You want to sell your pharmaceuticals in our country. Grease my Paul. And now that it's no longer illegal to do that, these companies are going to start doing it, which means that the companies that don't do it are putting their executives lives in danger and, you know, certainly the integrity of their operations.
This is absolutely criminal. I mean, this law was passed back in 1977, and it makes it illegal for American companies to pay bribes to do business in other countries, and vice versa. For other countries or other companies to pay bribes to do business here. And Trump just shut this down? It makes you wonder which count which countries Don Jr.
and Eric want to bribe in order to get Trump Hotel.
SECTION C: CORPORATE INTERESTS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section C corporate interests. [02:07:00]
Why does corruption matter - Civics 101 - Air Date 10-15-24
DAVID SIROTA: So in 1971,
Richard Nixon had just installed the now famous recording devices in the White House. We
CLIP: are going to use any means that we're getting done.
MUSIC: I
DAVID SIROTA: want it done. 1971 was this moment in history in which the reformers, Ralph Nader types, were winning. Tons of legislative victories. It was a time of really incredible progress in America.
I mean, the country had declared war on poverty. The Voting Rights Act had passed. The Civil Rights Act had passed. The Medicare had passed. Medicaid. Richard Nixon signed the legislation creating the EPA and the like. I mean, this was an incredible moment. And Nixon had just installed his recording device in the White House.
And one of the problems that had not been solved, one of the last big problems that had not really been addressed, was [02:08:00] this thrum of corruption underneath the political system.
And Nixon ended up recording this exchange that he had with his treasury secretary, in which his treasury secretary said. To Nixon and they were they were strategizing together that they could shake down. That was the that was the term used they could shake down the Dairy producers and we're talking about the big giant dairy companies They could shake down the dairy companies for more campaign cash to Nixon's re election campaign in exchange for Nixon issuing a policy That would create a price support floor for the price of milk to keep the price of milk at or above a Certain minimum amount.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Hang on, shake down the [02:09:00] dairy industry?
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Yes, milk, shakedown, milk, shake, we are not the first to notice the pun potential there.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Milk them for all they're worth! But how is this a shakedown, exactly? You know, you help me get re elected, I'll help your industry out. That's quid pro quo, as old as time in American politics, isn't it?
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Well, Nixon may not have invented campaign corruption, but he sure did define it in a new way.
DAVID SIROTA: It was very, very clear. They're going to give us money, we're going to do this policy. And what ended up happening was, this kind of came out. It leaked out at the time, not necessarily the tapes. The tapes did not leak out until Watergate a few years later.
The fact that so much money flooded into Nixon's campaign from the dairy producers, and then Nixon essentially reversed a decision from his agriculture department to then do these price supports, which enriched the dairy processors, the dairy [02:10:00] companies. It became this example of the kind of corruption that had become systemic in Washington and helped.
Basically,
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: even before Watergate went down, Congress was taking note of how campaign contributions could directly influence regulation. It was, like David said, very clear that Nixon had received a ton of money from the dairy industry and then turned around and helped the dairy industry. So, the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act regulated money in federal elections.
Contribution limits, spending disclosures, prohibiting candidates from offering rewards in exchange for donations.
DAVID SIROTA: I think what it exemplified was this cycle that we've been talking about, where Bad stuff [02:11:00] happens, Congress feels forced to react, uh, and Congress did react. Now, Nixon almost immediately after signing the Federal Election Campaign Act, signing it, I don't know, he didn't exactly love that he was signing it, he didn't do a big signing statement, but he felt sort of publicly pressured, publicly forced to sign it, uh, Nixon and his cronies uh, decided to try to immediately circumvented.
And what's fascinating is is that we uncovered a lot of previously never reported on documents in which they outlined their strategy of how to effectively undermine that anti corruption law immediately upon its passage. I should mention, when the bill was moving through Congress after this dairy corruption scandal.
Nixon was publicly saying he supports campaign finance reform. He supports anti corruption legislation. Meanwhile, we uncovered memos inside the White House in which they were plotting a strategy of getting [02:12:00] corporate donors to threaten members of Congress with financial punishment if they ended up voting for that anti corruption law.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Wow, that is,
DAVID SIROTA: well, I
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: guess
DAVID SIROTA: that is Richard Nixon. So, I, I realize that people listening to this will say, Well, it's not a surprise that Richard Nixon, of all people, was corrupt. And I think that's right, it's not a surprise, but I think we have to understand that the Watergate scandal and the Nixon administration, it really wasn't just a scandal about the break in and a desire to win an election.
It was really The first and biggest campaign finance and corruption scandal of the modern era.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: And Nick, why is it important that Congress is monitoring this stuff? That they're playing watchdog in their own world? Because the public is often busy thinking about other things. For example, who's [02:13:00] thinking about the dairy industry in 1971?
DAVID SIROTA: Is Nixon going to end the Vietnam War? The public may be keyed into, is Nixon going to sign the bill creating the Environmental Protection Agency? The public may not be as keyed into agriculture department policy on dairy prices. And dairy price supports. So, the smaller, more granular, more detailed, more esoteric the issue becomes, in some ways, the more likely a politician is to think, well, that's the kind of issue I can go do the bidding of big money because the public's never gonna notice.
The average voter's never gonna know what I did. The average voter's never gonna know that I slipped this or that line into a bill.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: I mean, members of Congress barely have the time or opportunity to read every detail of a bill, so why would the public?
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Exactly. And then there's the fact that you can always sneak language into a bill that gets you, or [02:14:00] someone else, what you, or they, want.
We hear about things like poison pillslanguage in a bill that basically kills it from the inside out. And riderslanguage attached to a bill that might have nothing to do with the bill. There are plenty of quiet routes to a legislative goal. Routes that voters might never notice or know about.
DAVID SIROTA: The more in the details you get, the easier it is for corruption to flourish. And what happened soon after that dairy scandal, Watergate happened. And what came out of Watergate was an effort to tighten and strengthen those campaign finance rules and those anti corruption rules.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: We talked about the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act.
After the Watergate scandal, Congress amended that act to limit contributions from individuals, parties, and political action committees. That 1974 [02:15:00] amendment also established the Federal Election Commission. But politicians were immediately opposed to these reforms.
DAVID SIROTA: And what ended up happening was that even In the shadow of that scandal that everyone paid attention to, everyone knew about, the president resigned on, the bills to strengthen the anti corruption and campaign finance laws after Watergate, the famous bills to crack down, even those bills had provisions slipped into them to help create ways New ways for corporations and interests with lots of money to continue and actually expand their power to influence members of Congress.
Gregory Shupak on Palestine Ethnic Cleansing, Portia Allen-Kyle on Tax Unfairness Part 1 - CounterSpin - Air Date 2-21-25
PORTIA ALLEN-KYLE: Doing that report was so eye opening for so many different reasons, and both personally and professionally, and a color of change in our advocacy.
I remember years ago when I [02:16:00] discovered after going to H& R Block and paying more than 300 for a fairly simple return and finding out that the person who filed my return wasn't even in a CalPIT. And I remember how ripped off I felt. So fast forward, being in this role and doing this work and this report in particular, just going into how much of a scam the tax preparation industry, both the storefront tax prep Companies, so your H& R Block, your Liberty Tax, your Jackson Hewitt of the world, as well as large corporations such as Intuit and other software providers that provide these tax filing services.
And the reality of the situation is that you have an industry that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars. Preventing people from being able to either pay the government what they owe, or in many cases, receive money back from the [02:17:00] government that is technically already theirs. They have earned it, the government has kept more of it than they were perhaps entitled to, and now people are in the position for a refund.
