Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,232]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

There is nothing really, just hating. 

The guys is doing a good job with finding fraud waste and abuse. He explain all in the video. 

That article is just a cheap shot taken at his company doing good. 

riddle me this

IF they are trying to get rid of fraud

why the fuck would they try and wipe out some of the main, most powerful ANTI-fraud parts of the US government?

ones that have found billions in fraud over the years and protect the US taxpayers and US citizens in general from systemic fraud and theft by some of the most powerful banks and firms in the world

for example

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the main US Government oversight to prevent fraud by the the giant banks and financial institutions

and

also they have fired (or are trying to) most all of the INDEPENDENT, NON-PARTISAN US Inspectors General for the major departments of the US government

 

You are taking gaslighting to another level trying to say this is about PREVENTING fraud.

 

Plus, Musk and Trump are running around screaming about social Security, etc cheques being paid out to 150 year olds.

 

pure bullshit (and betrays a staggering ignorance of computer languages)

 

The US Social Security computer system runs on the old COBOL programming language, which does not use a date or time type.  

So the date is stored as a number using the ISO 8601 standard.  The epoch for this is 150 years ago (1875) - aka the metre standard.

So if you don’t know the date of something, it will be a 0 value, which in COBOL will default to 1875, ie 150 years ago, the date of the Convention du Mètre.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_Convention

The Metre Convention (French: Convention du Mètre), also known as the Treaty of the Metre, is an international treaty that was signed in Paris on 20 May 1875 by representatives of 17 nations: Argentina, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, Ottoman Empire, United States of America, and Venezuela.

The treaty created the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), an intergovernmental organization, under the authority of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) and the supervision of the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM). These organizations coordinate international metrology and the development of internationally recognized systems of measurement.

Edited February 15 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

5 hours ago, Fernando said:

There is nothing really, just hating. 

The guys is doing a good job with finding fraud waste and abuse. He explain all in the video. 

That article is just a cheap shot taken at his company doing good. 

Smokescreen. Honestly mate take the blinkers off -they are nothing but greedy grifters, a billionaires club of greed, liars and rapists gaslighting the US public

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

Trump and his billionaire buddies removing immunity of prosecution for whistleblowers......

"If exposing a Crime, is treated the same as committing a Crime, you are being ruled by Criminals." - Edward Snowden

[Vesper 30,232]

Musk to Unions: The Nazis Are Coming

How Elon Musk’s DOGE logo is not a dogwhistle, it’s a slap in the face

https://www.mind-war.com/p/musk-to-unions-the-nazis-are-coming

Last week, the man currently rummaging around in our personal information, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and embarrassing America on the world stage, posted this logo for “DOGE” — an odd cartoonish thing that I originally dismissed.

But a friend pointed something out which is very important. Note the golden wheel.

Here’s a comparison of the logo and a short clip from a documentary about the Nazis.

The German Labour Front was the Nazi replacement for the trade unions that Hitler dissolved completely in 1933. Here was their logo, complete with 14 teeth, the same as the DOGE logo.

Consider that we are less than one month after Trump was inaugurated. This is how they treated unions in Nazi Germany. The German Labour Front was a division of the NSDAP. This is what the golden gear represents:

As early as March 1933, two months after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Sturmabteiling began to attack trade union offices without legal consequences. Several union offices were occupied, their furnishings were destroyed, their documents were stolen or burned, and union members were beaten and in some cases killed; the police ignored these attacks and declared itself without jurisdiction.These early attacks occurred at random, carried out spontaneously by rank-and-file Nazis motivated by a desire to destroy Marxism, and the Nazi Party leadership only implemented a general policy in May. On 2 May, 1933, trade union headquarters throughout Germany were occupied, their funds were confiscated, and the unions were officially abolished and their leaders arrested. Many union leaders were beaten and sent to concentration camps, including some who had previously agreed to cooperate with the Nazis.

The number 14 has significance to American National Socialist movements because it represents the “14 words” — the most famous neo-Nazi slogan, written by white supremacist terrorist David Lane:

“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Yesterday when Trump quoted Napoleon, Elon Musk chose 14 flags to celebrate it.

 

On the DOGE logo there are 8 stars above the cartoon, and 8 stars on the flag inside the gear. This is another National Socialist signal. It means Heil Hitler. Musk has used this signal numerous times, in addition to quite literally doing two Hitler salutes at the inauguration.

Elon Musk is daring the world to acknowledge what he is. He is daring unions, or government workers, or the press to stop him. It’s almost as if the corporate media and public is too embarrassed to simply call a Nazi, a Nazi.

We should be embarrassed. Say the quiet parts or die regretting you didn’t.

 

 

Edited February 18 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,232]

Anti-Vaxxer Thinks He's A Big Hero For Refusing Heart Transplant

Well, it's a choice.

https://www.wonkette.com/p/anti-vaxxer-thinks-hes-a-big-hero

There are a lot of contradictions involved in the anti-vaccine movement. People who would rather watch their children die from measles than have autism. People who would rather die themselves than get a vaccine, because they think the vaccine will harm their health in some capacity.

That’s the category Ken Long of Eaton, Ohio, falls into, because the 54-year-old veteran is literally choosing to die rather than get a vaccine so he can get a heart transplant … because he thinks the vaccine will give him heart problems. Also because of his “personal religious beliefs.”

"When I decide something, I mean it, and if it takes dying, it's what it is," Long told KOMO TV. "They don't know enough about it, and plus it's already done a lot of damage. People have said blood clots. There are known cardiac issues.”

“And our personal religious beliefs!” his wife Christina added, without explaining what on earth those religious beliefs are. Given that even Christian Scientists are not opposed to vaccines and the couple doesn’t appear to be either Hasidic or Amish, it’s unclear what those would even be.

Via KOMO:

"I don't want to die because I got a granddaughter and my wife and everything and my kids, but I believe so hard with not taking the vaccine that I'm willing to die for," Long said.

By sharing his story, Long hopes to influence hospitals to change their vaccination policies.

"I'm 54 years old, but there are kids out there right now that are sick, and they're over there with beliefs of not vaccinating, and that's why I'm doing this," Long said. "It's more important for these kids to have the opportunity to live."

Except for how having a heart transplant affects one’s immune system, meaning that a kid “with beliefs of not vaccinating” would have a far greater chance of dying from COVID (or measles, or the flu, or any illness really).

Long is far from the first to pull this. Just last week, 12-year-old Adaline Deal, a distant family member of JD Vance, was denied a heart transplant because her parents claimed it was against their religion as “non-denominational Christians.” There is not, to anyone’s knowledge, a single thing in the Bible about vaccines.

