Bloomberg News Ran a False Headline, “Russia Invades Ukraine,” for 24 Minutes on Friday. Here’s the Untold Story.

 

Bloomberg News Ran a False Headline, “Russia Invades Ukraine,” for 24 Minutes on Friday. Here’s the Untold Story.

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 7, 2022 ~

Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The same could be said of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, which last Friday ran the false headline “Russia Invades Ukraine.” For still unexplained reasons, the headline was left up for at least 24 minutes on the digital front page of Bloomberg News.

Billionaire Owner of Bloomberg News, Michael Bloomberg

But as the hundreds of thousands of traders around the globe that use the Bloomberg Data Terminal well know, Bloomberg News first publishes many of its headlines on the Bloomberg Data Terminal – the cash cow of Bloomberg LP that has made its majority owner, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire. Bloomberg’s largest customers for its Data Terminals include Wall Street megabanks like JPMorgan Chase that it also provides news coverage on via Bloomberg News. (Sometimes that coverage leaves a lot to be desired.)

Exactly when traders saw that headline is not precisely known. Bloomberg News said this in its statement: “We prepare headlines for many scenarios and the headline ‘Russia Invades Ukraine’ was inadvertently published around 4 p.m. ET today on our website. We deeply regret the error. The headline has been removed and we are investigating the cause.” Right next to that statement was the black box with the familiar reminder: “Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal.”

What is known, from the chart above, is that 101,000 contracts in the E-mini S&P 500 futures traded at approximately 3:55 p.m. EST as the S&P 500 futures plunged, ostensibly as a result of that headline. That was, by far, the largest number of E-mini S&P 500 contracts traded in a short time span all day. If someone needed to exit a short position at a tidy profit, that was a very convenient headline. Stock exchanges in New York close at 4 p.m. weekdays. But the E-mini S&P 500 futures contract trades almost around the clock, from Sunday evening until 5 p.m. EST on Friday.

Bloomberg LP isn’t just the owner of Bloomberg News and the Bloomberg Data Terminal. It also owns a trading platform called Tradebook, which is in business with Goldman Sachs. Tradebook’s website tells us this:

“Equity: Institutional buy-side firms can access Goldman Sachs’ world-class execution platform, robust liquidity offering, and breadth of global services through Bloomberg Tradebook. Clients can save invaluable time and make more informed trading decisions by leveraging Bloomberg’s world-class data, analytics and technology all directly from the Terminal.”

Goldman Sachs is not the first Wall Street firm to have a business relationship with Bloomberg. The giant brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch, now owned by Bank of America, was a minority owner of Bloomberg LP from its very beginning. After previously selling part of its stake back to Bloomberg, Merrill sold its remaining 20 percent stake back to Bloomberg in 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis.

Bloomberg LP has another division that would not appear to be ideal for a publisher of financial news. It’s called “External Relations.” The Bloomberg website includes the following description of how the “Corporate Communications” unit of External Relations works:

“We partner with senior business leaders across the world and work directly and regularly with Bloomberg’s management committee. We advise, write and edit on behalf of these leaders as we communicate company news and innovations to our worldwide client base, global financial markets and our employees.”

Bloomberg LP also does a significant amount of lobbying of the federal government. Since 2010, it has spent more than $6.2 million lobbying on issues that could negatively impact the profits of its Data Terminal and trading platform.

This is not the profile of a business that we can reconcile with an independent news organization covering Wall Street.

LINK

Bill Moyers: Capitol Crimes, BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | William K. Black | PBS

The financial industry brought the economy to its knees, but how did they get away with it? With the nation wondering how to hold the bankers accountable, Bill Moyers sits down with Bill Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Black offers his analysis of what went wrong and his critique of the bailout. This show aired April 3, 2009. Bill Moyers Journal airs Fridays at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings).

Bill Moyers: Capitol Crimes

Acorn Media // Unrated // April 17, 2012

List Price: $49.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]

---

Review by Christopher McQuain | posted April 10, 2012 | E-mail the Author

THE PROGRAM:

There could scarcely be a more appropriate time to make available, for our enlightenment, edification, and horror, Bill Moyers's 2006 special Capitol Crimes. This two-hour program retraces the steps leading up and into the then-current Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, the most egregious example (that we know of) of a long-running Capitol Hill culture of lobbying, barely concealed bribery, and the frank whoring-out of the power that rightfully belongs to us, the citizens/constituents, in our so-called democracy. The same concerns that the brazenly illegal and unethical power-brokering then imprinted onto the public consciousness as synonymous with "Abramoff" (at least for a few nonstop, rapid-fire cable news cycles) are today once more at the forefront of conscientious citizens' minds in the form of a growing public outcry against last year's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court ruling, which opened the floodgates of corporate money already flowing heavily into politics--taking the already problematic fact of bribes-by-other-names that traditionally run rampant in government and removing any lid or real regulation from how extravagant and extensive that purchasing of influence on policy can be. For an accurate sense of how truly disheartening and dubiously constitutional the Citizens United decision is, a strong illustration of how more, not less control and restriction of the influence of financial donations and other compensatory forms of lobbying (free luxury meals, trips, and other things Abramoff used as compensation for pliant lawmakers) is needed if there is to be any real American democracy--an in-depth look at how deeply destructive the ability of wealthy interests to just buy influence on public policy can be--would seem to be in order. And that is what the venerable Mr. Moyers--one of the few actually fair and balanced, truly investigative voices left in the jungle of 24-hour punditry and opinion-spouting, and in the twilight of televised journalism--has provided by recapping the cautionary political horror story of Jack Abramoff.