And these businesses, especially for black taxpayers, for low income taxpayers, have found ways to To profit off of people's already earned money by inserting themselves as these corporate middlemen in the tax preparation game, where their sole role is to bleach people's pockets, either from the money that folks have already earned, and they are doing the refund.
Or by upcharging, upselling, and preying upon folks who are eligible for certain tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit, and have made businesses off of selling the equivalent of payday loan products to these taxpayers where they take a part of their refund and just give people the rest under the guise of their income.
Giving them a same [02:18:00] day advance or a same day loan. And so no matter what the angle is, it is all unnecessary and all of them, and it's why government products like IRS Direct File are so important to both our democracy, how government works, and how people receive and keep their money.
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: A key fact in your report is that the tax preparation industry has these basic competency problems.
Tax laws change all the time. You're looking for someone who can make sure you pay what you're supposed to and look for any benefits you're entitled to. And of course, throughout this, is that the most vulnerable people are the most in need of this help. But an unacceptable number, if we could say, of these tax preparers are not required to really prove that they know how to do it.
That's an industry wide failing. Oh, absolutely. There are no real
PORTIA ALLEN-KYLE: requirements for tax preparers in [02:19:00] these companies, whereas if you go to an accountant. Accountants have professional standards. They have training requirements. Anybody can hang up a shingle and say, I am an accountant. The same way not anyone can walk into a hospital, put on a white coat and say, I am a doctor.
But what we have is an entire industry of people that are able to say, I am a tax preparer because I have applied for a job, maybe taken an internal Training to these companies and are now in the business of selling tax preparation,
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: right? But not to everyone because let's underscore that the fact that these systemic problems This is a regulatory problem clearly, but it doesn't land on everyone equally and it's not designed to and so in this case you see that these unregulated tax preparers are taking advantage of, well, the people that it's easiest to take advantage of.
Talk a little bit more about the impacts of that particular kind of [02:20:00] predation.
PORTIA ALLEN-KYLE: One of the ways in which, especially storefront preparers, are able to prey on communities is simply by location. And so many of these, like, franchised operations, some of them maintain year long locations, many of them do not.
But they pop up, kind of like Spirit Halloween, often around tax season. Right. In neighborhoods that are disproportionately Black or communities of color, disproportionately lower income. It just reports that we have taxpayers and residents who are eligible for what are expected to be larger refunds. So those who are eligible for the earned income tax credit, those who are eligible for the child tax credit.
And really play upon those folks in selling tax preparation services. And the key here is selling tax preparation services, because what they really are are salespeople. They have sales goals. It's why they are incentivized to. Upsell products, some of the products that they are also selling [02:21:00] are refund anticipation loans.
So they may lure you in and say, get a portion of your refund today or get an advance up front. That's a unregulated bank product. So you have a unregulated tax preparer now selling you an unregulated bank product, loan product that often sometimes reach interest rates of over 30%. And they know what they're doing, because that is where they make their money in the selling of product.
Right. And we see that in the data that reprogram such a vital volunteer income tax assistance program, disproportionately prepares the taxes of filers. Who don't have children and aren't eligible for so many of these companies will refer out other folks for whom they find that it is not worth it to prepare their taxes right on folks that they think are getting big refunds.
But more importantly, what really illustrates the difference in tax preparation and [02:22:00] expectation, the wealthy. Millionaires, billionaires, corporations, they're not going to H& R Block. Like Mark Cuban is not walking into H& R Block to file his taxes, right? Like folks on the other end of the income and wealth spectrum are relying on accountants.
Are relying on folks who are not just preparing a service in the moment, but who are providing a year round advice on how to make the system work for them. And so there's a service and an additional amount of financial insight and oversight that they are getting that an entire segment of the market is not being properly handled in this way.
Because at the end of the day, it's these tax lobby and these corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated. and confusing for the rest of us. Doing this while providing services that they know are subpar in quality and deliver questionable outcomes. I mean, demonstrated in the report, the error rate of those who prepare taxes for [02:23:00] companies like H& R Block, Liberty Tax, Jackson Hewitt, and other companies is extremely high, sometimes upwards of 60 percent.
So, You have a scenario where you have a portion of taxpayers who disproportionately have their returns prepared by preparers who are unqualified and unregulated and essentially increases their risk of an audit and then when they are audited with trial and that the IRS. Disproportionately have audited black taxpayers and particularly those who are eligible for EITC, et cetera.
And that is not unrelated to the way that it is structured and the predation of the corporate tax lobby in the first place. And while it sounds like when you see advertisements from H& R Block or Intuit, About how they stand by and guarantee their services, they'll defend you in an audit. Well, they need to defend you in an audit.
It's not altruistic. You'll need that protection because they're going to mess it up. Right. And have messed it up. Right. For so [02:24:00] many people and that part of the story is not often talked about when we talk about the disproportionate audit rate. It often is not always included how those folks had their returns prepared, and that's often by these same companies that are presenting and fighting against things like direct file, which is essentially the public option for taxes in the same way that the Affordable Care Act is, you know, in the exchange is the public option for health care.
The billionaires who run the world (and why they're psychos) Part 2 - Red Flag Radio - Air Date 2-23-25
CHLOE - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: well, while we're on to, uh, the Australian, uh, capitalist class, um, he's now an American citizen, but, you know, we couldn't do this episode without talking about Rupert Murdoch, um, and the Murdoch Empire.
Today he's worth 23. 4 billion US dollars, um, and yeah, he, you know, also like most capitalists already started out rich, um, he, uh, took over running Adelaide News, um, at the age of 21 from his dad, um, by the 1960s he had consolidated Australia's largest media conglomerate, [02:25:00] um, and from there Murdoch really pivoted to Try and take over the whole UK media landscape and then from from there the US.
And so today he has his enormous global conservative media empire, probably most famously Fox News, which is a major part of getting Trump into the White House and along the way he did just, you know, classic capitalist thing. So he was involved in massive union busting campaigns, particularly to try and break the power of the print unions in the UK.
Okay. Transcribed Um, it's worth saying, like, he's most famous for, you know, Fox News, uh, Trump, loving the Liberal Party, but Modok's also not afraid to back the Labor Party when it suits them. As he says, he can make money. Uh, under Labor governments as well. Um, so for example, he was a big backer of Tony Blair during the kind of new Labor turn to, you know, the most open neoliberalism and particularly the Iraq war.
Um, but Murdoch's probably most famous for using all of the means, the many means at his disposal to undermine Labor governments, uh, when [02:26:00] they just give him the shits and he wants to return to conservative rules. So, if you remember like the headlines on the Daily Telegraph, um, during the Rudd years, uh, kick this mob out.
Um, but he also, uh, was a big backer of Gough Whitlam, and then was the key guy that ran the kind of media assault upon, uh, Whitlam, uh, during the, uh, the coup against him. Um, so yeah, he's actually stepped down from being the chairman of Fox, um, and News Corp, um, last year. Uh, but yeah, still, you know, so involved in shaping just the media that, like, millions, billions of people around the world, um, consume.
And something like 65 percent of print newspapers, um, in Australia are News Corp, uh, newspapers that we read. So just appalling, uh, control that he has over the means of, uh, accessing information, um, for millions of people in Australia, billions of people around the world.
EMMA - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: Yeah. And I think of all the capitalists in the whole world, he's probably the most responsible for the rise of Trump.
