Month: April 2018

Being a subject of an FBI counter-intelligence investigation isn’t a good thing

by digby

I wrote about the latest on Trump and the Russia investigation for Salon today:

Donald Trump must have awakened on Tuesday, turned on “Fox & Friends” and downed at least three Diet Cokes in quick succession, because his morning tweetstorm was verging on frantic. Of course, he’s been tweeting frantically for several days now so perhaps, as the Washington Post’s Daniel Drezner speculated, he’s “trying to return to his brand as an angry outsider” in order to motivate his base to come out for the 2018 election. Personally, I think Trump is scared to death that his followers are angry that he hasn’t fulfilled his promises on immigration. That might explain all this fulminating about “caravans” invading the country and his pledge to send the military to guard the border.

It’s also likely that the pressure of the Russia investigation is starting to get to him. “Fox & Friends” does a nice job of keeping the bad news from his followers, but Trump keeps up with the latest real news for obvious reasons. On Tuesday, he learned that special counsel Robert Mueller had filed documents in response to former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s claim that Mueller had exceeded his mandate by indicting Manafort for money laundering and other crimes before he joined the Trump campaign. Mueller revealed that a memo last August from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the case, had given him explicit permission to pursue this line of inquiry.

This is the first documented evidence that Rosenstein is behaving as one would expect a career prosecutor to behave and telling Mueller to go where the evidence takes him. Whether Trump understands this is unclear but if he happened to tune in to something other than Fox News he would have heard plenty of experts say that the redactions in the Rosenstein memorandum indicate that there is much more evidence that remains under seal. That couldn’t have made the president happy.

Trump made a couple of TV appearances with the leaders of the Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and took a few questions, which he hasn’t done often in recent days. He bragged about his accomplishments, denigrated the press, referred to his former rival as “Crooked Hillary” and forced the foreign leaders to sing his praises, much as he has occasionally done with his cabinet members.

They were gracious. He was not. Complaining about NATO being a bunch of deadbeats until he came along and extorted more money out of them is a particularly crude thing to say to leaders of NATO nations who are wholly reliant on the organization for their security. Worse yet, he kept repeating that “no one has been as hard on Russia as I have” to people who are well aware of what he has and hasn’t done. In fact, his repetition of that mantra sounded very much like a man protesting too much:

We’ve been very tough on Russia, frankly. But I will say that if we got along with Russia, that would be a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s possible we won’t. We’re going to find out whether or not we do. But if we could all get along, that would be great. And that includes China, and that includes many other countries. But we’ll see what happens. Only time will tell. But nobody has been tougher on Russia. But getting along with Russia would be a good thing, not a bad thing. And just about everybody agrees to that, except very stupid people. OK.

Later at the formal press conference he repeated this again. And again. On each occasion he asserted his toughness on Russia and then added that he wants to have good relations. He never said one word about President Vladimir Putin. It was left to his guests to state the obvious, as President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania did when Trump ignored a question about the threat Russia poses to the Baltic states and instead babbled on incoherently about trade.

The second part of your question is of course interesting, especially because we didn’t talk in that way about the rival especially on our border. But if that country becomes aggressive, threatens “we have nuclear missiles on your border,” of course you sometimes call this country not very friendly. That is why we are investing in our defense, we are investing into our security, we are investing into reforming NATO. And we would like to see a strong NATO, strong alliance. And that is what we are going to do together.

Those countries have direct experience of what it means to have friendly relations with Russia. They also know what it means to have not-so-friendly relations. All three Baltic countries have KGB museums in their capital cities where they memorialize the torture, persecution and imprisonment perpetrated by the Soviet secret police during their decades behind the Iron Curtain. You can be sure that these three leaders, unlike Donald Trump, are very well aware of Vladimir Putin’s training and career as a KGB officer. “Stupid people” they are not.