Because the hospital could not, in good conscience, give Long a heart, they gave him a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) to pump blood to his heart.

"I can hardly do anything. If the power goes out, I have to worry about my batteries and my charger," Long said. "You can't get wet, so showering is an issue."

So this man is willing to die and willing to smell just to avoid getting a vaccine. And, if you can believe it, it gets even more stupid than that! While Christ Hospital refuses to give him a heart transplant, there are, apparently, some places that will. Long, however, will not go to them, because he wants to make a point.

"Do we want to switch hospitals to save his life? No," Christina said. "We would hope that Christ would continue to see him and grant him a transplant and recognize that this is his personal choice."

In a video interview with Long and his wife Christina, Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom President Stephanie Stock called the situation “vaccine status discrimination” and suggested that the treatment Long received was “punishment” for not taking the vaccine. Because, of course, what doctors are concerned about is hurting his feelings or ensuring that Bill Gates can track his whereabouts at any given time. Not that it’s literally a health issue or anything.

As Christ Hospital explained:

At The Christ Hospital Health Network, the goal with any organ transplant is to focus on helping each patient have long-term success and live a long and healthy life post surgery.

Our expert multidisciplinary team of physicians, psychologists, care coordinators and social workers carefully evaluate each individual to determine their eligibility and placement on the waiting list. Organ donation is a gift from another patient and family, and it is our responsibility to ensure that the gift is used with the maximum chance of success once transplanted.

Patients who receive transplants will be immunosuppressed for the rest of their lives. Vaccines play a vital role in mitigating a patient’s risk of life-threatening infections especially in the first year after transplant. Decisions about eligibility for transplantation involve discussions between our providers, the patient and their family and are always made in the best interest of the patient following established national guidelines for organ transplant.

There are lots of reasons why someone might be denied a heart transplant. If they have a drug problem, if they have other health problems, then they can’t get a transplant, because there just is not an endless supply of quality organs for those who need them, and they need to go to the people they will help for the longest amount of time.

We all understand that these people think vaccines are bad, that they think they will cause them harm of some kind, but that’s not factually true and no one should have to waste a heart because they want to have their ridiculous beliefs coddled.

[KOMO]

Edited February 18 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,232]

dangerous insanity from Trump...........

 

Trump says Ukraine 'should have never started' the war with Russia

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-ukraine-never-started-233129075.html

 

 

[Fernando 6,585]

On 15/02/2025 at 07:38, Vesper said:

riddle me this

IF they are trying to get rid of fraud

why the fuck would they try and wipe out some of the main, most powerful ANTI-fraud parts of the US government?

ones that have found billions in fraud over the years and protect the US taxpayers and US citizens in general from systemic fraud and theft by some of the most powerful banks and firms in the world

for example

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the main US Government oversight to prevent fraud by the the giant banks and financial institutions

and

also they have fired (or are trying to) most all of the INDEPENDENT, NON-PARTISAN US Inspectors General for the major departments of the US government

 

You are taking gaslighting to another level trying to say this is about PREVENTING fraud.

 

Plus, Musk and Trump are running around screaming about social Security, etc cheques being paid out to 150 year olds.

 

pure bullshit (and betrays a staggering ignorance of computer languages)

 

The US Social Security computer system runs on the old COBOL programming language, which does not use a date or time type.  

So the date is stored as a number using the ISO 8601 standard.  The epoch for this is 150 years ago (1875) - aka the metre standard.

So if you don’t know the date of something, it will be a 0 value, which in COBOL will default to 1875, ie 150 years ago, the date of the Convention du Mètre.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_Convention

The Metre Convention (French: Convention du Mètre), also known as the Treaty of the Metre, is an international treaty that was signed in Paris on 20 May 1875 by representatives of 17 nations: Argentina, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, Ottoman Empire, United States of America, and Venezuela.

The treaty created the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), an intergovernmental organization, under the authority of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) and the supervision of the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM). These organizations coordinate international metrology and the development of internationally recognized systems of measurement.

 

I would still give them the benefit of doubt. I don't see Musk as being corrupt. He is a geek that Trump is tapping to help with tech side. 

As he said here: 

 

[Vesper 30,232]

33 minutes ago, Fernando said:

 

I would still give them the benefit of doubt. I don't see Musk as being corrupt. He is a geek that Trump is tapping to help with tech side. 

As he said here: 

 

Anyone who gives Trump, at this point, any benefit of the doubt,

after decades of skulduggery, corruption, olympian level lying, fraud (34 felony convictions, and multiple civil judgments againt him), an attempted coup d'état...............

and now a staggering amount of unconstitutional actions that are putting the entire US system of governance in peril............

is simply being wilfully ignorant and/or a member of the MAGA cult.

Edited February 19 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,232]

Elon Musk’s DOGE ‘Savings’ Aren’t Really Savings

DOGE is axing billions worth of federal contracts and leases — but that money is still allocated to specific agencies.

https://www.notus.org/policy/doge-savings-congress

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency says it’s saving taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. In reality, none of the money has gone back to taxpayers yet — nor has it been cut from the federal budget.

The cost-cutting blitz has already halted the spending of more than $55 billion, according to DOGE, although that number is difficult to verify as DOGE only lists around 20% of its line-item spending reductions on its website. That includes canceling programs ranging from billion-dollar IT-support contracts to $32,200 set aside for two students interning at the Treasury Department.

“More of your tax dollars saved,” Musk posted on X after DOGE claimed credit on Thursday for saving $115 million in canceled contracts.

A Trump administration official told NOTUS that “Depending on the funds” the money is “either repurposed or returned to the Treasury Department.”

But it’s unlikely the White House will be able to unilaterally direct congressionally appropriated funds away from agencies, multiple federal budget experts told NOTUS, meaning those tax dollars aren’t likely to make their way directly back into taxpayers’ pockets or be used to pay down the national debt.

Under the process for appropriating federal dollars, the funds are likely still sitting in government agencies’ coffers.

“OK, we’re not going to spend it on this one project. Well, it’s still in this pool of money that the agency could spend for other projects that were similarly appropriated,” said Zach Moller, the director of the think tank Third Way’s economic program. “If that’s the situation, then there’s probably not going to be any savings.”

Congress’ power of the purse allows it to dictate appropriations to federal agencies — including moving those appropriations around or rescinding them.

Federal officials who decide to spend less than the congressionally appropriated amount — or want to cut spending altogether — must provide notice to Congress. Congress, in turn, has 45 days to pass a law allowing the rescission of funds. If Congress doesn’t pass a law, the funds must be spent as appropriated. Spending on contracts that agencies are obligated to must also be completed.

