Chris Hedges's Blog, page 127

Boris Johnson Gets EU Brexit Deal; Next Hurdle Is Parliament

BRUSSELS — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s career of disdain for the European Union was a thing of the past on Thursday as he and the bloc’s leaders celebrated their long-sought Brexit deal. He now faces an opponent closer to home: his own Parliament.

With the ink barely dry on the proposal and Johnson still happily backslapping EU leaders at a summit in Brussels, a chorus of British party leaders said they would vote against the deal. Crucially, the Northern Irish party that supports Johnson’s minority government also stood opposed, leaving the prime minister uncertain of getting the votes he needs to ratify the agreement.

After an intense week of talks and with only two weeks to go until Britain’s scheduled departure on Oct. 31, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker broke the tension with a tweet Thursday morning: “We have one! It’s a fair and balanced agreement for the EU and the UK and it is testament to our commitment.”

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The deal found a way to avoid a hard border between Ireland, an EU member, and the U.K.’s Northern Ireland. It crucially also lays a path for Britain’s orderly departure.

European leaders unanimously endorsed the proposal on Thursday, formally sending it to the British Parliament, which will consider it in a special session Saturday.

He said he was confident he would succeed where his predecessor did not — Theresa May’s proposal was voted down three times in Parliament.

“This is a great deal for our country. I also believe it’s a very good deal for our friends in the EU,” Johnson told reporters in Brussels. “There is a very good case for MPs across the House of Commons to express the democratic will of the people as we have pledged many times to do and to get Brexit done.”

He will face a struggle. All the major opposition parties condemned the agreement, and Johnson’s key ally, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, also said its lawmakers would oppose it.

“It seems the prime minister has negotiated an even worse deal than Theresa May’s, which was overwhelmingly rejected,” Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said.

Many opposition lawmakers want to oppose the deal and then seek to delay Brexit while new terms are negotiated. Last month Parliament passed a law ordering the government to seek an extension to the Brexit deadline if Parliament doesn’t approve a deal by Saturday.

But Juncker appeared to rule out any new postponement, leaving British lawmakers with a simple choice: deal, no deal or revoke Brexit.

“If we have a deal, we have a deal, and there is no need for a prolongation,” he said. The ultimate decision on any extension, though, does not rest with Juncker. It’s a decision for the other 27 EU countries.

Johnson’s 10 Downing Street office put it even more succinctly with the mantra: “New deal, no deal but no delay.”

Johnson began his career as a Brussels-based journalist spinning exaggerated tales of EU excess for British readers, and as a politician helped lead the campaign to take Britain out of the EU, but that acrimony was nowhere in sight on Thursday.

Instead, relief was palpable in Brussels as leaders happily mingled in the summit room of the Europa building, which has all too often been ground zero for European crises. Johnson cheerily saluted French President Emmanuel Macron, who responded with the heartiest of handshakes.

The jubilation soon turned bittersweet, with EU leaders bemoaning the impending loss of a major member state — a military, economic and diplomatic juggernaut that had joined 46 years ago.

“In my heart I will always be a Remainer and I hope that our British friends decide to return one day,” European Council President Donald Tusk said, using the nickname for people who supported keeping Britain in the EU. “Our door will always be open.”

EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said he and his fellow Frenchmen would not forget “Britain’s solidarity during the darkest hours,” a reference to their alliance during World War II.

The pound hit a five-month high against the U.S. dollar on news of a Brexit deal, then sank back as traders heard Johnson’s Northern Irish allies were still unhappy with the way the deal handles the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland — the only land border between the U.K. and the bloc and long one of the thorniest issues of any exit.

The new proposal is broadly similar to the 585-page withdrawal agreement that May hammered out, with the only major changes on the Irish border issue.

The agreement must also still be formally approved by the bloc and ratified by the European Parliament. That could happen as early as next week when it meets in Strasbourg.

While British leaders kept their legislators at arms’ length during the talks, the EU’s Barnier has kept the EU parliament fully involved and the final approval is expected to be little more than a rubber stamp.

The deal agreed Thursday will be legally binding if approved — but it doesn’t cover all the nitty gritty of future relations between the U.K. and the EU. It merely lays out the terms for withdrawal, while leaving the details of trade and other issues to future negotiations. The only issues that leaders felt they couldn’t put off and had to hammer out ahead of a U.K. exit were the thorniest ones: how to address the Irish land border and the rights of British and EU citizens living in each other’s territories.

The deal gives the two sides a grace period to work out other details by keeping relations as they are until the end of December 2020.

The key hurdle was finding a way to keep goods and people flowing freely across the Irish border after Brexit. That invisible, open border has underpinned the region’s peace accord and allowed the economies of both Ireland and Northern Ireland to grow.

Johnson insists that all of the U.K. — including Northern Ireland — must leave the bloc’s customs union, which would seem to make border checks and tariffs inevitable.

Barnier said the deal “squares this circle” by leaving Northern Ireland inside the EU single market for goods — so border checks are not needed on the land border on the island of Ireland. Instead, customs checks will be carried out and tariffs levied on goods entering Northern Ireland that are destined for the EU.

That effectively means a customs border in the Irish Sea between the islands of Ireland and Great Britain — something the British government long said it would not allow and something Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party vehemently opposes.

DUP leader Arlene Foster and the party’s parliamentary chief Nigel Dodds said they “could not support what is being suggested on customs and consent issues,” referring to a say the Northern Irish authorities might have in future developments on the border.

But the EU has compromised, too, by allowing Northern Ireland special access to its single market. And the deal gives Northern Ireland a say over the rules, something that was missing from May’s previous rejected agreement. After four years, the Northern Ireland Assembly would vote on whether to continue the arrangement or end it.

____

Lorne Cook and Sam Petrequin contributed from Brussels and Mike Corder from London.

Donald Trump Is Getting Off Easy

When the seemingly endless Russiagate investigation finally fizzled over the summer, the long-awaited impeachment of Donald Trump seemed to be a dead letter. “Liberal” cable news shifted from its two-year immersion in “the Russia conspiracy trap” (Masha Gessen)—with occasional interruptions for mass shootings, hurricanes, war scares, presidential tweets and other matters—to its next populace-paralyzing fixation: the big money, major party candidate-centered quadrennial presidential electoral extravaganza.

Then came UkraineGate, like a bolt from the sky, courtesy of a Central Intelligence Agency officer, other “national security” operatives and the non-Fox corporate media. In the last week of September, the world learned that on July 25, 2019, the very day (ironically enough) that special Russiagate prosecutor Robert Mueller gave his woefully unimpressive testimony to Congress, Trump called the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. During his conversation, Trump used the threat of withholding American military assistance to pressure Zelenskiy into helping Trump’s ridiculous personal lawyer, the fake diplomat Rudy Giuliani, dig up political dirt on Trump’s perceived 2020 presidential rival, former vice president Joe Biden.

As of now, it appears likely that Trump will be impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for this technically criminal abuse of power (compounded by Trump’s subsequent illegal intimidation of a “whistleblower”) before the end of the year. It is unlikely but not unimaginable that Trump will be removed from office by the U.S. Senate early next year.

What shall we make of it on the portside? It’s been hard not to enjoy watching Trump and his defenders squirm. Surely there is no public humiliation too great for this racist, sexist, ecocidal and fascist menace who befouls and endangers the world with his presence in its most powerful office.

No left worthy of the label would stand in the way of the constitutional defenestration of the neofascist malignancy. This isn’t the oligarchic political class trying to investigate, impeach and remove a President Bernie Sanders for trying to tax the rich and/or slash the Pentagon budget to pay for universal single-payer national health insurance and/or a Green Jobs program. This is about a leading faction in that class-wielding constitutional powers to consider indicting and perhaps even expelling a neofascist menace.

Still, an impeachment that is all or mainly over Trump’s Zelesnskiy call threatens to give Trump implicit exoneration for numerous other and bigger, impeachable crimes and abuses. The progressive activist “Roots Action” website gives the following daunting list of offenses for which Trump deserves impeachment: violation of Constitution on domestic emoluments; violation of Constitution on foreign emoluments; incitement of violence; interference with voting rights; discrimination based on religion; illegal war; illegal threat of nuclear war; abuse of pardon power; obstruction of justice; politicizing prosecutions; collusion against the United States with a foreign government; failure to reasonably prepare for or respond to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria; separating children and infants from families; illegally attempting to influence an election; tax fraud and public misrepresentation; assaulting freedom of the press; supporting a coup in Venezuela; unconstitutional declaration of emergency; instructing Border Patrol to violate the law; refusal to comply with subpoenas; declaration of emergency without basis in order to violate the will of Congress; illegal proliferation of nuclear technology, and illegally removing the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Roots Action should have included Trump’s worst offense: the criminal acceleration of ecocide, the biggest issue of our or any time. Trump has brazenly violated his oath to serve the general welfare by doing everything he can to turn the world into a giant greenhouse gas chamber as soon as possible.

Here we would do well to recall Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the de facto impeachment and removal of President Richard Nixon. Watergate was about Nixon’s breaking of ruling-class norms by needlessly burglarizing the other major imperial party’s candidate headquarters.

The Watergate hearings evaded Nixon’s and Kissinger’s mass murderous bombings of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, their criminal support for a fascist coup in Chile, and Nixon’s vicious, fascist-style police-state repression of the antiwar, back freedom and radical left movements. Nixon’s biggest crimes went un-aired and unpunished. It was officially fine for Nixon to inflict monumental murder and mayhem on anti-imperial freedom fighters, peasants and the left at home and abroad. Nixon’s only authorized sin was to have stupidly messed with the other American ruling class and imperial party, the Democrats, at home.

To make matters worse, Trumpeachment under the supervision of corporate and imperial Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif., net worth of $64 million) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and their “deep state” informants is about Trump putting his personal self-interest above a principle that rests on a great imperialist myth: “the national interest.”

Trump isn’t in trouble for bullying Ukraine. Superpower Uncle Sam bullies other countries all the time. Trump is in hot water because he got caught with his hands in the cookie jar clumsily injecting his selfish domestic political interests into the all-too-standard U.S. practice of imperial coercion. U.S. foreign policy is supposed to be about “the national interest,” not the political self-interest of one man who would like to be a king or dictator with the help of other heads of state.