Like he really, [02:27:00] especially back to his first presidential bid. Um, you know, there was a kind of alliance between the Trumpist campaign and his media, um, in those years. Um, not that it, that was, you know, solely based on his support for Trump, like, I think Murdoch's right wing push far predates, um, Trumpism.
Uh, he's been trying to shape ideas in a right wing direction, promote racism and so on for, uh, for many decades. But I think, yeah, it really, um, he found a someone he could really commit to in the person of Donald Trump. I think we were
CHLOE - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: reminded recently of just how pathetic Labor governments are in the face of these billionaire media moguls, um, when just awesome person Grace Thame, uh, turned up to We love you, Grace Thame.
Turned up to an Australia Day, um, Australian of the Year, uh, celebration, um, at Kiribilli, uh, wearing a Fuck Murdoch t shirt. Um, to which, like, Anthony Albanese was just, like, a pathetic [02:28:00] spineless dweeb and, like, you know, criticized when he was attacked in the media by, you know, Tame wearing the Fuck Murdoch t shirt.
He, like, totally threw her under the bus. Um, and Tame wrote this really excellent, uh, crikey article in response to it called, Why is my t shirt more offensive to our Prime Minister? than a 50 year assault on democracy, and it's just a great read. He talks about, um, you know, Murdoch's long history of being a nefarious goon, his role in sacking golf Whitlam, um, his connection to Ronald Reagan to, you know, uh, conservative figures in the US like Roy Cohen, um, who was the mentor of Donald Trump.
Um, And just the way that, you know, government's deregulation and neoliberal policies has helped Murdoch, uh, build his empire, you know, his nefarious, um, uh, tactics that his media outlets have used, particularly the phone hacking scandal from, uh, News of the World, um, where he, like, they hacked the, um, the phone of, like, murdered, a murdered schoolgirl and, like, lots [02:29:00] of other, um, figures.
Um, and yeah, to quote her article, she says, It alarms me how little people seem to know about Rupert, a man who owns far more than the news. If anything, his media empire is a front for his various business ventures. Um, it's the instrument he uses to promote policies that benefit him while brainwashing the everyday person into believing they're also good for them.
I don't know, like, I don't think Marxists would particularly agree with the brainwashing terminology, like, we think working class people have the capacity to reject a whole bunch of this, but there's so much that's right in this, um, particularly all of the links between, you know, uh, his media empire, but also just generally promoting the interests, um, of big business and the need to kind of push reactionary politics and try and get a section of the population to adopt reactionary politics, like the recognition that, like, Taking up, you know, virulent racism, you know, anti trans politics, all of this is about trying to get, uh, convince people to a certain degree to kick down instead of looking [02:30:00] at, you know, what the 1 percent are up to.
EMMA - CO-HOST, RED FLAG RADIO: Yeah. And, uh, it's, you know, we've talked mainly about capitalists of the US and Australian ruling classes, but I think it's a general pattern around the world that is not often recognized, which Grace Tame recognizes, that it's the fucking capitalists that push the most reactionary agenda. Um, obviously alongside their, their politician mates and, and so on, but, um, I think that's really important to understand that this stuff, not just like the pursuit of profits, but The racism and the hatred of ordinary people and stuff, that is all in their interest and they push it at all times.
So, um, a, a good example from elsewhere is, uh, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani from India, who have both become, uh, some of the richest people in the, the world. I think Mukesh Ambani is Asia's richest man currently, and Adani was briefly the second richest person in the world before a series of scandals, kind of, uh, briefly tanked his Uh, his conglomerate, [02:31:00] but they have been able to, you know, very similar to what's happening with Trump now, ride the wave of, um, Modi's rise to power, uh, Modi, you know, rose to power on the back of extreme racism, anti Muslim, um, uh, and Hindu nationalism.
And these guys became extremely rich out of their alliance with Modi. They were offered all of the major infrastructure projects and, and, you know, um, deals. from the government, uh, and were able to become like, like kind of just situate themselves as some of the most important capitalists, uh, in Asia and definitely the most important in India.
Um, and they've just become part of like the global elite. Last year, Ambani had a party for 1200 Silicon Valley Bollywood like types, just all these rich people came to his personal skyscraper, uh, called Antilla, which cost 2 billion to build. Like, I don't even. I don't know if that's the most expensive fucking structure ever built or whatever, but that's insane.[02:32:00]
Um, or at least as, as a personal residence. Uh, and you know, all of the classics were there, Zuckerberg, Ivanka Trump, Bill Gates, like Rihanna performed for them and stuff. So these are really part of the, um, the global elite. And I think they've, uh, you know, ridden to to that extreme wealth on the back of backing the most reactionary politics in India that is literally about, you know, pogroms against Muslims, uh, as well as, you know, enforcing a horrific level of exploitation of the working class as a whole.
D.C. Gutted. Grassroots Galvanized. Part 2 - Ralph Nader Radio Hour - Air Date 2-22-25
RALPH NADER - HOST, RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR: Well, Jimmy, you've done a lot of work on taxation, internet taxation, you've investigated all kinds of money laundering and tax evasions by big business and the super rich.
The reports are that Trump and Musk are going to get access to IRS personal data, which has never been allowed, and that they have put in place a toady as head of IRS forcing the current one. I had a friend who lost his his first term out of office, and he had about a [02:33:00] couple years more of his term.
Listen, this is the difference between Republicans and Democrats, among others, is that the Democrats let these heads of the Postal Service or the IRS finish their term When they win and replace the Republicans. The Republicans say, get out right now. They've got the IRS in their bullseye, and of course, both Trump and Musk are super low tax payers.
They're using every loophole possible, and it looks like they're going to get another tax cut for the super rich through Congress as fast as they can. Give us your view on this. What are the consequences here?
JAMES HENRY: Well, I've been following tax justice issues since the 1970s when I started to write about this, I did a big study of income tax non compliance for the American Bar Association way back in 1983.
And we had all these attorneys from big Wall Street law firms sitting around the table talking about how important it [02:34:00] was to have tax compliance. In the United States, the United States had this proud record of pioneering in the progressive income tax system. It had corporate tax rates as high as 70 to 80%, especially after World War II, and income tax rates were very high, it had an estate tax.
And so it was really leading the world in terms of having progressive taxation. And that's an important thing to understand, because since the 1980s, we've seen the global tax rates come down substantially. Under the influence of Reagan and then continued by Democrats, by and large, there was this effort to have moderation of taxation, both for an individual and for corporations.
And so by the time Biden takes office in 2020, we have corporate tax rates down to 21%. That's already very low. We have income tax rates that kind of cap out at 40 percent or so, depending on income levels. But the average Those are the [02:35:00] rates. That's right, those are the rates. And I'm just talking about the actual rates that people are paying, especially the rich, are much, much lower than that.
So even before Trump came into office the first time around, we've seen a substantial reduction in the rates of taxation for both corporations and individuals. He comes in in December 2017 without any hearings at all. He arranges a corporate tax rate that drops the level and generates about 2 trillion of savings, most of which went to the top 100 companies over 10 years.
And it was financed basically by borrowing. Well, this time around, those tax cuts, which most of which expire. At the end of 2025, he wants to renew. It would cost about $4.5 trillion of increased deficit over 10 years. And the way he finances at this time, given the fact the United States has this huge deficit, is by packing away all of social programs in the federal budget.
So that's the source of this attempt to, [02:36:00] to cut $2 trillion, most of which would just simply be turned over to the wealthiest people in the country. So I see this as a huge step backwards in time toward the period before 1930 and unraveling all the progress the U. S. was responsible for.
RALPH NADER - HOST, RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR: Tell our listeners, Jim Henry, over half of the profitable corporations in the U.