In classic Moyers style, Capitol Crimes calmly, cohesively stitches together a sampler comprised of televised footage from the Senate hearing at which Abramoff, accused of egregiously and repeatedly breaking lobbying laws, repeatedly invoked the fifth amendment to avoid admitting his habitual wrongdoing; interviews with former Abramoff associates (including some College Republican colleagues of Abramoff's youth who claim that even back then, in the relatively small-time framework of a campus political organization, Abramoff was a financially reckless schemer); interviews with Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist Jeffrey Smith, who helped bring the story to the American people; and Moyers' voiceover detailing the complicated story of Abramoff's Washington, D.C. dealings and influence, dabbing all the little dots of the scandal onto its canvas and pulling back at interludes to show us the emerging portrait of a rare sort of feckless crook. Abramoff was a flat-out, conniving mercenary who sucked other weak-spined guns for hire, including now-disgraced Republican Speaker of the House Tom DeLay and hatemongering right-wing boy wonder/former Christian Coalition figurehead Ralph Reed, into his sphere of professional lobbying. Using Abramoff's connections with DeLay, the unsavory and extremely influential anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and the Bush White House, this cabal committed multiple illegal acts of influence peddling. These included taking money from good-faith political donors who believed they were paying for straightforward lobbying, abusing their ability to convince various conservative and other political interests that they were people of principle, and then lining their own pockets, sometimes double-crossing clients and playing both ends against the middle to further enrich themselves; creating conservative-biased blacklists in the lobbying world to ensure Republicans received disproportionate donations, thereby remaining in control, thereby attracting more money, etc., in a vicious circle of money and power; and generally forsaking any of their supposed conservative "principles" for bald-faced greed, hunger for power, and conspiracy to commit illegal acts and cover them up.

Beyond the money-laundering illegality of Abramoff's moving funds from donors through political action committees and then around between his own pockets, those of his associates, and those of whomever he was bribing in Congress (the primary violators/willing political prostitutes being DeLay and Republican representative from Ohio Bob Ney), there is the rank hypocrisy of Abramoff's gang. For just one example, Reed, the Christian poster boy who was adamantly and unequivocally opposed to gambling, knew full well that much of the money being forwarded to him came to Abramoff from Native American hiring the lobbyist to advocate for the continuing legality of their casinos. One may disagree with the conservative donors and constituents who believed their association with and donations to Abramoff would make for a better, more "moral" world, but you have to feel for them; they were dragged into the stickiest, most discrediting mud conceivable by people who claimed to share their beliefs but whose only unwavering commitment was to getting away with robbery and experiencing the thrill of pulling the wool on a grand scale.

It was under the Bush administration and a concurrent mid-'00s Republican-majority rule in Washington that the crimes of K Street (the Washington road where many lobbying firms had amassed), always a plague on Washington, began to ratchet up to an extraordinary degree of boldness, which one could argue (as Moyers implicitly does) is nothing but the manifestation of neoconservative wealth-and-power worship and an underlying conviction that morally toxic, duplicitous means justify righteous ends. By the end of Capitol Crimes, despite Moyers's fair-minded acknowledgment that shady money and quasi-bribery is hardly restricted to just one of our two ruling parties, practically the entire neoconservative movement and value system as it manifested in the Bush era is indicted as complicit--negligently/passively at best, very actively and with full knowledge at worst--in the game Abramoff so cleverly mastered.

As Moyers points out, these were not victimless crimes; they resulted in U.S. government policy that caused unwarranted personal hardship and economic stagnation for many people. Without going into all the convolutions of the Abramoff saga (which makes Capitol Crimes, at times, as suspenseful as All the President's Men), suffice it to say that both various Southern U.S. Native American tribes looking to better their conditions through legal casino gambling and misleadingly recruited, practically indentured-servant sweatshop workers on the Pacific island of Saipan (a U.S. territory that Abramoff, Norquist, and DeLay self-servingly turned into a conservative cause célèbre, a "petri dish of free-market capitalism") suffered real, harshly unfair setbacks and sometimes unforgivable misery as a result of Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed being flown around by Jack Abramoff on "research" (read: luxury golfing) trips to Scotland, etc., on their dime and then failing to effect the promised policy reforms or protection these donors were seeking through them from the government. And that's in addition to the less directly felt indignity suffered by the sincere activists duped by Abramoff and his cronies as well as by any of us who believe in checks and balances, transparency, and real democratic practice.