But what is this grand “national interest” the reigning bipartisan U.S. political, intellectual and media cite like some holy incantation, with Democrats and their media allies in the lead in the Age of Trump? The great, prolific American historian Charles Beard was run out of U.S. public-intellectual life for having the audacity to in numerous books, including “The Idea of the National Interest” (1934) and “The Open Door at Home” (1934) that “the national interest” was a veil for ruling class imperialism. Empire, Beard argued, worked against the interests of most U.S. citizens by hitching economic growth to the profit-lust of those atop what would come to be known as the military-industrial-complex—and by enmeshing the United States in what Beard called (anticipating Orwell) “perpetual wars for perpetual peace.”

In the wake of Beard’s warnings and observations, the Pax Americana bloomed, spreading U.S. power across vast stretches of the planet. The United States has been enmeshed ever since in an endless series of wars, interventions and conflicts, few if any of which have ever had the slightest thing to do with the United States’ “national security.” Quite the opposite: the American Empire—replete now with more than 800 bases spread across more than 100 “sovereign” nations—has put ordinary Americans at risk at home and abroad while distributing wealth and power upward. The costs of this empire have been born by society at large. The benefits—including the massive transfer of taxpayer money away from domestic social needs to giant public subsidies for high-tech corporations like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and global military protection to multinational U.S. corporations and investors—have reverted to the wealthy Few and their political and military agents and allies.

The bloated military-Keynesian Pentagon system has bankrupted social programs, feeding savage domestic socioeconomic disparity while fueling the deadly militarization of society. It has hitched American “prosperity” to a permanent war economy that is helping drive the world over an ecological cliff while constantly developing new super-weapons capable of decimating the world many times over.

It is pathetic, contemptible and criminal for Trump to have strong-armed Ukraine in an effort to enlist foreign assistance for Trump’s domestic political ambitions. But it is stupid to think that the more standard practices of American imperialism have anything to do with the “national interest” of all Americans. The “national interest” is a great imperial, ruling-class and Orwellian lie in the hands of the nation’s dominant ideological authorities.

Even if its scope is broadened beyond UkraineGate, impeachment is not a popular rebellion against the main capitalist oppression structures of our time, which now pose an existential threat to human survival and must be overcome if we are to preserve chances for a decent and organized existence. It’s an elite process designed by the nation’s wealthy Founders, who considered policy and politics the special preserve of the propertied Few. The early republic’s slave-owning and merchant-capitalist masters believed, and their ruling class counterparts believe today, that the property-less and property-poor Many—the “rabble”—are not to be trusted with political power. We on the left want to put the “rabble”—the working-class majority citizenry—in the streets to confront not just the fascistic Trump-Pence regime and the fascistic Trump base but also the broader system of empire and inequality of which the Trump regime and Trumpism are part and symptom.

Trump is awful, of course. But so is the richly bipartisan system of class and imperial rule that gives rise to monstrous neofascist and white-nationalist actors and forces like Trump, Pence and Trumpism in the first place. Establishment Democrats like Pelosi and Schiff and their donors sit atop the other major party wing of the same American corporate-imperial bird of prey. They are so vile that several top Democratic Party campaign bankrollers, according to CNBC, are ready to back the malignant neo-fascist Trump not just over the progressive populist and self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders but even over the self-declared “capitalist” and center-left Democrat Elizabeth Warren.

The meaningfully democratic way to remove Trump is not through elite procedures designed by 18th century slaveholders for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare. It is through sustained mass civil disobedience within and beyond the streets—through rebellion by and for those whom the American ruling class fears and hates the most: the working-class majority. The left should mobilize to bring the ghastly neofascist Trump-Pence regime down in the same ways the people of Puerto Rico forced out their corrupt and racist-sexist governor Ricardo Rosselló last summer; the people of Hong Kong won the repeal of an authoritarian extradition law last spring; the French Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) won the repeal of a regressive tax last December; the people of Ecuador won the repeal of a regressive fuel tax and broader neoliberal austerity program last Sunday; the people of Algeria overthrew an authoritarian regime last spring, and Extinction Rebellion has put the environmental question front and center in England.

The left must not let the impeachment extravaganza keep millions seated in front of glowing telescreens to be told how the unmentionably disastrous two-party system, the ruling class corporate media and the U.S. Constitution “work” for democracy and the common good. They do no such thing.

Does the American ruling class and power elite really and at long last want to rid itself of the racist, sexist, neofascist and ecocidal atrocity that is Donald Trump? Good. Let them proceed.  We certainly won’t stand in their way. There can no defense of the wannabe fascist strongman Trump—the first president in American history who poses a serious threat not to honor the results of a re-election attempt that doesn’t fall his way—on the portside. But, as I have been saying from the start, the elites hate Trump for reasons very different than ours. Trumpeachment a la Pelosi and Schiff is not really our battle. The left’s fight is to build as quickly, deeply and widely as possible a popular grassroots movement against the fascistic White House and the racist, sexist, imperialist and ecocidal system of class rule that gave rise to it.

Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year War on the American Taxpayer

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

Last fall, Intuit’s longtime CEO Brad Smith embarked on a farewell tour of the company’s offices around the world. Smith had presided over 11 years of explosive growth, a period when Intuit had secured its place in the Silicon Valley pantheon, and the tour was like a long party.

In Ontario, employees wore T-shirts with Smith’s quasi-spiritual sayings: “Do whatever makes your heart beat fastest” and “Repetition doesn’t ruin the prayer.” In Bangalore, India, workers put on Smith face masks as they posed for selfies with the man himself. Fittingly, the tour culminated in San Diego, the home of TurboTax, the software that transformed the company’s fortunes. There, Smith arrived at his party in a DeLorean, and as he walked a red carpet, cheering employees waved “Brad is Rad” signs. To Smith’s delight, his favorite rock star, Gene Simmons of Kiss, emerged. The two posed for pictures, Simmons clad in black and the beaming CEO flashing the “rock on” hand sign.

Intuit began in the 1980s as an accounting software company focused on helping people with their bookkeeping. Over time, the company, like the other giants of Big Tech, cultivated an image of being not just good at what it did, but good, period. In a recent Super Bowl ad, Intuit portrayed itself as a gentle robot that liberates small-business owners from paperwork. The company stresses values above all, urging employees to “deliver awesome” and pursue “integrity without compromise.”

Intuit’s QuickBooks accounting product remains a steady moneymaker, but in the past two decades TurboTax, its tax preparation product, has driven the company’s steadily growing profits and made it a Wall Street phenom. When Smith took over in 2008, TurboTax was a market leader, but only a small portion of Americans filed their taxes online. By 2019, nearly 40% of U.S. taxpayers filed online and some 40 million of them did so with TurboTax, far more than with any other product.

But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.

For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.”

Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states.

The centerpiece of Intuit’s anti-encroachment strategy has been the Free File program, hatched 17 years ago in a moment of crisis for the company. Under the terms of an agreement with the federal government, Intuit and other commercial tax prep companies promised to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS pledged not to create a government-run system.

Since Free File’s launch, Intuit has done everything it could to limit the program’s reach while making sure the government stuck to its end of the deal. As ProPublica has reported, Intuit added code to the Free File landing page of TurboTax that hid it from search engines like Google, making it harder for would-be users to find.

Twelve years ago, Intuit launched its own “free” product: the similarly named “Free Edition” of TurboTax. But unlike the government program, this one comes with traps that can push customers lured with the promise of “free” into paying, some more than $200. Free Edition was a smash hit for Intuit and its pitch for “free” prep remains core to the company’s growth. Recently, it launched a “free, free free free” ad campaign for the Free Edition, including a crossword puzzle in The New York Times in which the answer to every clue was “f-r-e-e.”

Intuit knows it’s deceiving its customers, internal company documents obtained by ProPublica show. “The website lists Free, Free, Free and the customers are assuming their return will be free,” said a company PowerPoint presentation that reported the results of an analysis of customer calls this year. “Customers are getting upset.”

Intuit also continues to use “dark patterns” — design tricks to get users of its website to do things they don’t necessarily mean to do — to ensure that as many customers as possible pay, former employees say. A marketing concept frequently invoked at Intuit, which goes by the acronym “FUD,” seeks to tap into Americans’ fear, uncertainty and doubt about the tax filing process.

An Intuit spokesman declined to answer ProPublica’s detailed questions about its efforts to fend off a government filing system, but he provided a statement.

“We empower our customers to take control of their financial lives, which includes being in charge of their own tax preparation,” he said, adding that a “government-run pre-filled tax preparation system that makes the tax collector (who is also the investigator, auditor and enforcer) the tax preparer is fraught with conflicts of interest.”

The IRS is seemingly the biggest threat to Intuit and other commercial tax prep businesses, but it has more frequently acted as the industry’s ally, defending the Free File program even in the face of critical internal reviews. The IRS declined to comment for this article.

The consequences of Intuit’s efforts affect a huge proportion of the taxpaying public. Americans spend an estimated 1.7 billion hours and $31 billion doing their taxes each year. Just 2.8 million participated in the Free File program this year, down from 5.1 million at the program’s peak in 2005.

Intuit’s success has made the men who run the company rich. Smith, the CEO who stepped down last year and is now executive board chair, had a stake worth $20 million when he became chief executive. It ballooned to $220 million by last year. Co-founder Scott Cook is now among the country’s wealthiest people, his fortune soaring to $3.3 billion.

This year, Intuit was close to realizing a long-held goal: enshrining the Free File program in law, effectively closing the door on the IRS ever creating a free tax filing system. But an outcry followed ProPublica’s reporting on the matter and Intuit’s treatment of its customers, prompting the provision to be dropped and state and federal investigations into Intuit’s practices.

Yet even after this setback, the company remained steadfastly confident that its clout in Washington would win the day.

“What we’re not gonna do is fight this publicly because that is exactly what they want us to do,” said Sasan Goodarzi, the new CEO, in a video released to staff this May and obtained by ProPublica. “We are actually working with the IRS and members of the Congress to ensure that the facts are very clear.”