S. pay no federal income tax. Some of them get even refunds, so crazy is the tax system. How do they pull that off? Let's say General Electric, you know, made like 5 billion in the early 21st century, a few years ago. They paid no federal income tax. They got some returns because they were finagling with other tax liability companies trading off.
Explain, how do they end up making billions of dollars per company and paying no tax? Like Apple. Makes tens of billions. It's very, very little tax. The big banks make tens of billions. Explain to our [02:37:00] listeners, how can they get away with that? When the standard tax rate, as you say, is 21 percent on corporate profits.
Yeah.
JAMES HENRY: Well, the actual effective tax rate is about half that. But Apple, in particular, is one I know well, I've written about their use of the offshore system. For decades, they parked about 65 percent of their worldwide income in a company in Ireland that was a citizen of nowhere for tax purposes. It wasn't subject to U.
S. tax, and it wasn't subject to Irish tax. And so they could leave the money there offshore, untaxed, until they decided to bring it back. So by 2017 tax bill that Trump enacted, They had accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars offshore that had never paid tax. That's one method is to use the offshore system.
News Corp, owned by our friend Murdoch, has 152 offshore subsidiaries. And so one of the ways you avoid tax is by gaming the international system. You park your income [02:38:00] in jurisdictions without any income tax. You leave it there until it's appropriate for you to bring it back to the United States. And they, they basically have managed to game the system.
So, you know, of course, large credits and depreciation oil industry benefits a lot from tax. I think the IMF has done some fascinating work trying to estimate the fossil fuel subsidies. So, the offshore tax system is a mess. One of the things that Janet Yellen was trying to do at the Treasury under Biden was to work with the European countries, members of the OECD, come up with a compact that would agree that can't have any tax.
Rate lower than 15%. Well, Trump is just kabosh that whole idea and put an end to about a decade of work collaborating with our, our allies by throwing that treaty out. That will mean that in fact, U. S. Companies are back in the game of putting their money in anywhere in the world and not paying taxes on it.
RALPH NADER - HOST, RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR: There's an even greater absurdity here. You [02:39:00] mentioned tax credits, that doesn't mean much to a lot of people, but what they do, for example, with Silicon Valley companies and so on, and drug companies, is they say, if you put money in research and development, you can take that as a tax credit against your income tax.
Like, well, of course they're going to put money. I mean, that's how they make money. So they're paying these companies at the expense of middle class taxpayers who have to pick up the tabs. And the burdens of federal expenditures. They're paying these companies for what they should be doing anyway.
JAMES HENRY: Well, that's right.
And they would be doing anyway. You know, there's 150 billion dollars for being proposed. 150 billion tax cut being proposed as part of this package that Republicans are putting together for precisely that R& D credits that they should be making anyway. But the big picture here, and it's a little bit hard for ordinary Americans to kind of grasp all these technical issues.
And I'm familiar with the problem of trying to get people to understand the tax code to fight this fight. Basically, the U. S. [02:40:00] is now taxing corporations at Estonian levels. I mean, we have a tax rate that's below China's. You know, China's is about 25 percent corporate income tax. Ours is 20. Trump wants to make that even more generous for companies.
At the same time, one thing that I'm just shocked by, it's hard to be shocked by this administration, but any more than by anything else, but he's basically dismantling the IRS. The IRS had been for years sort of starved for financing for its tax enforcement efforts against large corporations and wealthy individuals.
They finally got the Biden administration to add another 80 billion over 10 years, which was hiring about 10, 000 additional investigators. Enforcement people and Trump has just fired them. So that whole effort to reinvigorate the IRS enforcement effort. So, you know, a lot of what we're talking about here is illegal activity.
It isn't even a question. It would have paid for itself that 80 billion investment [02:41:00] about 10 times over in terms of increased revenue collected. So it isn't that this is driven by rational economic policy. I don't think any part of Trump's program makes economic sense.
Gregory Shupak on Palestine Ethnic Cleansing, Portia Allen-Kyle on Tax Unfairness Part 2 - CounterSpin - Air Date 2-21-25
PORTIA ALLEN-KYLE: And the reality of the situation is that you have an industry that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars. Preventing people from being able to either pay the government what they owe, or in many cases, receive money back from the government that is technically already theirs. They have earned it, the government has kept more of it than they were perhaps entitled to, and now people are in the position for a refund.
And these businesses, especially for black taxpayers, for low income taxpayers, have found ways to To profit off of people's already earned money by inserting themselves [02:42:00] as these corporate middlemen in the tax preparation game, where their sole role is to bleach people's pockets, either from the money that folks have already earned, and they are doing the refund.
Or by upcharging, upselling, and preying upon folks who are eligible for certain tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit, and have made businesses off of selling the equivalent of payday loan products to these taxpayers where they take a part of their refund and just give people the rest under the guise of their income.
Giving them a same day advance or a same day loan. And so no matter what the angle is, it is all unnecessary and all of them, and it's why government products like IRS Direct File are so important to both our democracy, how government works, and how people receive and keep their money.
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: A key fact in your report is that the [02:43:00] tax preparation industry has these basic competency problems.
Tax laws change all the time. You're looking for someone who can make sure you pay what you're supposed to and look for any benefits you're entitled to. And of course, throughout this, is that the most vulnerable people are the most in need of this help. But an unacceptable number, if we could say, of these tax preparers are not required to really prove that they know how to do it.
That's an industry wide failing. Oh, absolutely. There are no real
PORTIA ALLEN-KYLE: requirements for tax preparers in these companies, whereas if you go to an accountant. Accountants have professional standards. They have training requirements. Anybody can hang up a shingle and say, I am an accountant. The same way not anyone can walk into a hospital, put on a white coat and say, I am a doctor.
But what we have is an entire industry of people that are able to say, I am a tax preparer [02:44:00] because I have applied for a job, maybe taken an internal Training to these companies and are now in the business of selling tax preparation,
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: right? But not to everyone because let's underscore that the fact that these systemic problems This is a regulatory problem clearly, but it doesn't land on everyone equally and it's not designed to and so in this case you see that these unregulated tax preparers are taking advantage of, well, the people that it's easiest to take advantage of.
Talk a little bit more about the impacts of that particular kind of predation.
PORTIA ALLEN-KYLE: One of the ways in which, especially storefront preparers, are able to prey on communities is simply by location. And so many of these, like, franchised operations, some of them maintain year long locations, many of them do not.
But they pop up, kind of like Spirit Halloween, often around tax season. Right. In neighborhoods that are [02:45:00] disproportionately Black or communities of color, disproportionately lower income. It just reports that we have taxpayers and residents who are eligible for what are expected to be larger refunds. So those who are eligible for the earned income tax credit, those who are eligible for the child tax credit.
And really play upon those folks in selling tax preparation services. And the key here is selling tax preparation services, because what they really are are salespeople. They have sales goals. It's why they are incentivized to. Upsell products, some of the products that they are also selling are refund anticipation loans.
So they may lure you in and say, get a portion of your refund today or get an advance up front. That's a unregulated bank product. So you have a unregulated tax preparer now selling you an unregulated bank product, loan product that often sometimes reach interest rates of [02:46:00] over 30%. And they know what they're doing, because that is where they make their money in the selling of product.
Right. And we see that in the data that reprogram such a vital volunteer income tax assistance program, disproportionately prepares the taxes of filers. Who don't have children and aren't eligible for so many of these companies will refer out other folks for whom they find that it is not worth it to prepare their taxes right on folks that they think are getting big refunds.