If there is one slight misstep in the way Capitol Crimes has been put together, it is that there are here, unusually for Moyers, bits of cheesy superfluity--ominous music over copious close-ups of Abramoff looking sinister (he has no other look, and as usual for this kind of glad-handing, overconfident snake-oil salesman, smiling only makes it creepier); lines from horrible e-mails between Abramoff, Reed, and Scanlon, full of obnoxious, legality-flouting expressions of contempt, that are interpreted by actors in voice-over--but they can dilute neither the grotesque wallowing in greed and avarice on incontrovertible display in the e-mails nor the appalling, angering revelation of sheer disdain on the part of these charismatic, duplicitous criminals for everyone and everything except their own greed, self-regard, and total, brazen lack of conscience or principle. (Anyone who can discern the tone of an e-mail will be reading those messages in their head in exactly the same sneering alpha-male manner in which the voice actors read them aloud; the worst that can be said of these added bits of business is that they're unnecessarily distracting and overemphatic, not really that they're inaccurate.)

As a postscript to his Abramoff postmortem, Moyers spends the final segment of the program in an extended, in-depth conversation with progressive Pity the Billionaire author Thomas Frank and conservative commentator Norman Orstein, an expert on our legislative branch. This discussion, with its surprise, encouraging concurrence of strong ethical opinion from both right and left in the form of Frank's and Orstein's joint condemnation of the utterly, potentially permanently corrupting influence of lobbying culture in Washington could conceivably be of some galvanizing, inspirational use when it comes to involvement of non-media, non-political-establishment, "ordinary" Americans. It's the kind of actually useful, pragmatic "bipartisan" practice--a real fight for and finding of common ground--that our current president less and less convincingly claims to be seeking as he seems to capitulate ever further rightward in the pursuit of a back-patting, "objective," chimerical version of bipartisanship. In that sense, Capitol Crimes sees Moyers once again doing right by the obligations of the journalist's profession and performing the essential role he has so often (and, in recent years, virtually alone in terms of national television) played: that of a rational, respectful beacon of responsible journalism who's committed to giving the citizenry a clear but complete-as-possible look at the facts of the matter at hand, however forbiddingly complicated, status quo-displeasing, or discouraging, so that we can ponder and act upon them from a place of being informed and responsive, not riled-up and reactionary.

THE DVD:

Video:

The basic source materials of the programs (all presented in the standard pre-HDTV 4:3 aspect ratio) are varying qualities of videotape (the best being that created for the new segments with Moyers and his interviewees, which is reasonably up-to-date, high-def digital video and easily the least visually compromised of the assortment), so there is plenty of noise and artifacting endemic to the older tapes and/or the third-hand excerpting of them. But as far as the transfer of the programs themselves onto disc, none of the visual "flaws," which are themselves a product of fidelity to the images in the program as they would have appeared when originally broadcast, can be attributed to the transfer onto disc.

Sound:

The disc's Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo soundtrack is of identical (if not superior) quality to the best possible broadcast sound. It's a basic, TV-news-journal sound mix that needs only convey theme/background music and talking-head verbalization, but in that limited context, the sound is virtually flawless.

Extras:

As usual, Athena Learning, the distributor of Bill Moyers: Capitol Crimes, has loaded up the package to the point of fairly groaning under the weight of its bounteous relevant extras, so many that they require an additional disc. Disc two contains the 2007 Moyers special Buying the War, a postmortem that does for the press/White House collusion leading up to our 2003 invasion of Iraq what Capitol Crimes did for the Abramoff scandal. Here, all the lies and omissions that spread through the closed circuit of the White House, cable news, and the so-called "liberal media" (how anyone can still use that expression with a straight face will be even further beyond you after you see the meticulously researched, minutely specific, thorough case laid out here), infecting a credulous, incurious majority of Americans, are dissected in purely fact-based detail, and it (re)provokes a wave of nausea over that tragically misguided invasion that any thinking American, if they didn't feel it during the purposely mendacious 2003 blur created by the government and mainstream media, has no excuse not to experience now. It's rife with interviewees (including tele-journalists like Dan Rather, Meet the Press's Tim Russert, and 60 Minutes's Brian Rose, and even a few of the pundits who supported the war like New Republic editor Peter Beinart) looking shamefaced and admitting their collusion, negligence, and failure of journalistic principle, stammering their apologies in the face of Moyers's utterly reasoned, calm, devastating questions pointing up how easily they could have discovered and revealed the facts of the matter if they hadn't been in the Bush Administration's pocket and cowed by bullying, warmongering "patriots" in the media and the blogosphere. It's sobering, richly informative viewing.