Intuit has dominated the tax software market since 1993, when for $225 million, it bought Chipsoft, the San Diego-based company that had created TurboTax. Even then, TurboTax was the most popular option, but Intuit pursued a plan of aggressive growth. The product necessarily came on a disk, and by the end of the 1990s TurboTax boxes were nearly ubiquitous, on shelves in office supply stores across America.

As internet speeds increased and dot-com mania took hold, it became apparent that Intuit’s future was not in a box on a shelf. It was online.

The prospect of TurboTax’s growth was vast for another reason. As late as 2001, around 45 million Americans still filled out their tax forms on paper. For Intuit, those were all potential customers.

But Intuit wasn’t alone in seeing possibilities in the spread of high-speed internet. In Washington, lawmakers began pushing the IRS to modernize and get more taxpayers to file electronically. It was a no-brainer: Filing taxes online would be easier, and the IRS would save staff costs on processing paper returns.

The danger to Intuit’s growing business was obvious. If the government succeeded in creating a system that allowed the vast majority of taxpayers to file online for free, TurboTax profits would plummet. Intuit recognized that the notion of “return-free filing” was not going away on its own.

And so in 1998, the company hired Bernie McKay, a onetime Carter administration aide and a senior lobbyist at AT&T, to be its vice president for corporate affairs. Intuit executives like to talk about having a “customer obsession” in developing their products. McKay’s obsession is stopping government encroachment. Known to physically bang the table to drive home a point, McKay’s style is “aggressive to the point of offense,” said one fellow tax prep lobbyist. An Intuit spokesman said, “This mischaracterization of Mr. McKay is pure fiction.”

McKay, for his part, when asked at a recent tax industry conference which Star Wars character he is, responded, “Darth Vader.”

The year McKay was hired, Congress passed a major overhaul of the IRS. The bill, reflecting Intuit’s lobbying, said that the IRS “should cooperate with and encourage the private sector” to increase electronic filing.

While McKay came through in his first big test, in 2002, the company found itself up against an unexpected foe, the George W. Bush administration. The threat came from a broad administration initiative to upgrade government technology. One of the proposals called for the IRS to develop “an easy, no-cost option for taxpayers to file their tax return online.”

Without such an option, taxpayers were stuck either filing on paper or, to file electronically, paying a tax professional or software company like TurboTax. Providing an alternative would be an obvious improvement, said Mark Forman, an official at the Office of Management and Budget who led the “e-government” program. The technology wasn’t all that complicated, and creating a free, automated filing system would help tens of millions of Americans. “This was seen as a low-cost, high-payoff initiative,” Forman recalled in a recent interview with ProPublica. Standing in the way, he said, was an industry “that lives off the complexity of the tax code.”

Intuit revved its new lobbying machine. Even before the OMB report was publicly released, a group of Republican lawmakers, led by TurboTax’s hometown congressman, wrote to the agency arguing that there was no reason for the government to “compete” with the “well-established” private tax prep companies. Intuit’s lobbyists also went above the OMB and pressed their case directly to the White House, Forman recalled.

At the IRS, “all hell broke loose,” remembered Terry Lutes, who was then the head of electronic filing at the agency. Intuit’s clout on the Hill meant that lawmakers were soon accusing the IRS of making “secret plans to undercut the industry,” Lutes said. The agency ran the risk of seeing its funding cut if it were to pursue the Bush plan.

The IRS commissioner at the time, Charles Rossotti, also opposed the idea. The IRS’ customer service staff, already too thin to respond adequately to Americans’ questions about the tax code, would have to grow substantially to handle millions of software queries. Congress “will never give you sufficient funding,” Rossotti told ProPublica.

So the IRS felt caught in the middle. The question became, Lutes said, “Is there some way to come out of this with something for taxpayers that addresses the administration’s objective and at the same time is acceptable to industry?”

Intuit, it turned out, did have a way. Since 1999, as part of the company’s strategy to head off encroachment, TurboTax had been offering free tax prep to the poorest filers.It was a program that served to bolster the company’s arguments that government intervention was unnecessary.

This became the basis for a deal. The industry would offer free tax prep to a larger portion of taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS would promise not to develop its own system.

Intuit organized a coalition of tax prep companies under the name the Free File Alliance, and after negotiations with the IRS, the group agreed to provide free federal filing to 60% of taxpayers, or about 78 million people at the time. Government officials touted the solution as a marvel of public and private cooperation. Americans would get free tax prep, and it would cost the government almost nothing.

For Intuit, it was the culmination of years of lobbying. The IRS had signed a contract that said it “will not compete with the [Free File Alliance] in providing free, online tax return preparation and filing services to taxpayers.”

What’s more, “free” wasn’t as unprofitable as it sounded. The alliance, guided by a lawyer who was also an Intuit lobbyist, won a series of concessions that made the program palatable to industry. Free File only required the companies to offer free federal returns. They could charge for other products. The state return was the most common, but they could also pitch loans, “audit defense” or even products that had nothing to do with taxes.

Free File had another bright side: The companies could tailor their Free File offers so that they didn’t cut into their base of paying customers. The agreement said the industry had to offer free federal services to at least 60% of taxpayers, but each company individually only had to cover 10% of taxpayers. Intuit and the others were free to limit their offers of free tax prep by age, income or state.

There was little incentive for the companies to publicize a free alternative to their paid products, and the IRS agreed that the Free File offers need only be listed on a special page of the agency’s website.

For Intuit, it was a major victory in the war against encroachment. The company could now focus on turning whatever new customers it acquired through the program into paying users, both that year and in the future.

The first year of Free File was 2003, and for Intuit, things went well. On paper, the Free File Alliance was a collection of 17 companies, all of them vying to serve the American taxpayer. But in reality, it was a group made up of two giants and a bunch of gnats. Intuit’s only significant competitor was H&R Block, and even it was a distant second. The rest of the alliance consisted mostly of tiny companies with names like Free1040TaxReturns.com. As a result, Intuit could tailor its Free File offer just the way it wanted.

But the next year, Intuit began to lose control of its creation. A scrappy competitor, TaxAct, decided to use Free File to stand out. The company decided it would try to pick up as many new customers as possible and then charge them for ancillary services. Instead of following Intuit’s lead and constraining its offer to a subset of low-income taxpayers, TaxAct went the opposite direction.

“Why not go for an offer that’s much simpler to understand?” is how Lance Dunn, the president of the maker of TaxAct, described the strategy in a later court hearing. It began advertising a pitch for “free federal online tax preparation and e-filing for all taxpayers. No restrictions. Everyone qualifies.”

TurboTax’s offer on the Free File page, meanwhile, was more difficult to parse: “if you are eligible for EIC, are age 22 or younger, age 62 or older, or active Military with a W2.” (EIC stood for the Earned Income Tax Credit.)

TaxAct’s ploy was a smashing success. The company’s volume exploded.

Alarmed, Intuit tried to get the other companies not to offer their products for free to too many potential customers, according to Dunn. Such a request could be collusion, a violation of antitrust law, Dunn said. “Intuit asked the Free File Alliance members that we should restrict offers, which I believe is probably not legal for that group to restrain trade,” he said.

ProPublica asked Intuit about Dunn’s accusation, but the company did not respond.

Dunn, who declined to speak with ProPublica, made these remarks during sworn testimony in 2011. The hearing was part of an antitrust case by the Justice Department against H&R Block after it tried to buy TaxAct. The U.S. argued that, by eliminating a competitor, the merger would create a duopoly of Intuit and H&R Block. Although the Justice Department ultimately blocked that takeover, the market has grown even more consolidated in recent years. In 2019, according to a ProPublica analysis of IRS data, the two giants accounted for 81% of all individual returns filed using tax prep software.

On the defensive, Intuit and H&R Block matched TaxAct’s “no restrictions” offer on Free File. Americans rushed to file for free, and in 2005, 5 million people filed their taxes through the program. Free File had become the most popular way to file taxes online.

Intuit viewed the popularity of Free File as a serious threat and took its case to Congress. That year, Brad Smith, then a senior vice president at the company and head of TurboTax, told a House committee that “the current Free File Alliance program has drifted very far from its original public service purpose and objective,” as he put it. The program wasn’t supposed to be for everyone, he said: It was for the “disadvantaged, underprivileged and underserved taxpayer populations.”

Intuit’s arguments quickly gained traction at the IRS. Already, in March 2005, the IRS had written to the Justice Department for legal advice on modifying the Free File program. The agency wanted to know: Would it run afoul of antitrust laws if the IRS barred companies in the Free File Alliance from offering a free product to everyone?

The Justice Department responded in a May 2005 letter. Clearly, wrote Renata Hesse, an antitrust section chief at the department, “any agreement among Alliance members to restrict such free service is likely a form of price fixing” and thus illegal. But there was still a way for Intuit to get what it wanted. She wrote that if the IRS itself were to impose such a restriction, it would be legal.

The IRS swooped in to beat back Intuit’s competition, doing for Intuit what the company could not on its own. Despite just 5 million Americans using a program that was purportedly available to 80 million, the IRS agreed that Free File needed to be reined in.

The agency made its reasoning clear in a previously unreported letter sent to the Free File Alliance the following year. Bert DuMars, then head of electronic filing at the IRS, wrote that there’d been a huge jump in people using Free File in 2005, but no corresponding boom in people paying for tax prep. “If this trend continued, the IRS was concerned that it could cause many vendors to go out of business,” he wrote. Stock market analysts, he pointed out, had said Free File “represented a threat to future revenues and profits of the publicly traded company participants.” The IRS decided to remove this threat.

The new agreement, struck between the IRS and the alliance in 2005, gave Intuit what it had sought. Companies were now expressly barred from offering free tax prep to everyone through the program. Instead, only taxpayers under an income cap, then $50,000 a year, would be eligible.

On paper, the program’s eligibility had actually increased to 70% of taxpayers, or about 93 million households, up from the previous 78 million. But in practice, because broad, easy-to-understand offers were now barred, it was clear the program’s use would decline.