But more importantly, what really illustrates the difference in tax preparation and expectation, the wealthy. Millionaires, billionaires, corporations, they're not going to H& R Block. Like Mark Cuban is not walking into H& R Block to file his taxes, right? Like folks on the other end of the income and wealth spectrum are relying on accountants.
Are relying on folks who are not just preparing a service in the moment, but who are providing a year round advice on [02:47:00] how to make the system work for them. And so there's a service and an additional amount of financial insight and oversight that they are getting that an entire segment of the market is not being properly handled in this way.
Because at the end of the day, it's these tax lobby and these corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated. and confusing for the rest of us. Doing this while providing services that they know are subpar in quality and deliver questionable outcomes. I mean, demonstrated in the report, the error rate of those who prepare taxes for companies like H& R Block, Liberty Tax, Jackson Hewitt, and other companies is extremely high, sometimes upwards of 60 percent.
So, You have a scenario where you have a portion of taxpayers who disproportionately have their returns prepared by preparers who are unqualified and unregulated and essentially increases their risk of an [02:48:00] audit and then when they are audited with trial and that the IRS. Disproportionately have audited black taxpayers and particularly those who are eligible for EITC, et cetera.
And that is not unrelated to the way that it is structured and the predation of the corporate tax lobby in the first place. And while it sounds like when you see advertisements from H& R Block or Intuit, About how they stand by and guarantee their services, they'll defend you in an audit. Well, they need to defend you in an audit.
It's not altruistic. You'll need that protection because they're going to mess it up. Right. And have messed it up. Right. For so many people and that part of the story is not often talked about when we talk about the disproportionate audit rate. It often is not always included how those folks had their returns prepared, and that's often by these same companies that are presenting and fighting against things like direct file, which is essentially the public option for taxes in the same way that the Affordable Care [02:49:00] Act is, you know, in the exchange is the public option for health care.
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: What is direct file and why can we expect to hear in the media a lot of folks saying, Oh, well, you might think direct file is good, but actually, you know, um, what should we know about it?
PORTIA ALLEN-KYLE: What we should know about it is, as I mentioned, direct file is the public option for taxes. Right. And it's important because it allows people to file returns and simple returns directly with the IRA.
The last year, the pilot program was only available in 12 states. This year, the program is open to folks living in 25 states. We hope to see and are fighting for the expansion after this season into all 50 states. And recognize the tough road ahead for that, but it is a program that in its first year, they over, I believe it was 130, 000 taxpayers, millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours in tax [02:50:00] preparation and already folks block.
This season to the direct file system and in the 1st, 2 week color of change has been doing a lot of advocacy. We are the top refer of traffic to direct file. And so we're already saving hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours, which is a real benefit to community. This is a system that like in government working for you.
It is also important because the other thing that private companies have really invested in and fought so hard about is that even when you file with H& R Block, when you file with Intuit or Total Tax, like when you file with Liberty Tax, That information is still going to the government, to the IRS, but now it also is housed in this private corporation that essentially uses it as a part of their business model to sell other products to you and prey on you in other ways.
And so it's not a [02:51:00] coincidence that a company like Intuit own TurtleTax, which is, you know, a software platform that will take up your data. They also own QuickBooks, so they have a bunch of data on small businesses that keep their accounting in that way. They own MailChimp, and so they have information of millions of posts to join direct marketing, email campaigns, and so they can link data in that way.
And then also own credit partners and so for those who are looking to improve their credit scores, for example, and they also then have information about, you know, Americans would not level and match this to essentially pray in different ways with different types of tax products and other banking products.
And we've seen this in the expansion of FinTech. Tax product alone, um, that has been going crazy. You know, when Cash App, for example, is telling you that you can file your taxes for free, you should assume that you are the product. And cutting out that corporate middleman is critical and essential for not just [02:52:00] ensuring that families keep money in their pockets, save time.
That they are able to put back, spend with their kids, spend with their families, spend pursuing other things, but also is a data protection strategy as well.
SECTION D: KING TRUMP
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, section D. King Trump.
Did Trump End Fundamental Constitutional Structure Holding Back Fascism - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 2-10-25
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: The Supreme court is corrupt. Congress is a rubber stamp and the president is lawless. What happens next? And so J. D. Vance is now saying that he and Donald Trump don't obey federal judges. He tweeted, quote, judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legislative legitimate power. This is how autocrats run things.
It's an extraordinarily dangerous moment. And I think it's important that we put this in a historical context. It was, uh, Tuesday, July 17th, 1787 when, uh, 50 some odd men got together at the, uh, what was then the City Hall in Philadelphia, uh, it's now called Independence Hall, [02:53:00] uh, to draw up, to write the Constitution.
And they drew their inspiration for that day's efforts, that July 17th, 1787 effort, from Charles de Montesquieu, who's, uh, who had published a, a book. He was a French philosopher and, and, uh, Uh, well, a philosopher, uh, in 1748, he wrote a book called The Spirit of the Laws. And in The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu pointed out that it is absolutely critical that if you want to have a government that doesn't devolve into tyranny, that doesn't become an autocratic, strongman, single party state.
That you must have at least three separate branches of government that have relatively equal powers relative to each other. In this case, the legislative, Congress, House and Senate, the executive, the presidency, and the judiciary, the, the courts. [02:54:00] In fact, this is a quote from his 1748 book. He said, when the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.
Again, there is no liberty of the judiciary power between the legislative and executive. So as this topic came up in the morning of July 17th, 1787 in Philadelphia, James Madison stood up to speak and, you know, his words were recorded. He said, you know, by, by quill pen, but recorded, he said, if it be essential to the preservation of liberty that the legislative, executive, and judiciary powers be separate.
It is essential to a main, maintenance of that, of that separation that they should also be independent of each other. In like manner, a dependence of the executive, the president, on the legislative would render it the executor as well as the maker of laws. And then according to the observation of Montesquieu, tyrannical laws may be [02:55:00] made, that they may be executed in a tyrannical manner.
Montesquieu conceived it to be absolutely necessary to a well constituted republic that the two forces should be kept distinct and independent of each other for guarding against the dangerous union of the legislative and executive departments. In other words, if the president were ever to dictate all terms to Congress, which then became a compliant rubber stamp, regardless of how excessive or even illegal the president's actions became.
That, Madison said, finishing his little rant, quote, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. We're there now. In simplified form, you know, basically the system that Madison and his compatriots came up with, to, was that the legislature creates agencies and funds them, the government. The president's job is to, and this is a [02:56:00] direct quote from Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution, to quote, Take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
Of course, the laws were created by Congress. And the role of the Article 3 Courts is to make sure that neither overstep their authority and independently arbitrate disputes between them. Well, those decisions must be final. The Supreme Court's decisions must be final for the system to work. However, we've had this 44 year long war.
Against American government, against American democracy, against James Madison and the founders that was funded by a bunch of, initially some fossil fuel billionaires, later a larger group of billionaires, now the tech billionaires are in on it. Uh, this was originally called the Reagan Revolution, then it was called the Bush Revolution, then the Trump Re There's 1, 500 radio stations, there's three television networks, there's multiple newspapers and other publications, over 200 TV stations, hundreds of billions spent to purchase and then elect politicians.
And all of [02:57:00] this American democracy and government after 240 years is finally on the verge of collapsing and being replaced by something very much like Viktor Orban's Hungary or Vladimir Putin's Russia. Both houses of the Congress are controlled by Republicans, and in both cases, every single Republican senator and member of the House of Representatives has just rolled over and said, okay, Donald Trump gets whatever he wants.