The White House declined to say whether it sent a request to Congress to rescind money from federal agencies.

“That’s sort of the general procedure that should be followed. It’s not being followed,” said Steve Redburn, a former senior government official in the Office of Management and Budget and now-lecturer at George Washington University.

“Congress hasn’t, as far as I know, hasn’t received any requests from the administration to actually rescind the money, so it’s possible the money is simply being delayed by the disruption and will eventually be used as intended by Congress,” he continued.

Neither DOGE nor the office of Speaker Mike Johnson responded to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the House Budget Committee deferred to the White House.

But House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a Tuesday post on X that he wants Congress’ budget resolution to include “passing into law @DOGE’s identified waste in government.”

And Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview on Fox News last week that DOGE’s work was “long overdue.”

“It’s going to take somebody, probably from the outside, somebody like Elon Musk, to be able to do it and do it right,” Thune said. “Obviously they’re going to identify some things that, you know, perhaps can’t be changed or fixed, but there’s a ton of stuff out there, I think, can be done better.”

Asked if Musk or others from DOGE have contacted Thune about rescinding funding, a spokesperson for Thune directed NOTUS to the Fox News interview.

Without involving Congress in the process, it’s doubtful that DOGE can actually significantly cut government spending in a way that boosts savings for Americans.

“Even to move stuff around in the various accounts in a particular department or agency will often require a reprogramming,” one House Democratic lawmaker told NOTUS. “That sometimes involves congressional assent.”

The view from inside the Office of Personnel Management is that the DOGE team is focused on cutting what they can with little regard for where the appropriated money ends up.

“It doesn’t seem like they’ve gotten that far,” one OPM employee told NOTUS. “They don’t appear to be considering the consequences of what they’re doing as a whole.”

It’s unclear how long DOGE could continue to circumvent the process for reducing or stopping spending agencies.

Multiple outside groups have accused Trump and his administration of executive overreach in lawsuits, citing the failure to reach out to Congress. Democratic lawmakers have signaled that Trump and Musk’s actions are likely to lead to more litigation that centers around laws on impoundment.

Because of the legal requirements for rescinding funds, many of DOGE’s claims about saving taxpayer money are simply hypotheticals, according to Bobby Kogan, the senior director for federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress.

“If they illegally cause us to not spend, then that means we have a smaller deficit. But it’s not like your taxes were any lower, right? You paid the same taxes,” Kogan told NOTUS. “The next step that I think is really important is that, because this is illegal, they’re not going to succeed at … lowering the deficit eventually.”

There are still plenty of question marks around what happens next when it comes to axed appropriations.

“We’re still trying to figure out what authority Elon Musk has in this process,” Moller said. “It’s unprecedented, it’s bizarre and it’s scary.”

—

[Vesper 30,232]

Musk and Trump Are Causing the Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History

Empires have fallen before. But it’s never been this purely idiotic.

https://prospect.org/world/2025-02-19-musk-trump-causing-dumbest-imperial-collapse-in-history/

A month into the second Trump administration, I think it is fair to conclude that the American empire in its current form is collapsing. The post-1945 global order, with the United States at its apex, is no more. America itself is not going anywhere—at least not yet—but the foundation of the empire, namely its structure of alliances and partnerships, has been dealt irreparable damage. Western Europe, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and especially Canada now view America with suspicion if not outright hostility, and they are right to do so.

Now, the history of empires is the story of their rise and inevitable fall. As Herodotus wrote about Greek city-states, “most of those which were great once are small today; and those which used to be small were great in my own time.” But nobody has matched this current downfall for sheer egregious stupidity.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of even a single competitor for that title. There have been, to be sure, many idiotic imperial leaders throughout history who helped blow up their empires through bungling and mistakes. Tsar Nicholas II was an incompetent boob whose closest adviser was a charlatan mystic, and he personally led the failed military effort during the First World War that eventually destroyed his regime. Yet Russia bore only a small share of the blame for starting the war in the first place, and other much better-governed empires like Germany and Austria-Hungary, which shared much of that blame, also collapsed because of the war’s strains.

The eventual collapse of the Western Roman Empire began when a large Roman army was heavily defeated by Goths, who had adopted many Roman military tactics. The Eastern European Empire persisted for another thousand years, but it too eventually collapsed following military defeat at the hands of the Ottomans.

That is how empires tend to fall. Either they are defeated in battle, and are conquered or collapse, or they suffer a succession crisis and fall apart (both often enabled by corruption and mismanagement). Or they are simply eclipsed by another power, as happened when the British Empire fell short and the U.S. succeeded it.

President Trump, by contrast, was handed an empire in splendid condition. The core alliance of NATO was stronger than it had been in decades, as Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine pushed Sweden and Finland to join. Thanks to President Biden’s policies, the American economy was the envy of the world, with a post-pandemic recovery that outstripped any peer nation. The dollar was still by far the most important reserve currency, and the U.S. still had control over global financial pipelines.

No serious threats were on the horizon, either. In its war with Ukraine, Russia has burned through most of its gigantic stockpile of Soviet-era military hardware, taken perhaps 800,000 casualties, and put its economy under terrific pressure. China, while the only peer competitor the U.S. has faced since 1991, is saddled with deep economic difficulties and looking down the barrel of population collapse.

Trumpism strikes directly at the heart of American power projection: trust.

But Trump and Musk are blowing America’s imperial foundations to kingdom come. Take USAID, which as the largest distributor of humanitarian aid in the world, has both done a tremendous amount of good work and also served as a carrot for America’s global predominance—until now. The agency has been all but dismantled, unleashing havoc all over the globe. HIV and drug-resistant tuberculosis are now spreading unchecked in many countries reliant on USAID medication, both proving America cannot be trusted and threatening outbreaks of those diseases in the U.S. itself.

Both Trump and Musk have attacked NATO; Trump has reportedly said he wants to withdraw from the alliance, while Musk has said it “needs an overhaul” and he wonders why it “continued to exist.” More importantly, Trump has repeatedly suggested annexing Canada, a NATO member. The enormous implications of this threat are clearly not getting through to many American elites. At The New York Times, Peter Baker has a column blithely speculating about which way Canadians might vote should they be annexed, concluding that Democrats would likely benefit.