Intuit had again bent the power of the federal government in its favor. After 2005, the Free File program was never again as popular, eventually falling to about half that year’s level.

With the threat of government encroachment on ice and high-speed internet access proliferating in the mid-2000s, Intuit looked forward to steady growth and big profits. The upside of the online software business was huge, with the cost of producing each additional unit approaching zero. And TurboTax was hardly a niche product: Intuit executives still excitedly talk about the TAM, total available market, of TurboTax as every single tax filer in the country, now over 150 million households.

But TaxAct’s Free File gambit had forever transformed the industry. Advertising “free” was a great lure, so TaxAct took the battle to a different venue. Barred from making a free offer to everyone through Free File on the IRS’ website, TaxAct decided to make the offer on its own website in 2006. Intuit recognized a credible challenge from the upstart and countered the next year, launching TurboTax Free Edition on its website.

Confusingly, there were now two distinct options: the government-sponsored Free File and the commercial free editions.

For customers who managed to qualify, the new commercial options offered by these companies were similar to what they could get on the IRS’ Free File website: The underlying software was the same, only the federal return was free, and the companies expected to make money on each customer through charging for a state tax return or other services.

But for the companies, there was a clear benefit to winning customers directly, rather than through the IRS program. The companies had complete control over how they handled customers from start to finish.

Intuit poured ad dollars into its Free Edition. Not only did the new product effectively meet TaxAct’s challenge, it quickly became the major driver of TurboTax’s customer growth.

That growth posed a challenge: how to, as internal company documents put it, “monetize free.” Over successive tax seasons, Intuit unleashed teams of designers, engineers, marketers and data scientists on that problem, working at its headquarters in Mountain View and TurboTax’s main offices in San Diego.

Part of the solution was to pitch users side products like loans or “Audit Defense.” But it also meant misleading customers. Frequently “free” didn’t mean free at all. Many who started in TurboTax Free Edition found that if their return required certain commonplace tax forms, they would have to upgrade to a paid edition in order to file.

The company came to a key insight: Americans’ anxiety around tax filing is so powerful that it usually trumps any frustration with the TurboTax product, according to three former Intuit staffers. So even if customers click on “free” and are ultimately asked to pay, they will usually do it rather than start the entire process anew. Intuit capitalized on this tendency by making sure the paywall popped up only when the taxpayer was deep into the filing process.

“There’s a lot of desperation — people will agree, will click, will do anything to file,” said a former longtime software developer.

Every fall before tax season, the company puts every aspect of the TurboTax homepage and filing process through rigorous user testing. Design decisions down to color, word choice and other features are picked to maximize how many customers pay, regardless if they are eligible for the free product. “Dark patterns are something that are spoken of with pride and encouraged in design all hands” meetings, said one former designer. In the design world, “dark patterns” are tactics to get users to do something they don’t necessarily mean to do. (ProPublica previously documented dark patterns encountered by people trying to file their taxes for free.)

On TurboTax’s homepage, for example, the company carefully chooses how it describes the different editions. Prominently featured next to Deluxe Edition, which costs around $100, is the phrase “maximize your deductions.”

If users initially click on the Deluxe software, they are never offered the choice to go to the Free Edition even if the no-cost option would produce the same return. “Maximize your deductions” was legendary at Intuit for its effectiveness in steering customers eligible for free filing to buy the paid product, according to a former marketing staffer.

Another celebrated feature, former staffers said, were the animations that appear as TurboTax users prepare their returns. One shows icons representing different tax deductions scrolling by, while another, at the end of the process, shows paper tax forms being scanned line-by-line and the phrase “Let’s comb through your returns.” What users are not told is that these cartoons reflect no actual processing or calculations; rather, Intuit’s designers deliberately added these delays to both reinforce and ease users’ “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.” The animations emphasize that taxes are complicated but also reassure users that the technological wizardry of TurboTax will protect them from mistakes.

In a statement, the Intuit spokesman said, “The process of completing a tax return often has at least some level of stress and anxiety associated with it. … To offset these feelings, we use a variety of design elements — content, animation, movement, etc. — to ensure our customers’ peace of mind.”

The 2007 launch of Free Edition started a period of rapid growth for TurboTax. Within two years, use of its web products had almost doubled, and over the past decade, its website has grown each year by an average of 2 million more customers. The company reported this year that TurboTax online had handled 32 million returns. In a statement, it said around a third of that number used Free Edition.

The government’s Free File program, meanwhile, has mostly faded into the background, drowned out by Intuit’s and other companies’ “free” offers. The IRS did try advertising campaigns, spending around $2 million some years to spread the word. But compared with the reach of Intuit, this was a pittance: The company reported this year that it spent $800 million on advertising. With its budget slashed by Congress, the IRS has spent no money at all to advertise the program in recent years.

Amid its success, Intuit has sometimes had to put down insurgents bent on reforming the tax filing system. In 2007, the same year Intuit launched its Free Edition, Barack Obama, then a candidate for president, took aim at the tax prep industry. In a speech to an audience of tax wonks in Washington, he promised that the IRS would establish a simple return system. “This means no more worry, no more waste of time, no more extra expense for a tax preparer,” he declared.

But the Obama administration, as Bush’s had before, found that it was no match for Intuit.

Again, Bernie McKay, the lobbyist who had joined Intuit in the late 1990s and outlasted multiple CEOs, led the company’s campaign. In response to the Obama threat, McKay and Intuit’s small army of outside lobbyists turned to Congress, where lawmakers friendly to the company introduced a series of bills that would elevate Free File from a temporary deal with the IRS to the law of the land.

Republicans have historically been the company’s most reliable supporters, but some Democrats joined them. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat whose district includes part of Silicon Valley, has introduced or co-sponsored five bills over the years that would codify the Free File program, with names like the Free File Permanence Act. Lofgren’s spokesperson told ProPublica that the congresswoman believes the IRS, because of its role as tax collector, should not also be the tax preparer.

Hedging its bets, the company also sought to make sure the IRS could not spend a single dollar creating a public filing system. One internal document says Intuit would “advance legislative language in House Appropriations for ‘No Funds’ restriction on IRS spending” on such a system. It worked. Within a few years, Congress passed a 3,000-page appropriations bill that included a single sentence crucial to Intuit’s financial future: “No funds,” the law decreed, could be used “to provide to any person a proposed final return or statement.”

Another important aspect of Intuit’s influence strategy during the Obama years was covertly enlisting minority and women’s groups to press its case.

The internal 2014-15 “encroachment strategy” document discloses plans to “leverage trade groups to support House/Senate Free File bills.” It goes on to list the groups Women Impacting Public Policy, The Latino Coalition and the National Black Chamber of Commerce.

Intuit has given money to all of those groups over the years. All have signed letters urging Congress to make the Free File deal permanent. “The Free File program has been a clear success,” said one letter signed by The Latino Coalition and the Hispanic Leadership Fund.

A spokesperson for Women Impacting Public Policy said it has received $70,000 from Intuit. The amounts given to the other groups are unknown, and they did not respond to requests for comment.

Company documents also outline plans to “mobilize” a “coalition” that included think tanks and academics, who published op-eds.

Will Marshall, president of the pro-business Progressive Policy Institute, opposed return-free filing in an op-ed in The Hill because doing one’s taxes is “a teachable moment [that] prompts us to review our financial circumstances.”

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the most consistent champion of Intuit’s policy positions, warned that “big spenders in Washington, D.C. want to socialize all tax preparation in America.”

It is unclear whether they were paid by Intuit or the Free File Alliance. Norquist didn’t respond to a request for comment, and a Progressive Policy Institute spokesman declined to say whether Intuit gave the group money.

Whatever external challenges to the status quo Intuit has faced, the company has been able to rely on the IRS’ continuing enthusiastic support of the Free File program. Every few years, the IRS and the industry got together to renew the deal.

In part, that was due to the relationships Intuit had developed with high-ranking IRS officials. One, Dave Williams, served as the agency’s top negotiator on the Free File program for several years and “was very commercially sensitive,” said Mark Ernst, the CEO of H&R Block until 2007. Ernst, who later held a senior role at the IRS, told ProPublica that Williams “didn’t want to offend the industry,” noting that “he was particularly open to having sidebar conversations with key people where he could imagine himself landing some day.”

Today, Williams works at Intuit, where he’s held the title of chief tax officer since 2013. He is one of several former IRS employees who have gone on to work there. In a statement, Williams told ProPublica he did not have discussions about future employment with Intuit or other companies until after he left the IRS. He added that his career in government was focused on “what is best for the taxpayer” and that he “joined Intuit for the same reason: to help the American taxpayer.”

Despite Free File’s declining use, the IRS often claimed that the program was nevertheless meeting one of its original goals: driving more people to file electronically instead of on paper. Ernst, who served as a senior official at the IRS from 2009 to 2010, didn’t believe that a program used by so few people was having any such effect. “It was a talking point that got trotted out all the time to justify the Free File Alliance,” he said.

Internally, IRS managers have also argued that the program is, in a way, a success, because it created “a free marketplace,” as one internal management report in 2017 put it. Apparently, customers weren’t the only ones taken in by the word “free.”

In 2018, Intuit faced rare scrutiny from inside the IRS. The agency asked its Advisory Council, a group of outside experts, to take stock of Free File. To the company’s alarm, it soon became apparent that the council’s report might be sharply critical.

That July, council chair and University of California, Davis, law professor Dennis Ventry wrote two pieces criticizing an Intuit-backed bill in Congress that would make the program permanent. His op-ed in The Hill was called, “Free File providers scam taxpayers; Congress shouldn’t be fooled.”

In response, the IRS again rose to Intuit’s aid. It rushed to assure the company that Ventry’s power to affect the program was limited, according to emails to the Free File Alliance obtained through a public records request.

“The Commissioner has met directly with Mr. Ventry,” IRS official Ken Corbin wrote to Steve Ryan, a lobbyist for Intuit who also represented the alliance. “Mr. Ventry will recuse himself from participating or contributing to the topic of Free File.”