Other bonus materials included on disc two are a couple of episodes of Moyers Journal that also fit easily under the category of "capitol crimes." "A Conversation with Historian and Writer Andrew J. Bacevich," in which a thoughtful, learned, and accomplished Vietnam veteran/professor Bacevich urges the U.S., its government, and its people to take a good, hard look at ourselves in the mirror--our addictions to debt, oil, and consumption--and fix our own problems instead of going on imperialist adventures in order to continue the superficial version of "freedom" he convincingly argues we've adhered to for decades now. It's one of the best, most cogent and well-supported cases ever made for taking another look at Jimmy Carter's unduly dismissed 1979 "malaise" speech (as well as a deeply effective rebuke to delusional, willfully-ignorant "morning in America" thinking we've been plagued with since Reagan); it may just convince someone, somewhere that the very definitive cornerstones and pinnacles of freedom and liberty actually aren't cheap gas and unfettered shopping. "A Discussion with Mother Jones Contributor Kevin Drum and Washington Bureau Chief David Corn" goes in-depth with those representatives of the venerable liberal journal for yet another sobering exploration of where we've come up short in our national prioritizing, doing for the 2008 financial crisis and its shockingly wealth-favoring aftermath what Capitol Crimes did for the lobbying circus in Washington and what Buying the War did for the falsely advertised, insupportable (by facts or reason) war in Iraq: It takes a good, hard, systematic, depressing but vitally important look at the facts of Wall Street arrogance and greed, demanding to know what the hell went wrong with the American people's powers of attentiveness, reason, and morality in the wake of our (and the world's) victimization. The case that we're puttering dangerously along as a "democracy in name only" has rarely been made more cohesively, accurately, and convincingly than it is in these supplements.

Other supplements include an onscreen-text Capitol Crimes updates--a where-are-they-now detailing the (deservedly dwindling or disastrous) post-scandal fortunes of principal players like Abramoff, DeLay, and Reed--as well as a six-page booklet with a brief history of lobbying in America, a description of the (insufficient but better-than-nothing) lobbying safeguards that have been instituted since the Abramoff affair, and graphs detailing some statistical facts about lobbying spending and number of lobbyists working, as well as gauging the confidence of the American people in their government (which, according to this information, had reached an all-time low in 2010).

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Despite some unusual (for Moyers), moderate slight stylistic missteps (occasional musical and dramatic effects that are unnecessary, overly manipulative, and may actually detract from the potency of what's being documented), Capitol Crimes is a well-prepared, essential slice of recent history for anyone, from any part of the political spectrum, who genuinely believes in ethical political conduct and is outraged by the egregiousness with which that very concept has been disregarded in the corridors of power. Moyers has gathered and clearly organized as many facts as available and as much qualified, in-depth commentary as possible to brief us on the Jack Abramoff scandal that erupted in 2006, following the nefarious political soldier of fortune from his College Republican origins through a ferociously ambitious career in conservative politics to the moment the lid was blown off the "K Street" culture of Republican lobbyists and conservative politicians to which he played kingpin--a viper's nest of powerful people who abused their influence and elected offices, sold votes, warped and mocked the idea of representative government, and created and drove an illegal, unethical power machine committed to a permanently Republican executive and legislative branch, with prominent figures like House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and right-wing ringleader Ralph Reed hypocritically grabbing whatever they could for their grossly unprincipled, ransacking, money-grubbing (and therefore remarkably un-Christian) selves in the process.

The program does implicitly raise the "partisan" proposition that these kinds of misdeeds are an inevitable result of "renegade," quasi-fascist neoconservative "principles" once they gain traction and hatch out into our world (something like--and this is my comparison, not Moyers's --that rapacious bowel-dwelling monster in Alien). But more importantly, Moyers and his able researchers take us an even further step back to look at the degree of influence money carries in our politics, which is so high that it makes the center of American governmental power a poisonous atmosphere that threatens to turn anybody of any political stripe into a wealth and luxury-subservient mercenary willing to sell off their vote or influence to the highest bidder for personal gain. In 2007, when the program was created and aired, Moyers couldn't have foreseen the current Citizens United brouhaha (which deregulates even further the influence of money and monied interests on the laws of our land) now alarming Americans in increasing numbers, but that prominent blotch on the political landscape of here and now makes what Moyers is bringing to our attention in Capitol Crimes all the more important and useful as a contextualizing reminder of recent history. Its trenchant prescience and rock-solid informativeness prove once again that Moyers has his steady journalistic finger on the pulse of what really matters to American citizens in a way virtually nobody else in his position can claim to. Highly Recommended.

4 new things I learned about Big Pharma

 

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) questions the CEO of Abbvie, a pharmaceutical company, about the massive amounts of money spent on stock buybacks and dividends while increasing drug prices during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Tuesday.