The president, so that's the, that's the legislative branch, the executive branch, the president is just nakedly breaking laws and just saying, Congress, courts, I dare you. And the courts, you know, are just beginning to weigh in, but now J. D. Vance comes out over the weekend and says that he can, he can do whatever he wants, he can ignore the courts.
And in fact, the only way courts can have their opinions enforced is by having federal [02:58:00] marshals do it. And who do the federal marshals work for? Oh, that's right, Pam Bondi. And who does Pam Bondi work for? Oh, that's right, Donald Trump. This is Pam Bondi, our Attorney General, who's investigating FBI agents who were looking into Donald Trump's crimes when he stole top secret documents from the White House, took them down to Mar a Lago, and left them out where Russian spies could wander in and photocopy them.
He conveniently left a giant photocopy machine there, too, right next to them. Wasn't that nice of him?
This is the very definition of a constitutional crisis. When one branch of government says we're going to completely ignore the other branch of government, or even, in this case, the other two branches of government, and just do whatever the hell we want. We don't care what the law says. We don't care what the courts say.
And we're going to find out. I mean, we're already hearing stories that even though a federal judge told Donald Trump and Elon Musk that they cannot suspend federal payments, [02:59:00] That farmers in the Midwest and, you know, and people all over the world are not getting federal payments. That money is being withheld in order to finance tax cuts for billionaires.
And here we have, and by the way, this was all facilitated by the Supreme Court, by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court in Citizens United in 2010, saying that bribery is just fine. If you want to, if a billionaire wants to own a politician, no problem. And so here comes billionaire Elon Musk saying, I'm going to own Donald Trump.
It only costs 270 million. Not even a billion, not even a half a billion.
So, and then, and then we look at, you know, Elon Musk. Well, what's in this for him? Well, let's just go through the list. The FAA administrator had launched an investigation into SpaceX. Now he's been fired. The Department of [03:00:00] Justice was looking into possible violations of securities and other laws by Musk and Tesla.
That investigation is probably going to die. The USAID Inspector General was investigating Musk's Starlink. He's gone. The Department of Defense's Inspector General, uh, opened a review into alleged failures by Musk and SpaceX to properly disclose contact with foreign leaders. You know, like Putin? He's been fired.
The USDA Inspector General was investigating alleged animal abuse at Neuralink, Musk's brain company. He's been fired. The National Transportation Safety Board, overseen by the DOT, had several open probes into Tesla. Uh, odds are they'll be dropped if they haven't been already. The EPA had settled multiple lawsuits with Tesla.
Uh, for, you know, hazardous waste violations and violations of the Clean Air Act. Now that the EPA is being gutted, there probably won't be any more. The National Labor Relations Board, overseen by the Department of Labor, had 17 open investigations against Tesla and SpaceX. For unfair labor practices, safety violations, and [03:01:00] discriminatory work process practices that are probably now, you know, moot.
The FCC was carrying out investigations and had issued court orders relative to Musk's business. The Federal Trade Commission was overseeing some of Musk's companies and had a consent decree in place. And the Air Force and the Pentagon's Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security had launched reviews into Musk and SpaceX's compliance with federal reporting requirements.
I think you can safely say all of these burrs under, under Elon Musk's saddle have, have been removed. And if not, so far, they probably will be soon. That 277 million investment that, that Musk made is going to pay billions in returns, it appears. Welcome to James Madison's very definition of tyranny.
DOJ files to dismiss NYC Mayor Adams case after request set off wave of mass resignations - The ReidOut - Air Date 2-14-25
GUEST 5: And that's, I think the, the, the, the top line takeaway here. Um, one is that, and we know where this is going to go to. So that low income heating program where [03:02:00] those people lost that money, that was straight out of project 2025.
I mean, right in the 900 page book, that was one of the programs that they were targeting. So in effect, Trump is just implementing a lot of the things that they've already written and prepared for, which means we know what's coming next. And we know the people that are going to be affected by it, which means there's no excuse.
For the, for Democrats, for the news media, not to be able to connect the dots. And your question is the important one here, because if we don't help build that connective tissue for his actions, to the harms that people are already experiencing, what's going to happen is that because they have narrative dominance and they have that massive megaphone there, when people start to ask questions, Hey, why is this happening?
They're going to blame the deep state. Malicious implementation right there and and they're going to use that anger and kinetic energy and turn it right back around to gather more power for themselves. So it is both an important opportunity, but we also need to make sure we're telling this story so that we don't, we actually prevent them from using it to get stronger.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yeah, [03:03:00] absolutely. And you know, Antoine, you, you, uh, you made a video actually that, you know, taught that sort of sort of walks Democrats through some real way to tell this story, not even just on the red state pain, but just on the price increases that everyone is feeling right now. I'm gonna play just a little bit of that.
Do we have it? Maybe we have a little bit of that.
DONALD TRUMP: We will stop inflation. We will make America affordable again. We have tremendous potential in this country. The President's tariffs are expected to have a major impact on the price American shoppers pay. Tariffs that could raise prices for many products.
It'll also bring your grocery bill way down.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Consumers can expect to see increases on items like avocados, berries, and meat products. The
CLIP: word grocery, you know, it's sort of a simple word, but it sort of means like everything you eat.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: With many thanks for our director downtown Sterling Brown. Um, here is, uh, your article, Antoine, is Trump ignoring his promises that won in the election?
What should Democrats be asking? Where should they be playing that video?
GUEST 6: Well, well, Joy, I can tell you this as a, as the old African American proverb tells us quite [03:04:00] clearly, we tried to tell y'all. The fact of the matter is what we see now is a governing style of ram, jam, and screw. Ram these government overreach extreme policies down the throats of the American people, jam up the news cycle with multiple things at one time, and screw whatever constituency that will be impacted by these.
And quite frankly, I think the American people need to understand that these policies and this government overreach, this extremism does not just impact democracy does not just impact. Uh, those who may not have been 4. It impacts everyone in my home state of South Carolina. We better known in many places as the battered capital of the world.
The largest investments from the Inflation Reduction Act, perhaps in any other state, we've had two or three announcements where companies will not. Produce what they said they were going to produce just in Georgia a few weeks ago, the same thing. And so I think what's going to happen at the end of the day, if you look at his extremism, along with what the Republicans want to do in the Congress [03:05:00] with this budget cut in terms of Medicaid, people are going to be hurting.
And the people who benefit the most are going to hurt the most, in my opinion, those who voted for Donald Trump.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yeah. I mean, and by the way, who's going to gain the most Angelo are, you know, Trump and his family. They're already reaping money. They're selling meme coins. They're selling their personally, you know, enriching themselves.
Elon Musk is signing himself up for contracts while canceling Medicaid money.
GUEST 5: Yeah. I mean, 800, 000 people lost money in that deal. Uh, you know, they thought they were going to get rich. They thought they were going to make some money off of Trump's momentum and they lost it. And that's the nature of a lot of these scams.
Uh, and that's a part, you know, that's the part about this that makes this even. more intense is that it's not just that they're using policies to directly affect people and harm people and transfer wealth. They're also then using their cultural and social influence to then fleece them and pick their other pocket, uh, with these sort of, with these other gambits and that, you know, and then further align their pockets.
And I mean, they are, they have really successfully [03:06:00] managing to double dip in the most odious ways. And one
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: of the ways that
GUEST 6: Remember Donald Trump promised on day one, he was going to bring down inflation. He was going to lower the price of car insurance and all these other things. And here we have prices of egg gas and goods and everything in between are still up and yet his constituents who voted for him.