Corbin heads the IRS division that processes most Americans’ tax returns and negotiates the Free File deal with Intuit and the industry.

A few days later, Ryan arrived at the IRS’ Constitution Avenue headquarters in Washington to mount a defense of the program. A former Democratic Senate aide turned lawyer-lobbyist, Ryan is known on Capitol Hill for taking on politically fraught clients, including Trump attorney Michael Cohen and the government of Qatar. He helped create Free File in the early 2000s, and it was now his job to secure its future.

Ryan’s PowerPoint presentation at the IRS rehashed arguments that the company had been making for the past 15 years. It also highlighted a 2013 study by Brown University professor John Friedman, a former Obama National Economic Council official, to make the point that the program had been successful in generating “Free Tax Returns Outside of Free File.” The presentation did not mention that Friedman’s study was paid for by the Free File companies and was not published in an academic journal. Friedman declined to say what he was paid but told ProPublica he “wrote the piece based on my analysis of the issues, which I stand by.”

Ventry, who attended the meeting, got a call the next day alerting him that a California public records request had been filed for his emails — they were subject to such a request because he’s an employee of a state university. It came from the Free File Alliance, as The New York Times later reported. The request, Ventry believes, was designed to “freak me out.”

In early October, the council sent a version of its final report, which included a harsh appraisal of the Free File program, to the IRS to seek responses before releasing it publicly the following month.

But in mid-October, just weeks before the report saw the light of day, the Free File industry group fired off an “urgent” request to meet with IRS officials. The goal was to re-sign and “improve” the memorandum of understanding that governed the Free File program, according to the emails. The current agreement wasn’t expiring for another two years, but Ryan cited the “time urgency to make changes that will benefit taxpayers” in the coming tax season, adding, “I have not darkened your door in 2018 and need your … attention to this opportunity.”

The IRS’ Corbin signed the new deal on Oct. 31. Two weeks later, the Advisory Council report was released, with a damning indictment of the program: “The IRS’s deficient oversight and performance standards for the Free File program put vulnerable taxpayers at risk,” the report found.

The expert body recommended that the IRS negotiate a series of new provisions designed to increase the use and oversight of the program, including mandating advertising by the companies. But it was too late. A new deal had already been signed with modest changes. As it had in the past, Intuit and the alliance had effectively insulated the program from reform. Members of the council, Ventry said, were “pissed off.”

A spokesman for the Free File Alliance said the group had pushed to renegotiate the deal in 2018 because of the looming 2020 presidential campaign. “The reason for the timing of the extension of the agreement was the political season,” he said. The group had not seen the report before its release, he added.

(In August, ProPublica sued the IRS to get more correspondence between the agency and Intuit’s lobbyists. In response to our Freedom of Information Act requests, the agency has withheld over 100 pages. The case is ongoing.)

The new deal included rules that barred Free File companies from offering extra products to the relatively small number of users who access the program. This makes it much more difficult to convert those users into paying customers.

At around the same time, the industry took steps to make the program more difficult to find. Both Intuit and H&R Block added code to their Free File websites that shielded them from search engines such as Google. The Intuit spokesman said the company increased paid search advertising for Free File “by nearly 80 percent” over the last year and has data showing more people found the program through online search this year than last year, but he declined to provide specific figures.

What is clear is that Intuit’s business relies on keeping the use of Free File low. The company has repeatedly declined to say how many of its paying customers are eligible for the program, which is currently open to anyone who makes under $66,000. But based on publicly available data and statements by Intuit executives, ProPublica estimates that roughly 15 million paying TurboTax customers could have filed for free if they found Free File. That represents more than $1.5 billion in estimated revenue, or more than half the total that TurboTax generates. Those affected include retirees, students, people on disability and minimum-wage workers.

Customers, meanwhile, remain confused by Intuit’s myriad uses of “free,” and internal documents show the company knows it. Over just a two-week period this past filing season, Intuit received nearly 7,000 TurboTax customer calls in which the phrase “supposed to be free” was uttered, according to a company analysis. One customer complained that Intuit charged him even though “it says ‘free free free’ on the commercial.” The TurboTax representative responded: “That ad has been the bane of my existence.”

Even as TurboTax’s business thrived, 2019 has been a rocky year for Intuit’s long-running war against government encroachment. In April, the company was close to finally succeeding in its long-held goal to make Free File permanent. A bill called the Taxpayer First Act was sailing toward almost unanimous approval in Congress. But after ProPublica published a series of stories about the program, including a story showing that military families and students were particularly affected by Intuit’s business tactics, the bill stalled. Congress ultimately removed the provision that would have enshrined Free File in law.

After having enabled Intuit for so long, the IRS finally responded to the pressure. It hired a contractor to review the Free File program. But the contractor had previously argued against the IRS offering its own tax prep option, and the review did not recommend major changes. The agency has not yet announced its plans for the future of the program.

The agency’s inspector general also launched an audit, which is ongoing. Other investigations and litigation followed, ranging from class-action complaints, alleging that consumers had been deceived by Intuit’s tactics, to investigations and lawsuits by regulators and prosecutors in New York and California. Intuit has denied wrongdoing, saying it “has at all times been clear and fair with its customers.”

Despite the scrutiny, Wall Street has continued to embrace the company’s business model. The company recently announced it made $1.5 billion in profits for its fiscal year. It expects its TurboTax unit to grow by 10% next year. Last year the CEO was paid $20 million. The share price hit an all-time record.

The company has returned to its old strategy: stay the course and take its case directly to the IRS and Congress. Its allies in the Senate have again advanced an appropriations bill that would bar the IRS from developing its own tax filing system. In the spring, Sasan Goodarzi, a former head of the TurboTax unit who took over as CEO of the entire company in January, sought to reassure employees.

“Our view is this will be in the press until there is a resolution with the IRS,” he said, according to the video obtained ProPublica. “And we’re working with them and we feel very good about where this will end.”

Doris Burke contributed research to this story.

Do you have information about Intuit, the IRS or tax prep? We want to hear from you. Fill out our questionnaire or contact Justin at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240.

U.S. Picks Trump Resort for G-7; Critics Call Choice ‘Brazen’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s suggestion that his Miami golf resort host next year’s Group of Seven summit became a reality Thursday, sparking an outcry from critics who called it the most blatant example yet of him using the power of his office to boost his business empire.

“There are folks who will never get over the fact that it’s a Trump property, but we’re still going to go there,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said in announcing Trump National Doral as host. “It’s not the only place. It’s the best place.”

Mulvaney said that the president will not profit from the summit because it will be booked “at cost” and that it stood out from a dozen sites considered because of its location and amenities. But it at least creates the appearance of a conflict of interest because, unlike foreign dignitaries who can choose to stay at the president’s Washington hotel and other properties, they have no choice but to spend money at his resort during the June 10-12 summit.

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“He is doubling down on his corruption,” said ethics lawyer Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. “He’s daring anyone to prevent him from further enriching himself from the presidency.”

The decision comes as several lawsuits accuse Trump of violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bans the president from receiving gifts or payments from foreign governments. It also comes as Trump has been repeatedly accusing Joe Biden’s family of profiting from public office because of Hunter Biden’s business activities in Ukraine when his father was vice president.

Mulvaney brushed off such concerns, as well as the idea that the summit at Trump’s Doral course would be nothing more than a massive promotion for his brand.

“Donald Trump’s brand is strong as it is,” Mulvaney said. “It’s the most recognized name in the English language.”

The chief of staff recounted that Trump himself raised the idea during a brainstorming session on possible sites, saying, “What about Doral?” said Mulvaney, “That’s not the craziest idea I’ve ever heard.

Trump boasted at this year’s G-7 summit in France that Doral would be a “natural” choice, touting its sprawling acreage, proximity to the airport, three golf courses, “incredible” restaurants and separate buildings for every delegation.

Mulvaney said about a dozen potential sites were narrowed to a list of four finalists before Doral was selected as “far and away the best physical facility.” He added that holding the event at Doral would be dramatically cheaper — saving “millions” — and he promised to provide financial figures after the event to back that up.

Critics noted that the Doral resort, the biggest source of revenue among Trump’s 17 golf properties, appears to have been struggling since even before he became president.

Financial disclosure reports filed by the president show revenue is barely growing, up just $1 million last year, to $76 million. And the Trump Organization itself has admitted it was struggling, arguing in a tax appeal to local authorities last year that it is “seriously underperforming,” according to a Washington Post review of tax appeal documents.

The Doral, which Trump purchased out of bankruptcy in 2012 for a reported $150 million, also faces a heavy debt load. At the end of last year, Trump had two mortgages on the resort, one for more than $50 million and another for as much as $25 million.

“The president is now officially using the power of his office to help prop up his struggling golf business,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Trump “no longer sees fit even to pretend that he is constrained by the law or the Constitution,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a liberal-leaning consumer advocacy group.

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions about Doral’s finances. Instead, it issued a statement saying that it is “excited to have been asked to host” the summit and “honored by this recognition.”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, among the Democrats in Congress who have sued the president over the emoluments issue, saw it as far more troubling.

“It’s so brazen and craven,” he said. “It’s virtually saying, ‘To heck with the rule of law.'”

Added U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York: “The emolument clauses of the Constitution exist to prevent exactly this kind of corruption.”

___

Condon contributed from New York. Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed from Washington.

Workers Celebrate Deal With GM, Show Union Power in Industry

DETROIT — On the picket lines at a General Motors transmission plant in Toledo, Ohio, passing cars honked and striking workers celebrated a tentative contract deal by munching on 10 pizzas dropped off by a supporter.

They had carried signs for 31 days and demonstrated the muscle the United Auto Workers union still has over Detroit’s three manufacturers.

Details of the four-year pact weren’t released, but GM’s latest offer to end the monthlong strike included wage increases and lump-sum payments, top-notch health insurance at little cost to workers, promises of new products for many U.S. factories and a path to full-time work for temporary workers.

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That’s a big difference from what GM wanted going into the talks: to slash total labor costs at its factories, which are about $13 per hour higher than at foreign automakers in the U.S.