Big Pharma has been price gouging Americans for years, and a recent report by the Congressional Oversight Committee is bringing their greed to light. Here’s what we learned:

• Big Pharma has hiked up the price of a dozen drugs to be 250 times more expensive than they were a few years ago.
• Taxpayers are footing the bill for people’s overpriced prescriptions because Medicare isn’t allowed to negotiate drug prices. This costs taxpayers $25 billion over five years.
• Companies are using patient assistance programs (which are meant to help low income people afford their prescriptions) to squash competition and hook people on their drugs.
• The report found more evidence that Big Pharma’s claim that they need to charge astronomical prices to offset the cost of research and development is a myth.

Meanwhile, Big Pharma has spent more than $20 million on lobbying this year alone.

Congress needs to stand up to Big Pharma’s greed and pass legislation that will allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, limit what seniors spend on prescriptions, and recover taxpayer dollars when companies jack up prices faster than inflation.

I’ve never taken campaign contributions from Big Pharma, and never will.

Onward,

Katie Porter

 

Paid for by Katie Porter for Congress

To contribute via check, please address to: Katie Porter for Congress, PO Box 5176, Irvine, CA 92616

RSN: FOCUS: Andrew Perez and Julia Rock | Big Pharma's Favorite Democrats Saved the Drug Industry Half a Trillion Dollars

 

 

18 November 21

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FOCUS: Andrew Perez and Julia Rock | Big Pharma's Favorite Democrats Saved the Drug Industry Half a Trillion Dollars
Andrew Perez and Julia Rock, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Corporate Democrats like Senator Kyrsten Sinema saved Big Pharma $450 billion by watering down the party's drug pricing plan."

Corporate Democrats like Senator Kyrsten Sinema saved Big Pharma $450 billion by watering down the party’s drug pricing plan.

Big Pharma’s massive lobbying campaign and advertising offensive against Democrats’ drug pricing plan saved the industry nearly half a trillion dollars. That represents a return of more than 1,700 times the investment the drug industry has made on lobbying Congress this year.

This outcome illustrates why industry groups are willing to throw ungodly sums of money at influencing Washington lawmakers. While spending hundreds of millions on lobbying and advocacy efforts might seem exorbitant, it’s nothing compared to the hundreds of billions these business interests stand to lose if legislative decisions don’t go their way.

In September, House Democrats estimated that the drug pricing provisions in their Build Back Better agenda reconciliation bill would save $700 billion over a decade. Democrats’ compromise drug plan — negotiated by pharmaceutical industry favorites Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Representative Scott Peters of California, and Representative Kurt Schrader of Oregon — would only save $250 billion during that same time, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a pro-austerity think tank. The difference equals $450 billion in savings.

According to data from OpenSecrets, the pharmaceutical and health products industries have spent $263 million on lobbying in Washington so far this year. Dark money groups with ties to Big Pharma have run misleading ad campaigns promoting the Democrats who worked to gut the party’s drug pricing measure, and they have also spent millions on ads attacking the entire concept of allowing the government to negotiate drug prices — an idea that is broadly popular and one that many other countries have implemented.

In a new tax return we obtained, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) disclosed donating another $2.7 million in 2020 to Center Forward, a dark money group that’s spent at least $1.2 million touting Sinema in Arizona in recent months. PhRMA, a powerful drug lobbying group, contributed $7.2 million to Center Forward from 2016 to 2020, accounting for more than a quarter of its revenue.

The lobbying and related advocacy blitz by Big Pharma to boost allied lawmakers and oppose Democrats’ drug pricing measure may seem staggering, especially if you live in a state or district flooded with their ads. But in total, the effort will end up costing less than 0.1 percent of the $450 billion the industry will get to keep thanks to corporate Democrats’ handiwork. And drug lobbyists are still working to chip away at the legislation further and block provisions that would limit future price hikes.

Of course, there is some chance that Democrats won’t manage to pass their Build Back Better bill at all, despite negotiating the legislation since March. But if the bill does become law, voters may not even begin to see any savings from the drug pricing provisions until after the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats could lose control of Congress — and some other changes wouldn’t take effect until after the 2024 presidential election.

As Politico noted on Monday, “Penalties on drugmakers that hike prices faster than inflation and a new $35-per-month cap on insulin won’t begin until 2023. A $2,000 cap for all out-of-pocket drug spending for seniors won’t be implemented until 2024, and the lower prices Medicare will negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for some of the most expensive drugs won’t be available until 2025 — with a full phase-in coming in 2028.”

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RSN: FOCUS: Banks Lobby Against Biden Proposal to Crack Down on Ultrawealthy "Tax Cheats"

 

 

26 October 21

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WE’RE REALLY TRYING TO MAKE UP GROUND HERE — It’s late in the month and we are a long way from where we would normally be and where we need to be on donations. A huge number of people who come here often are not donating. We’re getting into serious trouble over a few donations. Hit the donation link!
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FOCUS: Banks Lobby Against Biden Proposal to Crack Down on Ultrawealthy "Tax Cheats"
Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Lacy writes: "The federal government loses $600 billion each year because wealthy Americans avoid paying taxes. The top 1 percent of Americans 'choose not to pay' more than $160 billion a year in taxes, according to an analysis last month from the Department of the Treasury."