But this is not a political parlor game for Canadians. They are incandescently furious, and they are right to be. Canada stood shoulder to shoulder by America through the great bloodbaths of the 20th century. Since then, it has been a quietly loyal neighbor, making not a peep of trouble along the world’s longest land border, and providing a vast supply of energy, mineral, timber, and other exports to fuel the American economy. And this is the thanks they get: A senile fascist American president who suggests a war of conquest—and make no mistake, that is what it would take—because he wants to make America look big but doesn’t understand how the Mercator projection exaggerates the size of northern land masses—which, it’s been reported, is one reason for his coveting Greenland, too.

Baker’s witless speculation isn’t even correct. Canadians, if they got to vote under American occupation—a big if—would obviously elect a Canadian nationalist party.

Trumpism strikes directly at the heart of American power projection: trust. NATO members and other partners go along with the American-led order because it has been a pretty good deal, all things considered. Rather than exacting imperial tribute, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the others were encouraged to develop and become rich. In return, they allowed the U.S. to develop overwhelming military dominance, and played along with our control over the global financial system.

Threatening unprovoked war on a NATO ally for no reason destroys this trust—indeed, it makes clear that America is now a rogue state, led by erratic, violent madmen. Even Hitler felt he had to make up some lying pretext about German minorities being oppressed before he stole the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Trump just saw a map and thought, “I’ll have that.”

Something similar is true of Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and Europe. We have pre-existing trade agreements with those countries—indeed, the one with Canada and Mexico was signed by Trump himself. Yet Trump will break his word on a whim.

Again, the lesson is clear: America cannot be trusted, and all its former allies should start preparing for the worst, including developing their own nuclear deterrents in case of war with the U.S. itself. Some reserve currency replacement must be found, and new supply chains not reliant on the U.S. set up. Crash military buildups must be carried out to replace American security guarantees. You’d be a fool to rely on any American promises whatsoever, including ones made by Trump or Musk. These men lie as easily as they breathe.

Now, should it annex Canada, Greenland, and/or anywhere else that catches Trump’s fancy, America would set up a new and different empire, much smaller and weaker, based around explicit violent threats rather than alliances.

But it also might just fall to bits. Musk and his DOGE neo-Nazi teens have been firing tens of thousands of federal workers willy-nilly. The results have not yet been catastrophic domestically: utter chaos at national parks, an apparent sharp increase in airline crashes, and other problems.

But the DOGE Muskjugend recently illegally fired many of the workers who secure America’s nuclear arsenal, apparently by accident, and they are rooting around in the IRS and the Social Security Administration (prompting the head of the latter agency to resign), which hold much of the most sensitive data in the government. It’s not hard to imagine this going world-historically bad.

America suffered no military defeat. We were not outstripped economically by a bigger or better-organized competitor. Rather, we elected an insane tyrant who is blowing up the foundation of our international power for no reason, all while he lets a South African immigrant ultra-billionaire and his crew of teenybopper fascists tear the wiring out of the federal government—again, for no reason.

Never underestimate the destructive power of stupidity.

Edited February 19 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,232]

Heads up... Trump just took control of independent federal agencies by executive order...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/18/2304692/-Heads-up-Trump-just-took-control-of-independent-federal-agencies-by-executive-order

Trump signed one of his most outrageous executive orders to "bringing independent agencies under the control of the White House."

Which agencies? The actual executive order does not appear to name each agency.

Federal employee firings already took place at FDIC and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which were considered independent.

It's hard to believe that Speaker Johnson is letting Trump getting away with this power grab. 

Hopefully, federal employees unions or other parties will file an injunction lawsuit.

According to Politico...

Trump signs order to claim power over independent agencies

The action is likely to face court challenges and test a once-fringe legal theory.

It represents Trump’s latest attempt to consolidate power beyond boundaries other presidents have observed and to test the so-called unitary executive theory, which states that the president has the sole authority over the executive branch. And it reflects the influence of Russ Vought, Trump’s budget chief, one of several conservatives in his orbit who have called for axing independent arms of the executive branch.

Link to Politico story:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/18/trump-order-power-independent-agencies-00204798

From Fierce Health Care...

FTC, SEC and other independent federal agencies must clear regulations by White House, Trump order. According to a fact sheet on the Tuesday executive order, all executive agencies must submit any draft regulations to the White House for review—with the only listed exception being “monetary policy functions of the Federal Reserve,” which sets federal fund interest rates.

Additionally, the agencies “consult” on priorities and strategic plans with the White House, which will also set their performance standards.

Link to story:

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/regulatory/ftc-sec-and-other-independent-federal-agencies-must-clear-regulations-white-house-trump

 

From the White House fact sheet…

"The President and the Attorney General (subject to the President’s supervision and control) will interpret the law for the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.

REINING IN INDEPENDENT AGENCIES: So-called independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have exercised enormous power over the American people without Presidential oversight."

 

 

[Vesper 30,232]

“A New Academic Publishing Model”: Right-Wing Dark Money Group Launches Fringe Medical Journal

The right-wing RealClear Foundation’s foray into public health has been called “a mockery of scientific process.”

https://www.importantcontext.news/p/a-new-academic-publishing-model-right

This piece has been updated with research assistance from the Center for Media and Democracy.

Last month, a prominent right-wing dark money group launched its own Academy of Public Health, complete with a new medical journal.

At first blush, the RealClear Foundation’s foray into public health research looks like a serious venture. The academy’s webpage claims it is an “international association of public health scholars, researchers and practicing professionals in the field of public health and its many specialties,” and declares that “members are united in their commitment to open discourse, intellectual rigor and broad, equitable access to scientific discovery.”

There is even a constitution and bylaws linked. The new journal’s website looks professional and makes four commitments—to “open access,” “open and rigorous peer review,” “rewarding reviewers,” and “a timely and efficient publishing process.” According to the site, the journal will cover “all aspects of public health, including epidemiology, environmental health, occupational health, behavioral health, pharmacoepidemiology, community health, global health, disease surveillance, biostatistics, medical informatics, health services, health policy, health economics, medical ethics and public health education.”

But many of the names behind the new venture and publication have long histories of promoting COVID-19-related misinformation and contrarian medical positions, including questioning long-established pandemic mitigation strategies and the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines. Several played a real role in politicizing the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic.

Important Context has covered new right-wing groups with prestigious-sounding names that push out propaganda and launder the reputations of political operatives. In November, we reported on how the so-called American Academy of Sciences and Letters, seemingly named to echo long-established reputable organizations, was giving awards to fringe figures from the right alongside more credible academics. In our piece, we noted how the venture was backed by the foundation of an investment fund CEO who has been funding right-wing beachheads at prestigious universities. Another backer of the AASL—to the tune of $75,000–was the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major funder of right-wing causes.