Terry Dittes, the UAW’s chief bargainer with GM, said the deal offers “major gains” for 49,000 union workers who have been walking picket lines since Sept. 16. They’ll stay off work for at least a couple more days while union committees decide if they will bless the deal. Then workers will have to vote on it.

The deal shows that the union, with less than one-third of the 1.5 million members it had at its peak in 1979, still has a lot of clout with GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler.

“I think economically the UAW will do just fine in this agreement,” said Art Schwartz, a former GM negotiator who now is a labor consultant in Michigan. “The union certainly still has power in this industry.”

President Donald Trump called UAW President Gary Jones on Wednesday night, but union spokesman Brian Rothenberg said he did not know what the men discussed.

The strike immediately brought GM’s U.S. factories to a halt, and within a week, started to hamper production in Mexico and Canada. Analysts at KeyBanc investment services estimated the stoppage cut GM vehicle production by 250,000 to 300,000 vehicles. That’s too much for the company to make up with overtime or increased assembly line speeds. Analysts say the costs to GM will hit around $2 billion.

Workers, on the other hand, lost north of $3,000 each on average, the difference between their base wages and $250 per week in strike pay from the union.

“It’s nice to see there’s a deal, but without knowing the details I’m a little skeptical because we don’t know the highlights or the lowlights,” said worker Nick Kuhlman, who was among the strikers huddled around a burn barrel on a blustery, gray Toledo afternoon.

“I just hope it gets done,” said Toledo worker Mark Nichols, who thought the strike would last only a week or two and was ready to get back to work because his savings are running low.

GM apparently was able to close three of four factories that it wanted to shutter to get rid of excess capacity in slow-selling cars and components. The Detroit-Hamtramck plant will get a new electric pickup truck and stay open, but factories in Lordstown, Ohio; Warren, Michigan; and near Baltimore are to be closed. The Lordstown area will get an electric vehicle battery factory, but it won’t have nearly as many workers as the assembly plant that for years made compact GM cars.

The deal now will be used as a template for talks with GM’s crosstown rivals, Ford and Fiat Chrysler. Normally the major provisions carry over to the other two companies and cover about 140,000 auto workers nationwide. It wasn’t clear which company the union would bargain with next, or whether there would be another strike.

Schwartz said depending on the contents, the GM contract could influence wages and benefits in other industries. But he said foreign automakers with U.S. factories, mainly in the South, will give modest pay raises regardless of the GM contract, and shouldn’t be affected much.

Clarence Trinity, a worker at GM’s engine and transmission plant in the Detroit suburb of Romulus, Michigan, said the deal sounds good, “but I have to see it in writing or hear from the leaders.”

Trinity said he can’t figure out why it took 31 days for the strike to end. “I don’t understand what General Motors was expecting to get out of us. Maybe they didn’t expect us to strike. Maybe they didn’t expect us to strike this long.”

If all of the committees bless the deal, it’s likely to take several days for GM to get its factories restarted.

Matt Himes, a worker at the GM plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, heard news of the deal in Ohio, where he’s trying to help his wife sell their house after the Lordstown GM plant where he used to work was shuttered.

He hopes good news keeps coming. If they can sell their house, his wife can finally move south with him.

“I’m proud that we stuck our ground and everybody stuck together,” Himes said of the union workers during a phone interview. “And I’m relieved that hopefully it worked out, got us a good contract and we can move on and get back to work making cars like we should be.”

Wall Street investors liked news that the strike could end. GM shares jumped 2.6% just after the news broke, but eased back to close up 1% at $36.65.

GM and the union have been negotiating at a time of troubling uncertainty for the U.S. auto industry. Driven up by the longest economic expansion in American history, auto sales appear to have peaked and are now heading in the other direction. GM and other carmakers are also struggling to make the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and his tariffs on imported steel and aluminum have raised costs for auto companies. A revamped North American free trade deal is stalled in Congress, raising doubts about the future of America’s trade in autos and auto parts with Canada and Mexico, which last year came to $257 billion.

Amid that uncertainty, GM workers have wanted to lock in as much as they can before things get ugly. They argue that they had given up pay raises and made other concessions to keep GM afloat during its 2009 trip through bankruptcy protection. Now that GM has been nursed back to health — earning $2.42 billion in its latest quarter — they wanted a bigger share.

The union’s bargainers have voted to recommend the deal to the UAW International Executive Board, which will vote on the agreement. Union leaders from factories nationwide will travel to Detroit for a vote on Thursday. The earliest workers could return would be after that.

In past years, it’s taken a minimum of three or four days and as long as several weeks for the national ratification vote.

This time around — with a federal corruption investigation that has implicated the past two UAW presidents and brought convictions of five union officials — many union members don’t trust the leadership. But they’re also tired of striking and may return before they vote on the deal themselves.

The strike had shut down 33 GM manufacturing plants in nine states across the U.S., and also took down factories in Canada and Mexico. It was the first national strike by the union since a two-day walkout in 2007, and the longest since a 54-day strike in Flint, Michigan, in 1998 that also halted most of GM’s production.

____

Associated Press writers Mike Householder in Detroit, John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, and Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed to this report.

Joe Biden’s Disgraceful New Attack on Sanders and Warren

Speaking to reporters during a campaign event in Ohio on Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden accused Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—his two top rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination—of “playing Trump’s game and trying to con the American people” by supporting Medicare for All.

“I mean, look, I don’t want to pick on Elizabeth Warren, but this is ridiculous,” Biden said. “The idea that someone is going to be able to go out and spend what turns out to be, if you add on everything that’s going to be free beyond Obamacare, excuse me beyond Medicare for All, which is it’s going to come out to about 3.4 trillion dollars a year.”

Biden went on to falsely claim that the $3.4 trillion estimate, for which he did not provide a source, is “bigger than the entire federal budget.”

The former vice president neglected to mention that the United States spent $3.65 trillion on healthcare in 2018, a number that is expected to rise rapidly over the next decade under the for-profit system Biden’s public option plan would leave intact.

Biden also took aim at Sanders, falsely stating that the senator and author of the 100-page Senate Medicare for All Act of 2019 hasn’t explained how he would finance Medicare for All.

“God love Bernie, and it was really good, I really mean it, to see him so healthy and moving last night,” said Biden. “But Bernie, Bernie doesn’t pay for half his plan… Look the last thing the Democrats should be doing is playing Trump’s game and trying to con the American people to think this is easy. There’s nothing easy about it. If you’re going to do it, tell us how you’re going to do it. It’s called truth in speaking.”

Watch:

Joe Biden: “Bernie doesn’t pay for half his plans… The last thing the Democrats should be doing is playing Trump’s game and trying to con the American people to think this is easy.” pic.twitter.com/nz7LaffQ3m

— Ibrahim (@ibrahimpols) October 16, 2019

As the New York Times reported Wednesday, “Biden is under particular pressure because Ms. Warren has passed him in some national and early-state polls and joined him as a frontrunner, a status he held alone for months.”

In response to Biden’s attacks, Warren’s communications director Kristen Orthman told the Times that “instead of speaking to wealthy donors, our campaign spent the day calling and thanking over a thousand of our grass-roots supporters.”

“Other than that we have no comment,” said Orthman.

A request for comment to the Sanders campaign was not returned as of press time.

As Common Dreams reported, Biden raised around $10 million less than both Sanders and Warren in the third quarter of 2019 despite his heavy reliance on big-money events.

Biden’s remarks in Ohio on Wednesday came just hours after he joined South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg in launching a slew of misleading attacks on Medicare for All during Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate.

“For people making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year, their taxes are going up about $5,000 because the fact is, they will pay more in new taxes,” Biden said of Medicare for All, a statement that earned him a “mostly false” score from PolitiFact.

Briahna Joy Gray, Sanders’ national press secretary, pushed back on the premise of Biden’s attack on Twitter.

“The average American family pays $20,000 in premiums, and Joe Biden is focused on $5,000 in taxes,” said Gray. “The math is clear. Americans shouldn’t die because they’re poor. Period. Medicare for All.”

Syrian Forces Enter Key Border Town, Blocking Turkish Plans

CEYLANPINAR, Turkey — Syrian forces on Wednesday night rolled into the strategic border town of Kobani, blocking one path for the Turkish military to establish a “safe zone” free of Syrian Kurdish fighters along the frontier as part of its week-old offensive.

The seizure of Kobani by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad also pointed to a dramatic shift in northeastern Syria: The town was where the United States military and Kurdish fighters first united to defeat the Islamic State group four years ago and holds powerful symbolism for Syrian Kurds and their ambitions of self-rule.

The convoys of government forces drove into Kobani after dark, a resident said. The resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, was one of the few remaining amid fears of a Turkish attack on the town. Syria’s state-run media confirmed its troops entered the town.

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Syria’s presence in Kobani puts a firm limit on Turkish ambitions in its offensive. The town lies between a Turkish-controlled enclave farther west and smaller areas to the east that Turkey seized in the past week.

Turkey had talked of creating a 30-kilometer (19-mile) deep “safe zone,” driving out Kurdish fighters from the border region. Turkish forces had shelled Kobani in recent days as part of the offensive but had not advanced ground troops on it.

The battle for Kobani turned the once-nondescript town into a centerpiece of the international campaign against IS, with TV cameras flocking to the Turkish side of the border to track the plumes of smoke rising from explosions in the besieged town. Then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared it would be “morally very difficult” not to help Kobani.

The IS extremists were finally driven out in early 2015 in their first major defeat, and an alliance was cemented that would eventually bring down the group’s “caliphate” in Syria.

Now the Kurdish authority agreed to allow Damascus to deploy its military in the town and other parts of northeast Syria to protect them from Turkey’s offensive launched after U.S. President Donald Trump pulled back American troops working with the Kurds.

On Wednesday, the U.S-led coalition said it had vacated a cement factory south of Kobani, which had served as a coordination center with the Kurdish-led forces. Coalition spokesman Col. Myles Caggins said that after troops left the base, two U.S. fighter jets launched pre-planned airstrikes to destroy ammunition that was left behind.

The coalition also said its forces had left Raqqa, the former capital of the Islamic State that was liberated in 2017, and Tabqa, a town to the west.