Mostly rich people avoid paying $600 billion a year in taxes, in part through lack of income reporting to the IRS that Biden is trying to change.

The federal government loses $600 billion each year because wealthy Americans avoid paying taxes. The top 1 percent of Americans “choose not to pay” more than $160 billion a year in taxes, according to an analysis last month from the Department of the Treasury. Tax enforcement should rely on the IRS, but Congress has routinely cut its budget year after year. The rate of audits of wealthy taxpayers has dropped significantly over the last two decades. “They play by a different set of rules,” President Joe Biden said last month. The ultrawealthy, he said, pay “virtually nothing” in taxes because, with lax reporting requirements, the IRS doesn’t know how much they made.

Democrats are planning to do something about it. The bill working its way through reconciliation process, which Democrats are using to sidestep the filibuster, includes provisions designed to make sure people pay what they owe; target the wealthy Americans Biden has called “tax cheats”; and close the corporate tax loophole. One approach is to change the IRS reporting requirements, which the Treasury Department estimates would raise $460 billion in revenue over the next decade, to force banks to report customer account information.

The moves are facing opposition. Democrats are reportedly poised to back away from the corporate tax hike, saying that they might include it in another bill. And, in recent months, big banks and financial industry lobbying groups have ramped up efforts to fight the reconciliation package’s enhanced IRS reporting requirements. Republicans — prone to asking how social programs like Biden’s Build Back Better agenda will be paid for — are also lobbying against the tax reporting provisions. Twenty Republican attorneys general sent a letter on October 15 to Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen opposing the measures.

“We can pay for these game-changing investments in economic growth by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement. “The fact that Republicans and big banks are bending over backwards to protect wealthy tax cheats who are breaking the law and actively taking advantage of every other American says all you need to know about what’s on the line in this debate over the future of the American middle class.”

Opponents of the reporting requirements argue that forcing banks to disclose gross individual account flows to the IRS would invade individual privacy, put an undue burden on banks, and open up a wealth of data to potential breaches. Groups like the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group that represents 5,000 small and mid-sized banks, lobbied against the new reporting requirements by describing the proposal as the “IRS monitoring plan.”

“Banks and their wealthy clients are outright lying about this proposal, claiming that it would give the IRS information on individual transactions,” Senate Finance Committee member Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. said on a press call last week with Finance Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to push back on what they called a disinformation campaign by bank lobbyists and Republicans. “And many Republicans are backing them up to satisfy their corporate and wealthy donors. It’s no surprise that those who have billions in unpaid taxes on the line would gladly spend millions of dollars lobbying against this proposal, because it would help un-rig the tax system just a little bit.”

Banks began lobbying in earnest directly against the reporting measures earlier this year, when the proposal was rolled out as part of Biden’s American Families Plan, the first iteration of Democrats’ social spending package. The American Bankers Association, the country’s largest bank lobbying group, sent representatives to Capitol Hill to push back on the proposals.

In August, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, introduced an amendment to stop the IRS from using funds to assess individual account flows and called Biden’s proposal an “outrageous violation of the privacy of American citizens.” He thanked the Independent Community Bankers of America and other groups for backing his amendment, which failed in a 49-50 vote. Crapo has received at least $10,000 this year from banks and industry PACs, including at least two groups fighting the measure.

By September, banking groups’ opposition picked up. The American Bankers Association, along with the Community Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Auto Care Association, the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents, and 35 other bank lobbying and interest groups sent a letter to House leadership to express “strong opposition” to the IRS reporting requirement.

Bank of America lobbied last quarter on issues related to “financial account reporting” in the reconciliation package, according to disclosures. JPMorgan Chase issued guidance in recent months instructing bank tellers not to make political statements or explain the reporting proposal to customers who asked or complained about the potential changes; spokesperson Patricia Wexler told The Intercept that the bank did not spend on ads or lobby against the proposed changes and had not urged its customers to contact members of Congress.

In addition to national groups, more than a dozen state banking and industry lobbying groups have also spoken out against the proposal, including a host of state-level chambers of commerce. The Texas Bankers Association said last month it was considering a legal challenge if the reconciliation package includes a “bank surveillance” program. The group launched statewide radio ads against the proposal last month, and spokesperson Carlos Espinosa said it had gotten 40,000 responses so far to its efforts. Several local banks posted the same statement to Facebook last month: “While we typically do not raise issues occurring in Washington with our customers, Congress is considering requiring financial institutions to report detailed information on customer bank accounts to the IRS.”