Since the COVID pandemic hit, right-wing groups have been working to undermine public health institutions over their support for economically-disruptive interventions. Increasingly, medical contrarians and anti-vaccine scientists backed by right-wing money have been wading into the world of medical publishing. The anti-vaccine Brownstone Institute, for example, which is a central hub for those voices, calls the blog on its website a “journal.” Over the weekend, Important Context reported that Health and Human Services nominee and anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr., had cited a flawed vaccine study during his Senate confirmation hearings that was funded by an anti-vax dark money group and published in a new scientific journal from an anti-vax LLC.

The strategy of creating official-sounding front groups to peddle propaganda and muddy the waters around science is not new. Corporate interests have been using this tactic for decades to undermine the science and government response to problems like climate change and, more recently, COVID and pandemics.

The new RealClear journal appears to be another example of this trend.

“It is a common tactic to exploit the veneer of scientific credibility to push discredited theories,” said biologist Mallory Harris, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Maryland who studies the interplay between human behavior and infectious diseases. “Unfortunately, given this group's extensive political ties, I expect to see this ‘journal’ used to justify dangerous health policy unsupported by the body of actual evidence.”

Harris was not alone in her misgivings about the new journal. Evolutionary biologist Carl T. Bergstrom of the University of Washington offered a similar assessment, noting on BlueSky that “the bylaws reveal a wild sort of National Academy of Sciences cosplay, dialed up to eleven and designed to exclude everybody except fellow...er...contrarians. Only members can publish, new members are brought in by existing ones, and the editor-in-chief cannot reject members' [papers].”

The journal’s founding editor-in-chief is none other than Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician whose career trajectory has taken him from the vaunted Harvard Medical School to the anti-vaccine Brownstone Institute, where he served as the scientific director in 2022, bringing home over $100,000.

Kulldorff is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which articulated an unprecedented herd immunity strategy to deal with the COVID pandemic. It urged governments to “focus protection” on the elderly and vulnerable while allowing businesses and schools to remain open in order to deliberately allow the virus to mass infect the population in order to quickly achieve herd immunity with minimal disruption. The document was widely rebuked by public health experts, including the director-general of the World Health Organization, who called it “unethical.”

In a January 30 article on the journal’s website, Kulldorff outlined the alleged need for the new publication, bemoaning the problems with traditional academia and publishing.

“Scientific journals have had enormous positive impact on the development of science, but in some ways, they are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse,” he wrote, adding that he proposed “a new academic publishing model.”

Joining Kulldorff on the editorial board are a number of his contrarian allies, including names affiliated with the Great Barrington Declaration. The board includes the other co-authors of the document, health economist Jay Bhattacharya, a Brownstone alum who is now President Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, and theoretical epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. There is also Scott Atlas, a radiologist and COVID herd immunity advocate who, as a Trump administration science adviser, assisted with preparations for the conference out of which the Great Barrington Declaration emerged.

Atlas was tapped for his administration role following a push by the billionaire-funded dark money group Job Creators Network, which Trump megadonor Bernie Marcus founded. He is credited with selling the White House on herd immunity and inaction, downplaying the need for masks, lockdowns, and testing the height of the pandemic.

The RealClear journal board also includes declaration signatories Günter Kampf is an associate professor of hygiene and environmental health at the University of Greifswald, Germany and Helen Colhoun, a professor of medical informatics and epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Bhattacharya is not the only Trump appointee represented on the editorial board. Marty Makary, a surgeon turned medical critique and wellness influencer, was chosen by Trump to lead the Food and Drug Administration. Like Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Atlas, Makary has cast doubt on the safety of COVID vaccines and downplayed the need for pandemic mitigation measures. Makary has ties to Brownstone too, joining Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, both of whom have had official roles at the institute, on a team of contrarian medical voices the group organized to advise a potential GOP-led congressional inquiry into the pandemic.

Another Brownstone-affiliated journal editorial board member is Tom Jefferson, a UK epidemiologist who is a contributor to the conspiracy-promoting dark money group where he has written on topics like vaccine injury. Jefferson was the lead author of the controversial Cochrane review of the efficacy of masking against COVID. While Cochrane reviews are generally regarded as the gold standard, the 2023 mask review was marred by controversy due to Jefferson declaring that “there is just no evidence that [masks] make any difference”—a statement not supported by his own research. The Cochrane Library’s editorial-in-chief, Dr. Karla Soares-Weiser, even came out and rebutted the claim in a statement.

“Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” she said.

Another notable name on the RealClear public health journal’s editorial board is Dr. John Ioannidis, a physician scientist and Stanford professor who famously co-authored an influential COVID seroprevalence study with Bhattacharya that was later revealed to have significant flaws, from methodological issues to undisclosed funding from the anti-lockdown founder of JetBlue.

The journal’s other editor-in-chief is Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of Population Health & Disease Prevention at UC Irvine. Noymer has supported and defended COVID mitigation measures but advocated the lab leak explanation for the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ origins. Zoonosis remains the most likely and expert-favored pandemic origin story.

In October, Noymer participated in a controversial health policy symposium organized by Bhattacharya, whose nomination he has supported, at which he suggested that Fauci had embraced premature reopening in order to cover up his involvement in gain-of-function research that allegedly created the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Another connection between the editorial board and the Stanford public health conference runs through David Livermore, a semi-retired honorary professor of medical microbiology at the University of East Anglia. Livermore is on the editorial board of Collateral Global, a UK-based anti-lockdown group Bhattacharya and Gupta were affiliated with as recently as last year that also has ties to anti-vaccine groups. The organization funded the Stanford health policy conference Bhattacharya organized this past fall.

Harris told Important Context that despite the website’s sleek design, the journal and the individuals behind it “are making a mockery of the scientific process.”

“As far as I can tell, many of the people involved with this project are close ideological allies operating far outside of the scientific community,” she said. “They complain about censorship and gatekeeping but it is also the case that it is sometimes hard to publish shoddy work based on bad ideas. Most of us don't create a fake journal to cope with that.”

That sleekness cost money—something the right-wing RealClear Foundation has in spades. The foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit affiliated with the RealClear Media Group, has long been backed by a number of groups affiliated with major right-wing families like Uihlein, Koch, and Mellon. Important Context has previously reported on its funding.

Last year, the foundation brought in more than $8.5 million in contributions and grants. Major backers included the Bradley Foundation ($250,000) and its affiliated donor-advised fund, the Bradley Impact Fund ($110,000). The Thomas W. Smith Foundation, the private foundation of hedge fund manager and right-wing mega-funder Thomas W. Smith of Prescott Investors, gave $500,000. Meanwhile, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Allegheny Foundation, both affiliated with the old Mellon family, gave $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. The Searle Freedom Trust, of the Searle pharmaceutical family, donated $200,000.