On this notion of the ones who are suffering the most, they're not in blue states, they're not in urban cities, they're in rural America, they're in urban America, they're all over the country. And that's why, if you look back and reflect on this election, what people understand is it was easier to be angry than it was informed.
Because if you were an informed voter in this election, you know, it was not a policy thing that the president put up that went to benefit. Working class Americans, as they thought it would have when we tried to make this idea that the election was going to be about economic and microeconomics in particular, not one person who voted [03:07:00] for him is benefiting from that, except that the wealthy, the well off and the well connected.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: It was an open book test. The book was called Project 2025. Last word to you on this, Angela, because there, you said they were going to pivot and just blame someone. I mean, trans people are right now taking the brunt of it. I mean, they're being erased from the military. They're taking off the T in front of the Stonewall Memorial, which is literally Stonewall was done by trans people, black trans women did it.
I mean, they're literally just sort of making them vanish and disappear. It is.
GUEST 5: They are insidious. They are. And that's a strategy. Yeah. I mean, and they, you know, they organize power on the fringes, and when you bring all those people in from of the fringes, now each of them get their small little piece of the puzzle and there's a very strong segment of the right wing.
That wants to erase that, erase trans people. There's a big push in right wing media about a couple, two years ago that said that this was the trans lie and that it was only gay white men that were at Stonewall. There weren't even anybody that wasn't white there. That is the narrative that they push. And part of it is to divide and [03:08:00] to weaken.
But it's also a reflection of the fact that they are fighting a culture war here and recognize that politics is downstream from culture, which is partly why he hung that portrait of himself in that mugshot in the White House. It's about culture.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: It's about violence. A mugshot in the White House. Can we show this?
I mean, it is the first thing you see when you go into the White House is Donald Trump's mugshot. Insane. I mean, he is a convicted felon. So I guess that is what he wants people to know.
AOC Exposes Republican Plan To Pay For Elon Musk's Tax Break By Cutting Medicaid - The Majority Report - Air Date 2-26-25
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So they're going to have problems with this, and this is going to be like literally a year long process, maybe going into the fall. Maybe, you know, I don't know what the deadline is for reconciliation, but at the very least is going to happen over the next 67 months. In the meantime, we're 13 days away now.
They're going to try and pass a continuing resolution of the existing budget we have. They don't have time to come up with a new budget. They just agreed on these broad strokes today, yesterday. And the real question is, are Democrats going to [03:09:00] help them with this continuing resolution? And the answer should be a 100 percent unequivocal no.
Um, uh, Trump agrees that he does not have the right to exercise what we call impoundment or a line item veto. If Congress appropriates the money, the president is bound in the agencies are bound to expend that money.
And so that's the, that's what we're going to see over the next 13 days. We're turning away from the, what happened with that budget resolution. And now I'm going to look towards the continuing resolution for the, for the numbers that we have now. And in one other note, that budget contained a 20 billion cut to IRS.
And it was a, a future cut, right? Cause remember there [03:10:00] was 80 billion given to the IRS over the course of 10 years, 20 billion was cut in that first, uh, was pulled back in the last, uh, Biden negotiations, but it's in the budget. So it would be cut again. And they've already cut a bunch of IRS people and, and remember whenever they cut the IRS.
The first thing that happens, the first, every dollar that is cut reduces audits of wealthy people because that's the most expensive place. So hopefully the Democrats will hold strong and like they did yesterday and not help with the continuing resolution. And get out there and start messaging the Republicans are about to shut down the government.
The Republicans are about to shut down the government. The Republicans are about to shut down the government because they refuse to agree to our constitutional order. We'll see.[03:11:00]
In the meantime, they're trying to pretend like they're not cutting, uh, uh, Medicaid because they realize like, Hey, this is a problem. 70 million Americans. Some of those live in red states. In fact, a whole lot of them do. Here is a North Carolina Republican, Addison McDowell, saying we're going to find fraud and abuse.
We're not going to actually do any cutting.
COMMERCIAL: Of cuts on the Republican side is the 2 trillion cut. Some Congress, uh, people have concerns that it could ensnare Medicaid. Congressman Don Bacon, for example, saying he wants, he wants to advance Trump's agenda on national security, energy and taxes, but doesn't want to make significant cuts to Medicaid.
It's not explicitly laid out in this blueprint, but it could be affected. Are you confident? Pause it. Let me just
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: make this clear again. It's not explicitly laid out in this blueprint. [03:12:00] But, you know, I have a cup of, uh, of liquid IV here, and, um, if you tell me to empty out three quarters of that cup, well, let's say I had an eighth of coffee and the rest of it is liquid IV, and you tell me to empty out three quarters of this cup, guess what?
A bunch of it's gonna be the liquid iv. No. So thi this isn't laid out specifically, but you cannot get $880 billion from that committee's portfolio without cutting hundreds of billions of dollars for Medicaid. It's impossible. Or like the Egg committee is gonna be snap. Yeah, a hundred percent.
COMMERCIAL: Recently laid out in this blueprint, but it could be affected.
Are you confident that this blueprint wouldn't lead to any cuts of Medicaid? I'm confident that there's waste, fraud and abuse in our government in every system that we have. Uh, and that's what we're looking to find. Does that include Medicaid? There's not a single, [03:13:00] if there is waste, fraud, and abuse in any program, we need to find it so that that includes, just to be clear, sorry.
A little bit of a delay that to be clear, if there is waste. Fraud and abuse, as you described it in Medicaid, that would be something you would be supportive of looking at. Absolutely. If there's waste, fraud, and abuse in anything, I can't imagine there's a single American that wouldn't want us to go and find that.
Okay.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Go find the waste, fraud, and abuse. How are you going to do that? Are you going to sit in your office in Congress and go, Oh, we're going to call up every single and we're going to check through this. No. What you do is you hire more investigators. At the DOJ or at CMS, HHS investigators to go look for more, uh, fraud and abuse that fraud and abuse incidentally, like we talked about yesterday, comes from providers.
There is no, they have done extensive [03:14:00] research on this and they've done extensive actually, um, uh, prosecutions of people who have committed fraud. Medicaid fraud. And it's not people who are going around pretending that they're on Medicaid and they shouldn't be. It is people who are defrauding Medicaid by charging them for stuff that they haven't done.
Medical, uh, device providers, ambulance companies, nursing homes, you name it. Providers, not beneficiaries. Here is AOC at the, um, That, that very same committee, House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, this was from earlier that day, yesterday, I should say, uh, outlining that they're full of, they're full
AOC CLIP: of it.
But that's the argument, right? But if that were true, [03:15:00] then one would think that. The so called cost savings from certain wasteful cuts would be reinvested in Medicaid. However, that is not what the committee is proposing. They are proposing that we have cuts to these essential programs in order to pay for Elon Musk's tax breaks.
The order has come down to this committee. Find 880 billion dollars. Find it for what? To pay for a tax cut bill that benefits Tax cuts on yachts, and private jets, and billionaires, and megacorporations, while secretaries and working class people pay higher effective tax rates than Facebook does.
Undocumented immigrants in this country pay more in [03:16:00] taxes than many large corporations do. And so the, the argument here that these cuts need to be for the sustainability of Medicaid doesn't really make sense when you realize that these cuts are being just moved to justify expenditures and deficit spending in another area.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah. If you thought there was a waste, fraud, and abuse, and the only way to save Medicaid was to cut that waste, fraud, and abuse. And there was a magic button where you could be like, Oh, we're just going to. These people at Medicaid put in a line item, waste, and one's fraud, and one's abuse. We're just going to cut those.