Trump’s agitation likely eased a bit on Tuesday evening when the Washington Post published a story reporting that as of a month ago Mueller didn’t consider the president a target of a criminal investigation but rather a subject. Apparently, the distinction has some bearing on whether he would be wise to volunteer for an interview with the prosecutors. A target would be foolish to do so, while a subject might have less to worry about. Of course, a subject can turn into a target the minute he either incriminates himself or lies to the prosecutor, both of which are highly conceivable with this undisciplined braggart. (Perhaps Mueller and his team are subtly trolling the president with this leak, hoping to get him to agree to a interview.)

Needless to say, Fox News is reporting this as if Trump has been fully exonerated, and I would not be surprised if he tweets out that he’s free at last. He would be well advised to be cautious. As CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin said on Tuesday night:

Jeffrey Toobin: White House shouldn't quite celebrate word from FBI that President Trump is not a criminal target. It's a big deal to be under investigation by the FBI https://t.co/zDsTTJ69LO pic.twitter.com/4LBTvnV9Ae— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) April 4, 2018

Indeed. The president of the United States being the subject of a counter-intelligence investigation is about the biggest deal there is. But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about: Scandal, corruption, dysfunction and failure follow him wherever he goes. His true talent is simple survival and he has unwavering faith that he will prevail. He always has before.

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50 years ago — a very bad day

by digby

As bad as things are right now with gun violence and what seems like a rapid descent into political madness, there was a time when assassins were routinely shooting our leaders. I guess it’s some form of progress.

50 years ago today, Martin Luther King was shot as he stood on a balcony in Memphis. This film about the manhunt for the murderer James Earl Ray is a fascinating look at the journey of a white supremacist.He was so ordinary.

This PBS documentary called The Roads to Memphis is also well done:

And then there’s this:

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“Trounced”
by Tom Sullivan

Events planned around the country today honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Memphis.

At the Wisconsin Governor’s Mansion in Maple Bluff this morning, Scott Walker has other things on his mind. Wisconsin held its spring election on Tuesday and the results did not bode well for Wisconsin Republicans.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Rebecca Dallet trounced Michael Screnock on Tuesday for a seat on the state Supreme Court, shrinking the court’s conservative majority and giving Democrats a jolt of energy heading into the fall election.

It marked the first time in 23 years that a liberal candidate who wasn’t an incumbent won a seat on the high court.

Dallet won a 10-year term on the court, besting opponent Michael Screnock by twelve points (56-44). The D vs. R proxy fight is a huge loss for Walker.

Carolyn Fiddler write at Daily Kos:

Tuesday’s Supreme Court election was officially nonpartisan, but the ideological battle lines were clearly drawn. Former Vice President Joe Biden recorded a robocall for Dallet, and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee spent at least $165,000 on the race. Screnock, meanwhile, had the backing of Gov. Scott Walker and the National Rifle Association, and a notoriously anti-union business lobby had dumped in almost $1 million on ads as of last Friday.

Dallet’s victory moves the ideological makeup of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from five-to-two in favor of conservatives to four-to-three and secures her a 10-year term on the bench. Progressives are now well-positioned to end the conservative court majority in the next few years—and with that, a way to finally place a brake on extreme Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics.

Last night’s results mean six of the seven justices on the court are now women, Fiddler adds.

Dallet told reporters, “I think people are tired of what’s been going on in our state in terms of the money coming in to buy these elections and people spoke out tonight.”

Walker, who has turned the state into a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, reacted in a tweet, “Tonight’s results show we are at risk of a #BlueWave in WI. The Far Left is driven by anger & hatred—we must counter it with optimism & organization. Let’s share our positive story with voters & win in November.”

In another, Walker wrote, “Big government special interests flooded Wisconsin with distorted facts & misinformation. Next, they’ll target me and work to undo our bold reforms.”

Dark money guy haz sad.
Poor dark money guy.
– @CharlesPPierce

Those “bold reforms” included erecting barriers to voting including photo ID laws that kept 17,000 or more registered Wisconsin voters from voting in 2016 and may have handed the presidential election to Donald Trump. “Black voters were about 50 percent likelier than whites to lack these IDs,” Ari Berman wrote at Mother Jones, “because they were less likely to drive or to be able to afford the documents required to get a current ID, and more likely to have moved from out of state.” Two-thirds of the state’s African American population lives in Milwaukee where voting rates “plunged,” accounting for half the state’s falloff in 2016 turnout. Fifty years after King’s death the fight for black voting rights continues.