Smaller contributions came from the Robert and Ardis James Foundation ($50,000), begun by the prolific quilter Ardis James and her husband, the State Policy Network ($50,000), which supports a right-wing dark money network across America, and the Dunn Foundation ($19,000). Founded by William A. Dunn, former founder and head of the investment firm Dunn Capital Management, the Dunn Foundation has been a major funder of groups in billionaire Charles Koch’s political influence network.

RealClear also received a significant portion its fundraising haul in untraceable donations through DonorsTrust, a right-wing donor-advised fund popular among Koch network donors. The fund funneled more than $5.8 million to the foundation. The board chair of DonorsTrust, Kimberly Dennis, is also the executive director of Searle.

Last year, the RealClear Foundation gave Bhattacharya its inaugural Samizdat Prize, an official-sounded annual award reserved for “for journalists, scholars, and public figures who have resisted censorship and stood for truth.” In 2022, represented by a Koch-funded lawfare dark money outfit, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff sued the Biden administration, alleging that it had coerced social media companies into censoring their content.

The case failed at the Supreme Court last June.

Edited February 19 by Vesper

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10 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Heads up... Trump just took control of independent federal agencies by executive order...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/18/2304692/-Heads-up-Trump-just-took-control-of-independent-federal-agencies-by-executive-order

Trump signed one of his most outrageous executive orders to "bringing independent agencies under the control of the White House."

Which agencies? The actual executive order does not appear to name each agency.

Federal employee firings already took place at FDIC and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which were considered independent.

It's hard to believe that Speaker Johnson is letting Trump getting away with this power grab. 

Hopefully, federal employees unions or other parties will file an injunction lawsuit.

According to Politico...

Trump signs order to claim power over independent agencies

The action is likely to face court challenges and test a once-fringe legal theory.

It represents Trump’s latest attempt to consolidate power beyond boundaries other presidents have observed and to test the so-called unitary executive theory, which states that the president has the sole authority over the executive branch. And it reflects the influence of Russ Vought, Trump’s budget chief, one of several conservatives in his orbit who have called for axing independent arms of the executive branch.

Link to Politico story:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/18/trump-order-power-independent-agencies-00204798

From Fierce Health Care...

FTC, SEC and other independent federal agencies must clear regulations by White House, Trump order. According to a fact sheet on the Tuesday executive order, all executive agencies must submit any draft regulations to the White House for review—with the only listed exception being “monetary policy functions of the Federal Reserve,” which sets federal fund interest rates.

Additionally, the agencies “consult” on priorities and strategic plans with the White House, which will also set their performance standards.

Link to story:

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/regulatory/ftc-sec-and-other-independent-federal-agencies-must-clear-regulations-white-house-trump

 

From the White House fact sheet…

"The President and the Attorney General (subject to the President’s supervision and control) will interpret the law for the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.

REINING IN INDEPENDENT AGENCIES: So-called independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have exercised enormous power over the American people without Presidential oversight."

 

 

Those close to him have him in an information vacuum.

He thinks Ukraine started the war, and Palestine/Israel started on Oct 7th. 

Military industrial complex and AIPAC needs to keep him their useful idiot

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19 minutes ago, Vesper said:

billionaire Charles Koch’s political influence network.

The Kochs are dangerous billionaires. They spend millions influencing media to be right wing, to deny climate change to protect their oil gas and mineral extraction

There used to be a group in the UK called Revolutionary Communist Party =intellectual left wingers. About 15 years ago they did a U Turn and are all right wing climate change deniers - they got funded/bribed by the Kochs

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/trump-living-costs-crisis/681669/

Woe to the American consumer. The price of groceries, gas, housing, and other goods and services jumped 0.5 percent from December to January; the cost of car insurance is up 12 percent year over year and the price of eggs is up 53 percent. “On day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail. That is not happening. Worse, the White House’s early policies are making it more likely that the country’s cost-of-living crisis will endure for years to come.

Voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation delivered the White House to Trump; Americans cited the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as their No. 1 economic concern, and Trump as their preferred candidate to handle it. On his first day in office, Trump ordered the government to deliver “emergency price relief” by figuring out ways to expand the housing supply, streamline the health-care system, eliminate climate rules on home appliances, and expand energy production.

Each of those policies would bring down costs, if enacted, as would Trump’s deregulatory agenda. But as a general point, the White House has fewer ways to quickly temper consumer prices than it does to, say, bolster or lower demand—a problem that bedeviled the Biden administration too. The Federal Reserve controls borrowing rates. The housing and child-care shortages are the products of decades of underinvestment, the former also heavily influenced by municipal policies that Washington has no say in. The trillions of dollars spent by billions of consumers on billions of products generated by millions of firms—the gravitational forces of supply and demand, settled on liquid international markets and affected by government policies only on the margin—are what determine how much people pay at big-box stores and the gas station.

The policies the Trump White House has enacted are likely to make the cost crisis worse. Trump has described the word tariff as “the most beautiful” one to appear in the dictionary. He insists that adding levies to the goods produced by foreign companies will boost national industry and keep American households from getting ripped off. But economists from across the political spectrum agree that tariffs are taxes paid by domestic consumers. They increase prices.

 

Trump has backed away from the tariffs he proposed on Mexico and Canada in his first weeks in office. Yet he has implemented new levies on Chinese goods, spurring Beijing to retaliate with levies on American natural gas, oil, and farm machinery. This week, Trump also announced new steel and aluminum tariffs, raising costs for American automakers, energy companies, construction firms, and other businesses working in heavy industry. If Trump ends up implementing trade restrictions on Canada and Mexico as originally proposed, or ones of similar scale, the effective tariff rate on American imports would increase from 3 percent to 10 percent—the highest in seven decades.

 

Studies of the tariffs Trump implemented in his first term demonstrate what will happen. By the end of 2018, Trump’s trade policies were costing Americans an additional $3.2 billion a month at grocery stores and malls, while also reducing the variety of goods American consumers could purchase. And those tariffs were far more limited than the ones he has promised to impose this time.

 

On top of making imports more expensive, Trump is raising the cost of hiring workers and doing business in the United States by cracking down on the flow of migrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has amped up its raids; Trump is also attempting to end birthright citizenship and close the borders. Fewer undocumented workers will enter the country, and fewer will remain.