Banking interest group officials justified their opposition by arguing that the reporting would be too onerous on the banks. “It’s not a function of just adding a few lines on something,” said Paul Merski, an executive vice president at the Independent Community Bankers of America, who claimed new software and staff would be required to implement the changes.

Experts questioned whether the burden for banks would be so high when virtually all banking is computerized. “You’re talking about two pieces of information on a given account. You’re talking about information that the bank already has,” William Gale, an expert on economic policy at the Brookings Institution, told The Intercept. “The objection that this is an intolerable administrative burden seems entirely misplaced to me.”

“If you show me a bank that manages its bookkeeping and accounts by hand, then I will agree that for that bank this would be a burdensome regulation,” Gale said. ”I think it’s much more sort of a reflexive claim on the part of the financial institutions that they don’t want to have to report anything.”

Biden’s proposal is an important piece of efforts to curtail tax evasion, Gale said. “It’s hard to see how policymakers are willing to support the continued high levels of tax evasion that we see.”

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RSN: FOCUS | 'We Need to Deliver': Anger Grows at Senators Manchin, Sinema Over Obstruction of Democratic Priorities

 

 

21 September 21

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FOCUS | 'We Need to Deliver': Anger Grows at Senators Manchin, Sinema Over Obstruction of Democratic Priorities
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Democrats are still divided over President Biden’s sweeping $3.5 trillion spending plan to expand the social safety net, increase taxes on the rich and corporations, improve worker rights and combat the climate crisis."

Democrats are still divided over President Biden’s sweeping $3.5 trillion spending plan to expand the social safety net, increase taxes on the rich and corporations, improve worker rights and combat the climate crisis. Senate Democrats are hoping to use the budget reconciliation process to pass the bill, but this will only work if the entire Democratic caucus backs the deal, and conservative Democrats have balked at the price tag. Progressive Democrats in the House, meanwhile, say they won’t vote for a separate $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed by the Senate unless the reconciliation bill is part of the package. “We want to pass the full agenda that President Biden has set forth,” says Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressmember from California. “This is what President Biden campaigned on, and we need to deliver.” Khanna also discusses U.S. immigration policy, raising the refugee cap, investigating the full 20 years of the War in Afghanistan and bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at what Senator Bernie Sanders calls “the most consequential legislation since the 1930s and FDR and the New Deal.” We’re talking about President Biden’s sweeping three-and-a-half-trillion-dollar spending plan to expand the social safety net, increase taxes on the rich and corporations, improve worker rights and combat the climate emergency.

Senate Democrats are hoping to use the budget reconciliation process to pass the larger package, but this will only succeed if the entire Democratic caucus backs the deal. So far, two conservative Democratic senators — Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — have balked at the three-and-a-half-trillion-dollar price tag.

This comes as House Democrats face a looming deadline on September 27. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had agreed to hold a vote on the separate, bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill by that date, but now some House Democrats say the deadline may be missed. A group of progressive Democrats are threatening to vote against the smaller, bipartisan infrastructure deal if it’s not voted on alongside the larger three-and-a-half-trillion-dollar plan.

Last week, President Biden urged Democrats to back his spending plan, outlining some of its key components.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Investments in roads, bridges, highways; clean water in every home and every school; universal broadband; quality, affordable places for families to live. And we can invest in our people, giving our families a little help with their toughest expenses, like daycare, child care, elder care, prescription drugs, healthcare, preparing our young people to compete against any country in the world with preschool and community college. We can confront this crisis of extreme weather and climate change, and not only protect our communities, but create new opportunities, new industries and new jobs. In short, this is an opportunity to be the nation we know we can be, a nation where all of us — all of us, not just those at the top — are getting a share of the benefits of a growing economy in the years ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden, speaking Thursday at the White House.

Meanwhile, Democrats were dealt a setback Sunday when the unelected Senate parliamentarian ruled Democrats could not include a pathway to citizenship to millions of people as part of the reconciliation bill.

We go now to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Ro Khanna, Democratic congressmember from California.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Congressmember Khanna, you are part of a group of progressive Democrats that say that you will vote against the bipartisan bill if it’s not voted on alongside this larger, sweeping, FDR-esque, three-and-a-half-trillion-dollar plan. Explain your position.

REP. RO KHANNA: Amy, our position has been consistent for months. We want to pass the full agenda that President Biden has set forth. Yes, we need investments in roads and bridges and highways and the traditional infrastructure, but we also need investments in modern infrastructure that takes into account the climate. You can’t just have traditional infrastructure without having a clean energy standard, without investing electric vehicles, without investing in renewable energy. And we need the human investments in child care, in the expansion of Medicare, in free community college. This is what President Biden campaigned on, and we need to deliver.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, how would this work? And talk about the timeline right now. And maybe what most people don’t realize, this three-and-a-half trillion dollars is not going to be spent this year.