Since Dallet won her Supreme Court seat in a nonpartisan contest, likely Wisconsin Republicans now will want to switch the race to a partisan one.

Judge Michael Morgan won a North Carolina Supreme Court seat in 2016, defeating Republican incumbent Robert H. Edmunds Jr.
and tipping the court majority in Democrats’ favor.

Candidates from the governor’s party (Republican Pat McCrory in 2018) are listed first in NC general election races, but ballot placement for nonpartisan judicial races rotates alphabetically. Republican voters may have assumed Morgan was a Republican since his name appeared first on the ballot. Morgan is African American.

The Republican-controlled legislature responded by switching the contest to a partisan one over the veto of newly elected Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.

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He only hires the best

by digby

Another one bites the dust:

A political appointee at the Department of Defense has resigned after a CNN KFile inquiry about controversial postings he made on Facebook.

Todd Johnson is a former Trump campaign state director in New Mexico who joined the Department of Defense in 2017 as an advance officer, a Pentagon employee with the sensitive task of providing logistical support related to the secretary’s events and appearances domestically and abroad. Johnson had a pay scale of GS-14, typically reserved for senior civil service positions.
A CNN KFile review of his social media found that Johnson posted birther conspiracies about then-President Barack Obama and shared a video that claimed Obama was the Antichrist.

After CNN initially reached out to the Pentagon for comment, Johnson made his Facebook account private. A spokesperson confirmed Johnson was still working at the Pentagon Tuesday morning, but in the afternoon, after CNN informed the Department of Defense that a story was forthcoming, a Pentagon spokesperson said Johnson had offered his resignation and that it was accepted.

Photos and videos posted online show Johnson has traveled extensively with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis overseas and posed in photos with Trump and at the Pentagon along with Mattis and former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

In September, Johnson warned friends on Facebook against posting or tagging him in articles about current events and politics.

“While I really appreciate you tagging me in and posting to my wall articles covering politics and current issues, I have to request that you please refrain from doing so any longer, due to the sensitive nature of my job. I don’t mean to upset anyone, it’s just what I have to do to protect myself and others in my position, and to comply with our policies,” Johnson wrote.

Before taking the Pentagon job, Johnson regularly posted articles and content popular in mainstream conservative circles. But Johnson also shared conspiracy theories about Obama’s citizenship, an off-color joke about Obama dying in a plane crash and a clipping that compared people on entitlements to animals.

In July 2012, Johnson shared a video titled “Michelle Obama admits Barack Obama’s home country is Kenya,” commenting, “people still don’t believe.” Obama released his long-form birth certificate in 2011, showing that he had been born in Hawaii.

These were resume builders for the Trump administration. After all,the president himself was the leader of the birther movement.

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Who believed the fake news?

by digby

Via Washington Post:

President Trump has said repeatedly that Russian interference didn’t matter in the 2016 presidential campaign, and he has suggested — wrongly — that the intelligence and law enforcementcommunities have said the same. His overriding fear seems to be that Russian interference and the “fake news” it promoted would undermine the legitimacy of his election win.

Trump won’t like this new study one bit.

The study from researchers at Ohio State University finds that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton’s support on Election Day. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed but which may be the first look at how fake news affected voter choices, suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama’s 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories.

Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck and Erik C. Nisbet, the study’s authors, inserted three popular fake news stories from the 2016 campaign into a 281-question YouGov survey given to a sample that included 585 Obama supporters — 23 percent of whom didn’t vote for Clinton, either by abstaining or picking another candidate (10 percent voted Trump, which is in line with other estimates).

Here are the false stories, along with the percentages of Obama supporters who believed they were at least “probably” true (in parenthesis):
Clinton was in “very poor health due to a serious illness” (12 percent)
Pope Francis endorsed Trump (8 percent)
Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, “including ISIS” (20 percent)

Overall about one-quarter of 2012 Obama voters believed at least one of these stories, and of that group 45 percent voted for Clinton. Of those who believed none of the fake news stories, 89 percent voted for Clinton.