“Coalition forces continue a deliberate withdrawal from northeast Syria,” Caggins tweeted.

After being effectively abandoned by the U.S., the Kurds’ turn to the Syrian government for protection has allowed Damascus’ ally, Russia, to step in as the biggest power player.

Moscow further asserted that role Wednesday, offering to mediate a resolution to the conflict, one day before U.S. Vice President Mike Pence was to begin a mission to press Turkey for a cease-fire.

On Monday, Trump imposed limited economic sanctions on Turkey to raise the pressure on Ankara. The move came five days after Trump raised the specter of sanctions in a letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which he also said that if the Turkish leader invaded Syria he would be remembered as a “devil.” Trump told Erdogan he wouldn’t want to be responsible for “slaughtering thousands of people,” and warned, “don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!”

Erdogan defied the sanctions, saying the only way its military offensive would end was if Syrian Kurdish fighters leave a designated border area.

Erdogan also said he had “no problem” accepting an invitation from Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Russia soon to discuss Syria. But he threw into doubt a planned Nov. 13 meeting with Trump, citing anger over the sanctions that Washington imposed Monday on the NATO ally.

Despite an outcry among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers over the pullout and the Turkish invasion, Trump insisted a fight between Turkey and the Kurds was not a U.S. problem and that things are “very nicely under control” in northern Syria.

“Syria’s friendly with the Kurds. The Kurds are very well-protected. Plus, they know how to fight. And, by the way, they’re no angels,” Trump told reporters at the White House while meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

Trump added that U.S. troops are “largely out” of the region, adding that if Russia wanted to get involved with Syria, “that’s really up to them. It’s not our border. We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”

Still, the repercussions from America’s abrupt withdrawal were expanding. Assad’s forces are returning to regions of northern Syria they abandoned at the height of the 8-year-old civil war. Moscow has taken a more prominent role as an interlocutor among Assad, the former U.S.-allied Kurds and Turkey.

Erdogan’s office confirmed the Turkish leader would meet Thursday with Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and said he would travel to Sochi, Russia, for talks on Tuesday.

Erdogan said he was not concerned by the U.S. sanctions. He told reporters that chances for his November trip to Washington are “something to be assessed” after the talks with the American delegation, he said, adding that the sanctions and criticisms in the U.S. constituted “great disrespect toward the Turkish Republic.”

In an address to his ruling party legislators, Erdogan said Turkey would not be coerced into halting its offensive or accepting offers for mediation with the Kurdish fighters, which Turkey considers to be terrorists.

“Our proposal is for the terrorists to lay down their arms, leave their equipment, destroy the traps they have created, and leave the safe zone we designated, as of tonight,” Erdogan said. “If this is done, our Operation Peace Spring will end by itself.”

In a speech to Parliament, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey won’t be affected by “sanctions and threats.” He also said Turkey would “give the appropriate answer to these sanctions.”

Turkish forces and Kurdish fighters also battled over the border town of Ras al-Ayn. Turkey said it had captured the town days ago, but its hold appeared uncertain.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in remarks carried by Russian news agencies that Moscow is committed to mediating between Syria and Turkey.

Russia already has announced it had deployed troops outside the flashpoint town of Manbij to keep apart the Syrian military and Turkish-led forces. Syrian forces took control of Manbij as U.S. troops completed their pullout from the town Tuesday.

Lavrov also said Moscow will also continue to encourage Syria’s Kurds and government to seek rapprochement following the U.S. withdrawal. The Kurds are hoping to reach a deal with Damascus that preserves at least some degree of the autonomy they seized for themselves during the civil war.

Lavrov also blamed the U.S. and the West for undermining the Syrian state, saying this pushed “the Kurds toward separatism and confrontation with Arab tribes.”

In another sign of Moscow’s rising profile, France suggested it will also work more closely with Russia in Syria.

French Foreign Minister Jean Yves Le Drian said told French TV channel BFM that France is now looking to Russia, given their “common interests” in defeating the Islamic State group in Syria.

A U.N. Security Council meeting concluded with no call for Turkey to end its military offensive against the Kurds. Instead, the diplomats issued a brief statement expressing concern about the dispersal of “terrorists” from the region and the humanitarian impact.

___

Mroue contributed from Beirut. Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed.

Pete Buttigieg Is the Past

It was the paradox that defined the fourth Democratic debate Tuesday night. Pete Buttigieg stood to benefit more than anybody from Joe Biden’s entirely forgettable performance, and yet with the possible exception of Biden himself, no one more vividly embodied all that is stale and sclerotic about the Democratic Party than the fresh-faced politician colloquially known as Mayor Pete.

Prior to the debate, Buttigieg threw punches to his left over health care, gun control and (perhaps most bizarrely) grassroots voters. And from the jump, he went right after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), trotting out one Heritage Foundation-tested line after another on health care: that the overarching desire of the public in health care is to have choice, that higher taxes equal higher cost, and that Medicare for All would result in “kicking 150 million people off their health insurance.” It was a line of attack that earned the South Bend mayor and self-styled Heartlands whisperer rave reviews from the likes of the Republican National Committee.

But then Buttigieg described the defining feature of his “Medicare for All for those who want it” proposal—a glorified public option co-opting the language of single-payer, which Warren rightly dubbed “Medicare for All who can afford it”—as superior to the single-payer plan introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and backed by Warren. “Our country will be horrifyingly polarized, even more than now, after everything we’ve been through, after everything we are about to go through, this country will be even more divided,” he intoned. “Why unnecessarily divide this country over health care when there’s a better way to deliver coverage for all?”

To accept this statement on its face is to brazenly ignore the history of health care reform in the United States. You don’t even have to go back to the first calls for single-payer under President Harry S. Truman; just look at the Affordable Care Act—a plan whose most controversial feature had once been a Heritage Foundation proposal—and the war that rages over it to this day. Any proposal expanding the government’s role in health care is still virulently opposed by both Republicans and health care profiteers, even if the proposed legislation carves out a space for private health insurance. Even Biden, who by all accounts did not want any part of another health care fight in the early days of the Obama administration, admitted as much later in the debate. “The greed and profiteering of those insurance companies, they are as much against my bill as they are anybody else,” Biden said, in response to a charge from Sanders that the public option doesn’t go far enough in taking on the industry. “They were strongly against Obamacare.”

Still, it’s imperative we remember that neither of these groups strangled the public option in its crib; instead, the culprits were right-wing Democrats, including Sens. Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman, along with the conservative Blue Dog Coalition in the House. Ten years later, it’s increasingly hard to believe that these Blue Dogs, whose campaign arm is run by the corporate donor-friendly Cheri Bustos, would find the political courage within themselves to pass a public option. In all likelihood, they would abandon health care reform altogether.

If the Trump administration’s repeated attacks on the Affordable Care Act have taught us anything, it’s that incrementalism does not work, and yet Buttigieg clings to this myth. Pundits have sneered at Sanders’ pledge to use his bully pulpit to force Congress’ hand, but his 2020 rival is employing the same basic logic, albeit without even pretending as if he wants to mobilize working-class voters. “We are at the cusp of building a new American majority to actually do things that congressmen and senators have been talking about with almost no impact for my entire adult life,” Buttigieg said. (He was criticizing O’Rourke’s gun buyback plan, but the sentiment could be applied just as easily to health care.)

Buttigieg is a Harvard graduate and a former McKinsey associate, and like so many of his class, his entire approach to politics—that both sides have to have buy-in for anything to work—is deeply cynical. His program would run into all of the same obstacles that Sanders’, Warren’s, and others’ would, so it’s difficult not to view these plays at “getting things done” and being “realistic” as anything other than a signal to donors and moderates alike that he won’t rock the boat too much. If Democrats tried to pass Medicare today, conservatives would deride it as socialism, just as the conservatives of the time did. Buttigieg knows this, of course, and he’s acknowledged as much on the debate stage.

There is no public policy in modern American history on which progressives, moderates and conservatives have found themselves in agreement of what the goal should be, much less what the solution is. There are people who are OK with the status quo—tens of millions of people lacking basic health insurance—and there are people who aren’t. It might be inconvenient for Buttigieg that this is such a black and white question, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

Tuesday’s debate was Buttigieg’s chance to show he actually had something to offer, that he wasn’t being propped up “Weekend at Bernie’s”-style by high-dollar donors. Instead, he meshed the painfully outdated rhetoric of past Democratic campaigns—Barack Obama’s appeal for “post-partisanship” springs to mind—with the pessimism and limited imagination that has come to define the center of his party.

Pete Buttigieg might be the youngest person in this race, but his politics are a relic. Unfortunately for him, voters appear to have moved on.

No, Warren and Sanders Are Not the Same

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had two heart stents inserted into his arteries in early October, media pundits were quick to foresee the end of his pioneering, movement-based candidacy. Some questioned why it took three whole days for his family and campaign to confirm the details of his medical condition and others wondered whether age and health would be important factors in his candidacy. Given the documented media bias against Sanders, it is certainly not surprising to see Sanders’ health scare exploited to undermine his candidacy. (Sanders, on the other hand, in his typical fashion, exploited his situation to demand that health care ought to be “a human right.”)

Los Angeles Times opinion writer Rich Benjamin pushed the bias further by saying, “any perception of fatigue and frailty can undercut his effectiveness in competing for the nomination and in the dogfight against Trump if he does beat the rest of the Democratic field.” Benjamin demanded that it was time for “Bernie and his bros” — using a sexist, racist and discredited smear that assumes Sanders’ supporters are mostly pig-headed white men — “to get behind Elizabeth Warren.” In fact, men and women are roughly evenly split among Sanders’ supporters, and people of color are more likely than whites to back him.

Benjamin is echoing a sentiment that has been gaining traction: that Warren is a good enough emulation of Sanders and has adopted enough of his progressive policy proposals for Sanders’ supporters to unreservedly support her. But while a Warren nomination would certainly be a strong sign of progress, particularly in the era of Donald Trump, there are serious distinctions between Sanders and Warren that should not be dismissed.