 

Undocumented workers, and immigrants in general, are crucial to millions of American businesses, particularly farms, construction firms, child-care providers, and delivery services. If you get rid of workers, production will go down and prices will spike. One new study found that the increase in deportations during the Obama administration led each average-size county in the country to forgo “the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of additional residential construction”—meaning 1,994 new homes—over three years. As a result, home prices jumped 10 percent.

 

At the same time, Trump is silencing the country’s contagion-monitoring system during a bird-flu outbreak, meaning farmers might end up culling millions more chickens and dairy cows. (Bird flu is the reason egg prices are up so much to begin with.) He is also rattling the markets, leading companies to pull back on the kind of investments that would increase domestic production—presenting “a compelling case for taking some chips off the table,” as Tiffany Wilding and Andrew Balls of Pimco put it in a note to investors.

 

All in all, Trump’s policies should add 0.5 percent to consumer costs this year, Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics told me, slowing GDP growth by 0.2 percent this year and 0.5 percent next year. He said he did not expect the country’s growth to be “derailed, given the economy’s strong underlying fundamentals and Trump’s willingness and ability to pivot on policy.” But it “will be meaningfully diminished.”

 

America is lucky that its underlying fundamentals are strong. The stock market is high; unemployment is low; wages are going up; businesses are generating big profits. Still, people are struggling with a dire housing shortage, bruising out-of-pocket medical costs, and a severe undersupply of early-childhood-education options—as well as expensive eggs and unaffordable car and home insurance. Trump has yet to put out a policy agenda that would tackle those problems in the long term, and is backing away from his campaign promise to make America affordable again in the near term too.

 

He seems to be betting that voters don’t care as much about the economy as they said they did. “They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue,” Trump said after his inauguration. “I said, I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue.” He added: “How many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”

 

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Donald Trump declares himself ‘king’ after striking down New York congestion pricing

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-declares-himself-king-200157069.html

Days after suggesting he is above the law, Donald Trump declared himself “king” following his administration’s push to strike down new tolls for Manhattan drivers to raise funds for the city’s aging mass transit system.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,” he wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday. “Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”

The White House’s X account then shared his statement with a mock cover of Time magazine featuring a portrait of the president wearing a crown with the caption “long live the king.”

White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich also shared an AI-generated image of the president wearing a crown and regal cape.

In a letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy outlined the president’s objections to the first-of-its-kind congestion pricing program, claiming that federal officials would be discussing plans with the state for the “orderly cessation of toll operations.”

Duffy called the program “backwards and unfair” and a “slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners.”

“Public transit is the lifeblood of New York City and critical to our economic future — as a New Yorker, like President Trump, knows very well,” Hochul fired back in response.

Since the program rolled out last month, vehicle congestion in New York has “dropped dramatically and commuters are getting to work faster than ever,” she said.

“We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” Hochul said. “We’ll see you in court.”

Trump’s statement follows his declaration that “he who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a message also shared by White House X accounts in an apparent endorsement of a belief that the president of the United States is incapable of breaking any law.

On Tuesday, the president — who has empowered Elon Musk to gut federal agencies while blocking congressionally approved funding and inviting major constitutional challenges in courtrooms across the country — issued an executive order to consolidate power by assuming regulatory control of independent agencies created by Congress, which are now no longer allowed to disagree with him.

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority sued Duffy and federal transportation officials on Wednesday, arguing that the Trump administration unlawfully and “precipitously — and for blatantly political reasons— purported to ‘terminate’ the program, as then-candidate Trump proclaimed he would do in his first week in office.”

“The Administration’s efforts to summarily and unilaterally overturn the considered determinations of the political branches — federal, state, and city — are unlawful, and the Court should declare that they are null and void,” lawyers for the MTA argued.

If the court allows Trump to follow through with his threats, he will be stripping more than $15 billion that the MTA had planned to spend on crucial upgrades throughout the city’s mass transit system, which moves more than 3.6 million people on subways and 1.4 million on busses each day.

“It’s mystifying that after four years and 4,000 pages of federally-supervised environmental review — and barely three months after giving final approval to the [program] — [the Transportation Department] would seek to totally reverse course,” MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber said in a statement.

New York City comptroller Brad Lander said he was “appalled” by the president’s actions, which he called “another instance of federal overreach by the Trump administration.”

Trump delivered his announcement while New York City Mayor Eric Adams was in a federal courthouse, where a judge grilled his attorneys and the deputy assistant U.S. attorney general about the Department of Justice’s motion to drop federal corruption charges against him. Adams is accused of agreeing to a quid pro quo arrangement that would see his case dissolved on the condition that he support Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda.

Hochul has met with New York City officials about Adams’s future and has not ruled out ordering his removal.

The governor was scheduled to discuss the congestion pricing plan with Trump at the White House last week, though those plans were abandoned after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced she was suing the state and top officials over local immigration policy. Adams was not among the defendants.

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The US people fought a war to distance themselves from a King...

blokes mental

[Vesper 30,232]

Trump Vowed to Clean Up Washington, Then His Team Hired a Man Who Pushed a Scam the IRS Called the “Worst of the Worst”

Frank Schuler was a leading promoter of a tax deduction derided as a scam by prosecutors, senators and the IRS. Now he’s a senior adviser to the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s property.

https://www.propublica.org/article/frank-schuler-gsa-doge-syndicated-conservation-easements-tax-scam

Even as he has vowed to eliminate “every dollar of waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal budget and operations,” the new acting administrator of the General Services Administration, Stephen Ehikian, has appointed a senior adviser whose firm used to specialize in tax transactions that a bipartisan Senate committee excoriated and that the IRS branded as “abusive” and among “the worst of the worst tax scams.” The adviser has been battling the tax agency in court over $4 billion in disallowed deductions for thousands of his clients.

The GSA, the federal agency responsible for managing the government’s land and property, will now be taking advice from Frank Schuler IV, the 57-year-old co-founder and longtime president of Ornstein-Schuler, an Atlanta-based real estate investment company. Schuler’s firm was for years among the most prolific promoters of tax-shelter deals known as “syndicated conservation easements.”

Schuler and his colleagues exploited a tax deduction that was created to reward landowners who give up development rights for their acreage, usually by donating those rights to a nonprofit land trust. When used as intended, conservation easements can preserve pristine land, sometimes as a park that the public can use, and reward the land donor with a charitable tax deduction.