I wrote about the “very poor health” thing which was everywhere long before she got pneumonia and was echoed by Trump himself every time he said “she doesn’t have the strength or the stamina” to be president, one of his endless refrains from the very beginning designed to tweak the sexist lizard brain.

I don’t know if these fake stories really had anything to do with it or if most of these people had only voted for Obama in 2008 because the country was in economic freefall and they didn’t trust the McCain and the lunatic he put on the ticket. But these stories were everywhere on social media so it stands to reason that some not-so-bright people might have believed them.

It’s difficult to know how fake news played specifically in the three states that delivered him the presidency: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But the fact that Clinton lost each of these divisive states by less than one percentage point means that even a slight impact by Russia and/or fake news — or even then-FBI Director James B. Comey’s announcement about Clinton’s emails or some other factor — could logically have changed the result.

But we can use this study to glean clues and even rerun a hypothetical 2016 election. The Washington Post’s polling director, Scott Clement, ran a predictive probability analysis using the OSU team’s data and compared the existing 2016 election to a hypothetical election in which these fake news stories didn’t exist. The result: Clinton lost 4.2 percent more of Obama’s votes in the race with fake news vs. the hypothetical race without it.

I’m sure none of my readers need this but maybe you’d like to pass it on some of your relatives?

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The authoritarian strategy to strangle the free press

by digby

I am reliably told that there is nothing at all to worry about with Trump’s threats to the free press and his promoting of Trump TV, both the Fox and Sinclair versions. I sure hope that’s right.

Michelle Goldberg explained today why we shouldn’t take it for granted that it will all be fine:

In 2009, Turkey’s tax ministry imposed a $2.5 billion fine for alleged tax evasion on Dogan Yayin, a media conglomerate whose newspapers and television stations were critical of the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Under financial and political pressure, the company began unloading some assets and closing others. Last month, the billionaire Aydin Dogan sold his remaining media properties, including the influential Hurriyet newspaper and CNN Turk, to a group of Erdogan loyalists.

Modern authoritarians rarely seize critical newspapers or TV stations outright. Instead, they use state power to pressure critics and reward friends. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors at Harvard, wrote in their recent book “How Democracies Die,” President Vladimir Putin of Russia turned the tax authorities on Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of an independent television network, NTV, which was considered bothersome. Gusinsky eventually signed NTV over to a government-controlled company. Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan authorities accused Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovisión, a TV station frequently critical of the government, of illegal profiteering. In 2013, Zuloaga sold Globovisión to allies of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.

Now Donald Trump is going after Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post.

The president’s latest round of anti-Amazon tweets began last Thursday, when Trump claimed, inaccurately, that Amazon pays “little or no taxes to state & local governments” and that the United States Postal Service loses money on Amazon deliveries. On Saturday, he wrote that The Washington Post should be forced to “REGISTER” as an Amazon lobbyist. On Monday, he warned that Amazon may soon have to pay more for its deliveries: “Only fools, or worse, are saying that our money losing Post Office makes money with Amazon. THEY LOSE A FORTUNE, and this will be changed.”

Trump’s antipathy has already affected Amazon’s fortunes. He threatened the company during the presidential campaign, and, as Forbes reported, Amazon’s stock plunged more than 6 percent after he won. Last Wednesday, after Axios reported that Trump was “obsessed” with Amazon, the company lost $53 billion in market value. In the wake of Trump’s tweets on Monday, Amazon’s stock fell more than 5 percent.

She goes on to point out that Amazon isn’t blameless and there is good case that Amazon has become such a dominant distribution platform that it needs to be reined in. But I think we can easily assume that Trump has not read the academic papers that show Amazon has become what the monopoly railroads were in the 19th century:

But Trump revealed his motive for condemning Amazon when he called for government registration of The Washington Post. A source who spoke to Trump told The Post’s own Philip Rucker that “a negative story in The Post is almost always the catalyst for one of his Amazon rants.” Trump’s tweets on Saturday came after The Post published a piece that read like an omnibus of Trump sensitivities: “From Mueller to Stormy to ‘Emoluments,’ Trump’s Business Is Under Siege.”