REP. RO KHANNA: Thank you, Amy, for making that clarification. It is over 10 years. People don’t talk about the fact that over those same 10 years, we’re going to spend $7.5 trillion on defense. When they talk about defense, they use the one-year number, but when they’re talking about social investments, human investments, they use the 10-year number. So this is $350 billion over the year.

The other point that is worth making is that the progressives have been willing to have a conversation. We are willing to engage in a dialogue with the White House, with Senator Manchin, with Senator Sinema, of how we get this done. The question is: Are they going to engage in that dialogue? We still haven’t heard what Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema are for. They keep saying what they’re against. What we want to know is: What are they for?

AMY GOODMAN: So, on Sunday, you tweeted, “Can anyone explain to me why we are passively giving Elizabeth MacDonough who has not won a single vote more power than any sitting Senator or House member to kill the $15 wage and common sense immigration policy? Overrule her,” you said. Well, since most people don’t know who she is, explain who she is, what she did and what you think has to happen.

REP. RO KHANNA: I don’t have anything personal against Elizabeth MacDonough. I just don’t understand this idea that a Senate parliamentarian is going to decide whether this country — whether we can have a $15 minimum wage, whether we can have a path to citizenship for those who are undocumented. I mean, we fight elections over this. This is what congressional elections are over. This is what the presidential election is over. Madison, Jefferson, they didn’t put Senate parliamentarian in the Constitution. It’s a total artifice that is a creation of arcane Senate rules.

And the point is that the Senate, with a 51-vote majority, is not bound by the Senate parliamentarian’s advice on what can pass and what can’t pass as an exception to the filibuster. In the past, the Senate parliamentarian has been overruled many times by presidents and vice presidents. The vice president, of course, is the president of the Senate. And what I’ve said is that we should overrule her opinion on this. It’s just plain wrong. I mean, $15 minimum wage does have a budget impact. Making people citizens who pay taxes does have a budget impact. And it’s mind-boggling to me that this one person is going to decide the fate of millions of people.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what can you do?

REP. RO KHANNA: The administration can overrule the parliamentarian. I mean, it takes 51 senators to say we disagree with the parliamentarian’s ruling. We have those 51 senators, with our 50 Senate members plus Vice President Harris. And a number of us said that they should have overruled her months ago on the $15 wage. Now this has become a pattern of her obstructing the president’s agenda.

She’s making opinions. I mean, she’s opining that, well, someone may take away immigration status later on. First of all, she doesn’t understand constitutional law. You can’t just repeal something. It’s a violation of the due process. Second, it’s not her place to be having those political conversations. No one elected her. She has no legitimacy.

So, the president should make it clear, vice president should make it clear, that we will overrule her. Now, the question is, well, this will upset norms, this will upset decorum. I mean, what’s more important? Norms and decorum or the lives of millions of people who don’t have citizenship or the lives of millions of people who aren’t making a decent wage?

AMY GOODMAN: So, your message to Manchin and Sinema right now, and also the issue of who they’re beholden to — for example, the well-known ties of Senator Manchin to the oil, gas and coal industry — and how that can play into his opposing a three-and-a-half-trillion-dollar deal which is about the greening of America?

REP. RO KHANNA: You know, Amy, I have a decent relationship with Senator Manchin. I’ve never questioned his integrity. My point is, let’s get to the right policy. Let’s have a conversation. I mean, I understand that there are fossil fuel industry in his state. And so, if he has a view that we need to have more investment in his state in clean energy so that these jobs are first in West Virginia and he can go to his constituents and say, “This is not going to cost the economy in West Virginia; it’s actually going to add to it,” I’m open to having that conversation. Many progressives are open to having a conversation with him.

We don’t know exactly where he and Senator Sinema are coming from. For example, on voting rights, his plan, it’s not one I fully agree with, but it’s a good one, and the progressives can rally around his voting rights plan. I guess my question to the senator, about Manchin and Sinema, is: What is their plan? Where is their — what are they proposing? That, as an initial matter, is necessary for us to get to a yes. And we made that clear to both the White House and those senators, that they have to come up with a proposal.

AMY GOODMAN: He, Manchin, has said he has a concern about the money. Manchin has received more campaign donations from the oil, coal and gas industries than any other senator. Maybe that’s the money he’s concerned about?

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, Amy, look, I’m having a hearing, as the environment chair, where we’re going to get the fossil fuel companies in for the first time — Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell. So, we’re certainly going to realize and find out what they’ve been doing to kill legislation, to have lobbying influence.

I will say this: I mean, West Virginia has a large fossil fuel industry. So, if there are individuals who are supporting him in those industries, that, to me, in and of itself, doesn’t — isn’t what is the decisive factor. What is the decisive factor is: What is he for? And if he comes onto the table and says, “Look, I want these things for West Virginia,” I think he’ll find a lot of people in the caucus are willing to do that. We want to have a dialogue with him. I personally have never questioned his integrity. What I want to do is: How do we get to a yes for the president’s agenda? And it’s in all of our interests as Democrats to do that.

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