But middlemen like Schuler’s firm turned the tax provision into a highly profitable business, packaging easements into what were essentially outsized tax deductions for purchase. After snatching up a cheap piece of vacant land, Schuler and others typically hired a private appraiser willing to declare that the property had huge untapped development value — that it was suited to become anything from a gravel mine to a luxury resort — and was worth many times its purchase price. They then sold stakes in the easement donation to rich individuals, who claimed wildly inflated tax deductions based on the appraisal, cutting their taxes by twice as much as they’d invested. ProPublica first began investigating the syndicated easement business, which has cost the government tens of billions in tax revenue, back in 2017.

The IRS, the Justice Department and Congress struggled for years, through public warnings, hundreds of audits, tax court cases and criminal prosecutions, to shut down the scheme. Those efforts were countered by $11 million in lobbying expenditures from the promoters and the creation of a Washington-based trade group, called Partnership for Conservation, which Schuler founded. Syndication advocates pressed Congress to defund the IRS crackdown.

In 2020, the Senate Finance Committee released a bipartisan investigative report on the transactions. (Schuler was one of six people subpoenaed by the committee to provide information.) The report, which detailed Ornstein-Schuler’s practices, described syndicated easements as a “dollar machine” for wealthy taxpayers, saving them two dollars in taxes for every dollar they put in, “with promoters pocketing millions of dollars in fees for organizing the deals.” The practice was finally curbed through legislation passed in late 2022, but it remains on the IRS’ “Dirty Dozen” list of “bogus tax avoidance strategies.”

“This is someone who made his money by ripping off American taxpayers and who shouldn’t come anywhere near a position of authority over tax dollars,” commented Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who helped oversee the Senate investigation, in a written statement after being told about Schuler’s appointment. “He’ll fit right in with the Trump administration.”

Schuler’s exact role in the government is unclear. A GSA staffer said that he was present on a recent 15-minute video “check-in” conducted by Nate Cavanaugh, a 28-year-old who ProPublica has identified as being part of Elon Musk’s DOGE team. Cavanaugh introduced Schuler, who said little, as “my colleague Frank.”

Schuler’s photo and contact information were also listed last week in the agency’s internal staff directory shortly after his profile disappeared from the Ornstein-Schuler website. But it’s unknown whether he’s a paid government employee or a volunteer associated with Elon Musk’s DOGE effort. Schuler and Matt Ornstein did not respond to calls, messages and emails seeking comment. The GSA and Ehikian did not respond to emails sent to the agency’s press office.

Frank Schuler Credit: Ornstein-Schuler website

In the past, Schuler has described his tax transactions as legitimate and well intentioned. In a 2017 interview with ProPublica, he said his entry into the business of syndicating easements was the result of a personal epiphany sparked when his toddler son compared the paving of a residential development to pollution. As Schuler described it, “The importance of conserving land for him and future generations really pushed me to this point. … That’s why today I’m so passionate about conservation.”

Ornstein-Schuler dropped out of the syndicated-easement business in 2019, citing “recent developments and the uncertainty related to the conservation and gifting of property.” The firm turned to other real estate and tax realms, including launching a new division to buy and sell Georgia state film tax credits. Schuler also reportedly earned a credit as an executive producer on a film in which Mira Sorvino played an AI home security system. (Ornstein, who’s still CEO of Ornstein-Schuler, also co-founded a private equity firm, whose holdings include a chain of dental offices and a chain of car washes.)

But the legal warfare over Ornstein-Schuler’s tax-avoidance business continues today. According to a recent IRS filing, the firm has filed more than 100 tax court cases involving its transactions, contesting more than $4 billion in disallowed charitable deductions from some 2,000 investors. Many of the cases are still pending. Ornstein-Schuler has made long-running efforts to reach a global settlement with the IRS; another filing includes an August 2022 letter from one of its law firms asserting that such an agreement would clear the way for collection of $1.5 billion in taxes and would personally cost Schuler and his partner approximately $150 million in additional taxes, interest and penalties.

A tax court decision handed down last year resolved the first of Schuler’s cases to actually go to trial, involving multiple conservation easements from 2014 on 4,607 acres in rural Alabama. The promoters claimed that the potential for sand and gravel mining justified a total of $187 million in charitable deductions. Investor promotional materials, evidence showed, projected $200,000 in tax savings for every $100,000 invested. The decision, which resolved 13 linked cases involving the property, backed the IRS, disallowing about $180 million of the $187 million in write-offs and imposing 40% “gross valuation misstatement” penalties on most of the disallowed amounts. The judge found that partnerships promoted by Schuler had claimed deductions as high as $50,000 an acre on land that had been purchased less than a year earlier for $2,200 an acre.

In his opinion, Albert Lauber, a senior judge in U.S. Tax Court, pointedly noted how Ornstein-Schuler’s standard pitch of promising investors $2 in tax savings for every $1 they invested assumed he’d obtain a sky-high property appraisal, generating a profitable investor write-off. “When asked at trial how he could have posited in advance a deduction-to-investment ratio of $4.389 to $1, before any appraisals had been performed, Mr. Schuler said that appraisals were basically irrelevant to the tax write-off they were offering,” the judge wrote. He called the land values Schuler’s firm had claimed “wholly implausible.”

“We were making plenty of money,” Schuler testified during the case. “The investors were doing well. And we felt that it was great that land was being conserved.”

Ornstein-Schuler is also among the defendants in a federal class-action suit in Georgia filed by three investors. The suit claims Ornstein-Schuler collaborated with lawyers, accountants, appraisers and others to collect millions in fees through a “fraudulent scheme” that deployed “a mountain of misrepresentations and omissions” to promote invalid easement deductions based on “egregiously inflated appraisals.” Ornstein-Schuler and other defendants have filed a joint motion to dismiss the case, asserting that the risks of the easement investments were fully disclosed and they misled no one.

Ornstein-Schuler has also gone on the attack. In December 2023, it sued the IRS, claiming that the agency had failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request for an array of agency documents. The firm complained of “IRS abuses relating to its targeting of conservation easement transactions,” which it said were part of a “well-publicized campaign.” Among the requested documents: “all records of communications between IRS employees and members of the news media,” including ProPublica reporter Peter Elkind, Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Rubin and Forbes reporter Peter Reilly, regarding conservation easements. Rod Rosenstein, a deputy U.S. attorney general during the first Trump administration, is representing Ornstein-Schuler in the case.

Doris Burke contributed research. Avi Asher-Schapiro contributed reporting.

 

[Vesper 30,232]

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

Aggregate of polls show 52% of even Republicans are now against Trump and his fawning over Vlad Putin

Putin who is ex KGB was taught how to manipulate the gullible, they use 'MICE'

Money Influence Compromise Ego

Trump is putty in his hands