Then you would reinvest it into the program into non waste, fraud, and abuse. But again, their whole argument is, well, if there's, um, if there's 10 percent fraud in Medicaid, the way that we deal with that is by [03:17:00] cutting Medicaid by 10%.
It's absurd.
If you have 10 percent of your inventory in your store is being shoplifted, the solution is not to cut down your inventory by 10 or 20%. Yeah. If there's occasional immigrant crime, it doesn't mean you do mass deportations. That's what we're looking at. And we'll see how far, uh, Democrats go in terms of being able to, uh, exploit this for political purposes.
Ho hopefully we're gonna see ads running in Republican districts, purple districts tomorrow.
Trump Calls Zelensky a Dictator While Crowning Himself King Part 2 - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 2-21-25
BRAD ONISHI - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: And the point is this, Trump signed an executive order this week that is probably more important in terms of policy than him saying he's king. Now, that's important and we all know that. I've talked about it a million times in the show. But [03:18:00] this executive order, I'm going to read from a piece at NPR by Danielle Kurtzleben.
The executive order gives the president greater power over independent regulatory agencies, government entities Congress set up to be shielded from White House control. Well known independent regulatory agencies include the Consumer Product Safety Commission, The Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees markets.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures bank deposits, FDIC. I think you've all heard about that. The Federal Reserve, which sets monetary policy. And it's supposed to be outside of electoral politics because you don't want every four years there to be somebody who can just sort of decide how the Federal Reserve works.
This executive order basically means that any new regulations have to be, uh, run by the White House and there has [03:19:00] to be White House liaison offices that regularly consult and coordinate policies and priorities. It also says that the executive branch going back to Trump only, and the president is the only source of interpret, interpreting the law that exists period, at least when it comes to the executive branch, the Y.
So all of that to say, Dan is there is an attempt here to make sure that these independent agencies. Are under the control of the president period Politico piece by Megan Messerly and Bob King, independent agencies often find themselves in the political crosshairs either because they take actions that appear to align or conflict with the sitting president's agenda.
Those include the SEC's efforts during the Biden era to force companies to disclose the risks they face from climate change, as well as the FCC's more recent actions to investigate companies such as CBS for alleged bias [03:20:00] against Trump during The 2024 campaign, Daniel Farber, who is a professor of law at UC Berkeley said this, one result will be to give the president much more control over the financial sector, especially via the SEC.
The ultimate result could be regulatory whiplash. The commission system has given these areas of law, some degree of stability. So the rules don't completely flip after every election that would change under Trump's order. You're left with the situation, Dan, where the federal election committee, the federal communications commission, federal trade commission, and the SEC securities and exchange commission are basically not independent from Trump's will.
The argument is that from Russ Vogt, the architect of project 2025 and friends. This is project 2025. We talked about it on the show 18 [03:21:00] months ago in July of 2023, the United executive, the unified executive theory. Russell vote argues that there should be no agencies that are independent from the president.
Now their argument is the president is elected and therefore the president should have full control over all of these agencies because if you're elected, that's what you get. The reason these agencies were set up to be independent is because, right, one person should not have complete control over.
Which companies are investigated for fraud, which companies are investigated because of consumer complaints. I don't know, Dan, federal communications. Does that sound like maybe one person shouldn't have control over the media and who, who's, who's censored, who, whose licenses are under threat. Maybe one person shouldn't have control over the federal reserve, especially when they're getting together with, uh, Elon Musk and talking about putting the, the, the federal, the, the.[03:22:00]
The National Reserve and Dogecoin, okay, which is something that's been discussed already. The Federal Trade Commission. I don't know, Dan, we've had tariffs and, and things like that suggested. Do you think that like one person should have control over like, you know, how our trade is completely like regulated?
Especially when that person has business interests and like billions and billions of dollars at stake, whether that's Donald Trump or Elon Musk. Dan, it's not only that we have an executive who's trying to take control of these things, We have the exact kind of executive who the people who set them up had in mind to protect us from.
A kind of like wheeling, dealing businessman, who is a failure at every turn when it comes to like making deals, who's thinking, if I just have control of the markets and trade, if I have control of the securities exchange, if I have control of all of those agencies, you have to come to me. If you want favorable conditions for your [03:23:00] businesses, your conglomerates, your communications, labor, et cetera, this is taking control of the government in a way that we've never seen before.
I got more to say on this that I'm going to take us to Elon in a minute, but jump in here.
DAN MILLER - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Yeah, so I know I do this a lot, but I want to sort of almost back up and look at the whole structure of the executive order. Like system and the way that Trump is using it, because I think this is another important dimension.
So like, Trump obviously in the executive orders makes these bold claims and they're, they're real. The threat is real. Everything about Project 2025, like all of that is real. The part that is always sort of surprising to me, or maybe not surprising, but I want to keep in front of people is again, I've referenced this before, you made the reference weeks ago about people, this is my language, but the idea of like sort of preemptively complying with.
The demands of autocrats, right? And the weird thing about the executive order is they don't do anything in and of [03:24:00] themselves. It's Trump putting out a political fantasy. It's Trump saying, here's what I want to be. Here's what I want political reality to look like. They're not self enforcing. They don't have the force of law.
That's why they get, you know, challenged in court and so forth. And we can go down all the stuff about like what happens if they don't listen to the courts, etc. All real things. We can talk about the fact that all of these are intended to go eventually before the Supreme Court and really try to push the boundaries of executive authority and so forth.
But what's striking to me is how much it's this, this performance, this political performance, you sign this executive order, you make this proclamation that has only as much force As people give it to begin with, and this is the dimension that I keep seeing happen, is that every time Trump signs one of these, everybody just falls in line.
These executive orders that they are not self executing, they are not self authorizing, it's not a magic wand. Trump did not wave a magic wand and suddenly make it so that all [03:25:00] these regulatory agencies have to do what he says. The way that he says he wishes they would do what he says. And yet with executive order, after executive order, after executive order, we see individuals, organizations, institutions, government agencies falling in line in anticipation of them having the force of law, which of course makes us, they don't ever have to have the force of law.
Like everybody just does it. And it's just this kind of performative thing. And that's the part that I find so, a lot of things, a lot of adjectives. I find it maddening. I find it, if I'm just trying to be analytic about it, I find it fascinating. I also find it terrifying that, yes, the claims in this are really, really scary.
But that's all they are right now are claims until and unless everybody just falls in line and starts doing what Trump wants. In which case they give him the authority that he's claiming. And I think that's the dimension that I find so disturbing about the way that these executive orders are being received.
At a national [03:26:00] level. And we've, we've seen this, you know, with, with all the executive orders, everything from like, you know, trans healthcare to, you know, not allowing transgender women in sports to Trump's authority to, you know, birthright citizenship, like whatever they are. That performative dimension that people simply falling in line when they are not required to do so is what is giving the authority to Trump.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or our upcoming topics: the resistance to Trump, such as it is; followed by the international reshuffle as Trump effectively switches sides in Russia's war on Ukraine. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991. You can now reach us on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the username bestoftheleft.01. There's also a link in the show notes for that. Or you can simply email me to [email protected].
The additional sections of the show included clips from Trump's Terms; [03:27:00] Straight White American Jesus; On the Media; the Rachel Maddow Show; Red Flag Radio; Democracy Now!; Today, Explained; Amicus; The Thom Hartmann Program; Civics 101; CounterSpin; the Ralph Nader Radio Hour; The ReidOut, and The Majority Report. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show, and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist trio, Ken, Brian and Ben for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting.
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