For example, on health care, although they both back the idea of a “Medicare for All” plan, Warren and Sanders do not take identical positions. Health care is the most important issue for the American electorate. During Tuesday’s Democratic presidential candidate debate, Warren repeatedly avoided admitting that backing a Medicare for All plan would mean that taxes would go up across the board. She sidestepped questions twice, saying, “I will not sign a bill into law that raises their costs, because costs are what people care about.” But in fact people care about getting the health care they need more than anything. According to a new poll released on the same day as the debate, “Fifty-six percent of Americans think providing access to affordable health care coverage for all Americans is the responsibility of the federal government, and two-thirds favor the creation of a national, government-administered health insurance plan similar to Medicare that would be available to all Americans.” Vox.com writer Tara Golshan explained that although Warren has endorsed Sanders’ health care plan, “she speaks about Medicare-for-all more in terms of expanding public options for health care, rather than eliminating private insurance altogether.”

Sanders, on the other hand, was far more candid about the cost of his plan during the debate, saying, “I do think it is appropriate to acknowledge that taxes will go up. They’re going to go up significantly for the wealthy. And for virtually everybody, the tax increase they pay will be substantially less — substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.” By acknowledging that taxes will go up while premiums, co-payments, deductibles and  “all out-of-pocket expenses are gone,” Sanders was far more honest about what his bill to expand Medicare to all Americans would entail while also demolishing the right-wing argument about high costs. Later in the debate, he went further and slammed the Democratic Party, challenging it to have “the guts to stand up to the health care industry, which made $100 billion in profit.”

There are differences in other policies too. For example, Sanders’ plan to tax the wealthiest Americans goes much further than Warren’s. His tax rate for billionaires is more than twice that of Warren, leading one commentator to declare that Sanders’ plan to tax extreme wealth “makes Warren’s wealth tax look moderate.” Sanders has even said he doesn’t think billionaires should exist.

It has become more and more apparent that Sanders is the only Democratic candidate to have a lengthy track record on progressive politics, compared to those who have discovered their progressive backbones more recently because they know it plays well to the party’s left-leaning base. Seven years ago, Warren did not back Medicare for All, and 23 years ago she was a registered Republican. In fact she maintains she is an avowed capitalist. Meanwhile, Sanders has been backing the idea of a Medicare plan expanded to all Americans for at least 10 years. He has been calling himself a socialist for decades, and he most recently distinguished himself from Warren’s self-proclaimed capitalist label in an interview.

When Sanders ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, media outlets ignored him until he began winning primaries, and even then, experts routinely underestimated his pull and popularity. Progressives were thrilled to finally see a bona fide leftist candidate on a national stage echoing the issues that we longed to hear about, analyzed in ways that targeted corporate profiteers. After the election ended, the movement that was borne from his candidacy flourished and proliferated into multiple organizations that were determined to challenge establishment politics from inside and outside the electoral system. Among the successes of that movement was the 2018 election of the outspoken and staunchly progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

While recent polls show Sanders’ popularity as a candidate dipping a few percentage points behind Warren, his performance this week during the Democratic debate (including his characteristic dismissal of concern over the state of his health, saying only that he was “healthy” and “feeling great”), may bump his numbers up in the next poll. Perhaps even more important is the announcement that Ocasio-Cortez will be endorsing his candidacy. Both Warren and Sanders had sought the endorsement of the young and very popular progressive Democrat and now that Sanders has clinched it, it may well boost his standing. Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who are considered part of the four-member “squad” of prominent progressive congresswomen of color, have also decided to throw their weight behind the Vermont senator. Sanders and Omar just co-sponsored a bill to feed all schoolchildren three free meals a day regardless of income. Clearly Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and Tlaib see a distinction between Warren and Sanders.

There is one thing Warren has going for her over Sanders: She’s far more charismatic than he is. At a recent LGBTQ event in Los Angeles, Warren won over the crowd when she was asked how she might respond to a supporter who claimed that marriage should be between one man and one woman. She replied,  “I’m going to assume it is a guy who said that. And I’m going to say, ‘Well, then just marry one woman. I’m cool with that.'” With the perfect timing of an improv artist, she waited for applause and added, “Assuming you can find one” — which of course resulted in even more applause.

Yes, Warren’s candidacy would be huge step in the right direction for the United States in the Trump era — especially if she were the most progressive front-runner in the race. But she’s not. In fact, she is arguably being pulled to the left by Sanders’ candidacy. CNBC’s Jim Cramer suggested that if Sanders dropped out of the race, “she doesn’t have to be worried about that [far-left] flank anymore.” So, do progressives want the candidate who may be feeling pressured to move to the left or the person whose candidacy is setting the progressive standard?

Trump Has ‘Meltdown’ in Syria Meeting With Democrats

WASHINGTON — Washing his hands of Syria, President Donald Trump declared Wednesday the U.S. has no stake in defending the Kurdish fighters who died by the thousands as America’s partners against IS extremists. Hours later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats walked out of a meeting at the White House, accusing him of having a “meltdown,” calling her a “third-rate politician” and having no plan to deal with a potentially revived Islamic State group.

Condemnation of Trump’s stance on Turkey, Syria and the Kurds was quick and severe during the day, not only from Democrats but from Republicans who have been staunch supporters on virtually all issues.

The House, bitterly divided over the Trump impeachment inquiry, banded together for an overwhelming 354-60 denunciation of the U.S. troop withdrawal. Many lawmakers expressed worry that it may lead to revival of IS as well as Russian presence and influence in the area — in addition to the slaughter of many Kurds.

At the White House, Trump said the U.S. has no business in the region — and not to worry about the Kurdish fighters.

“They know how to fight,” he said. “And by the way, they’re no angels.”

After the House condemnation vote, the congressional leaders of both parties went to the White House for a briefing, which grew contentious, with Trump and Pelosi trading jabs. The Democrats said they walked out when the meeting devolved into an insult-fest.

“What we witnessed on the part of the president was a meltdown,” Pelosi told reporters, saying Trump appeared visibly “shaken up” over the House vote.

“We couldn’t continue in the meeting because he was just not relating to the reality of it,” she said.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer criticized Trump for not having an adequate plan to deal with IS fighters who have been held by the Kurds. He said the meeting “was not a dialogue, this was sort of a diatribe, a nasty diatribe not focused on the facts.”

Republicans pushed back, saying it was Pelosi who’d been the problem.

“She storms out of another meeting, trying to make it unproductive,” said House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy.

White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham called Pelosi’s action “baffling but not surprising.” She said the speaker “had no intention of listening or contributing to an important meeting on national security issues.”

Trump himself has stalked out of his White House meetings with congressional leaders — in May, saying he would no longer work with Democrats unless they dropped all Russia investigations, and last January during the partial government shutdown.

Separately on Wednesday, a letter was disclosed in which he both cajoled and threatened Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, urging him to act only in “the right and humane way” in Syria.

He started on a positive note, suggesting they “work out a good deal,” but then talked about crippling economic sanctions and concluded that the world “will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!”

In public appearances Wednesday, Trump said he was fulfilling a campaign promise to bring U.S. troops home from “endless wars” in the Middle East — casting aside criticism that a sudden U.S. withdrawal from Syria betrays the Kurdish fighters, stains U.S. credibility around the world and opens an important region to Russia, which is moving in.

“We have a situation where Turkey is taking land from Syria. Syria’s not happy about it. Let them work it out,” Trump said. “They have a problem at a border. It’s not our border. We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”

Trump said he was sending Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Ankara to urge the Turks to halt their weeklong offensive into northeastern Syria. But his remarks, first to reporters in the Oval Office and later at a news conference with his Italian counterpart, suggested he sees little at stake for America.

“Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine,” he said. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So, there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.”

“Let them fight their own wars.”

More than once, Trump suggested the United States has little concern in the Middle East because it is geographically distant — a notion shared by some prior to Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaida militants used Afghanistan as a base from which to attack the U.S. That attack set off a series of armed conflicts, including in Iraq, that Trump considers a waste of American lives and treasure.

The current withdrawal is the worst decision of Trump’s presidency, said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who meets often with the president and is one of his strongest and most important supporters in Congress.

“To those who think the Mideast doesn’t matter to America, remember 9/11 — we had that same attitude on 9/10 2001.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he strongly disagreed with Trump and had told the president so. But he asked, “What tools do we have” to back up that disagreement?

Turkish troops and Turkish-backed Syrian fighters launched their offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria a week ago, two days after Trump suddenly announced he was withdrawing the U.S. from the area. Turkey’s Erdogan has said he wants to create a 30-kilometer (20-mile) -deep “safe zone” in Syria.

Ankara has long argued the Kurdish fighters are nothing more than an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has waged a guerrilla campaign inside Turkey since the 1980s and which Turkey, as well as the U.S. and European Union, designate as a terrorist organization.

Trump mischaracterized the progress made thus far by the U.S. military in carrying out his instructions to withdraw all 1,000 troops in northeastern Syria. He referred to the approximately two dozen soldiers who evacuated from Turkey’s initial attack zone last week, but cast that as meaning the U.S. has “largely” completed its pullout.

A U.S. official familiar with planning for the withdrawal of the 1,000 said that they are consolidating onto two main bases but have not yet begun flying out of Syria in significant numbers. Military equipment is being gathered and flown out, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the withdrawal, which poses big security risks.

Trump downplayed the crisis that followed his decision to pull out of Syria, which critics say amounted to giving Turkey a green light to invade against the Kurdish fighters.

“It’s not between Turkey and the United States, like a lot of stupid people would like you to believe,” Trump said. “Our soldiers are not in harm’s way, as they shouldn’t be.”

Trump did impose new sanctions on Turkey this week in an attempt to force Erdogan to end his assault. But he said Wednesday, “It’s time for us to come home.”

Even as Trump defended his removal of U.S. troops from northeastern Syria, he praised his decision to send more troops and military equipment to Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom defend against Iran.

Trump said the U.S. is sending missiles and “great power” to the Saudis, and “they’re paying for that.”

___

AP writers Alan Fram, Darlene Superville, Jill Colvin, Kevin Freking and Ellen Knickmeyer contributed.