This is not the first time the Trump administration has appeared to be trying to punish enemies in the media. Reporting on Trump’s war with CNN last July, Michael M. Grynbaum of The New York Times wrote that White House advisers had discussed a “potential point of leverage” over the network: “a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T.” In November, the Department of Justice sued to block the merger.

Meanwhile, Trump uses his platform to praise obsequious outlets like Sinclair Broadcast Group, which ordered news anchors on its nearly 200 local television stations to record Trump-style warnings about fake news: “Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’” After Deadspin produced a creepy viral video of Sinclair anchors reading their script in totalitarian unison, Trump came to the company’s defense, tweeting, “Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”

Sinclair’s regime-friendly propaganda, which seems meant to erode trust in competing sources of information, is also familiar from other nations that have slid into authoritarianism.

“When you look at many of these countries, it’s been a two-pronged attack on the media,” Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-born M.I.T. economist and a co-author of “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty,” told me. “Even before the attacks against the Dogan group started in Turkey, or even before the attacks against a few remaining independent TV stations and newspapers had started under Putin, you had these troll-like media outlets that were flooding the market with what we are now calling fake news.”

By the time those regimes moved against unsympathetic media companies, much of the population had been disoriented by disinformation. Under Trump, America has started down the same road. There are many reasons to be terrified of Amazon’s power, but Trump’s ability to undermine it with a tweet is far scarier.

Perhaps all this will be meaningless in the long run or perhaps it will represent a significant erosion of norms that govern our common understanding of how the media is supposed to work. If this president can use social media and the power of the government to intimidate media companies, affect their stock prices and protect friendly members of the press there is little reason to believe that others wouldn’t do the same. This is simply “working the refs” taken to its natural conclusion.

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Killing us slowly and then all at once

by digby

I guess the argument over climate change is over. And the planet lost:

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced today that his agency was rolling back Obama-era fuel efficiency and emissions standards for automobiles, calling the move another step in President Trump’s “regulatory agenda.”

“Those standards are inappropriate and should be revised,” Pruitt said at the EPA.

The change in policy relaxes fuel efficiency and emissions standards for vehicles manufactured between 2022 and 2025. Pruitt did not outline any new standards, saying they are still under evaluation.

Yeah, I’m going to guess that if Trump and Pruitt have their way those “new standards” will need decades of study and when they are implemented, they’ll be a further rollback.

Scott Pruitt is a corrupt, paranoid nutcase who would probably be facing a federal grand jury if he worked for anyone but Donald Trump. But he’s getting the job done killing the planet so for now it looks like he’s staying.

By the way, even auto dealers don’t want to be associated with this nonsense:

The press conference was originally scheduled to be held at a Chevrolet dealership in Chantilly, Virginia, that is owned by Geoffrey Pohanka, an outspoken climate change denier and National Automobile Dealers Association board member. But other Chevy dealers, wary of associating the General Motors brand with the Trump administration’s actions, convinced Pohanka to cancel the event, according to The New York Times. Instead, Pruitt hosted the conference in the EPA’s historic Rachel Carson Green Room.

The president gets a sad that only soldiers can cure

by digby

He needs to stop watching Fox. It makes him feel bad:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday revealed that he would send troops to the U.S. border and said that a so-called “caravan” of migrants made him “very sad.”

During remarks from the Cabinet Room, Trump spoke about his plan to secure the border in lieu of a sprawling border wall.

“We are going to be guarding our border with our military. That’s a big step,” he told reporters before accusing President Barack Obama making “changes that basically created no border.”

According to Trump, Mexico broke up a “caravan” of migrants who were heading to the United States because he told them too.

“The caravan makes me very sad,” he said.

The “caravan” has been happening for years. It’s a political demonstration. Trump, of course, has no clue about any of that because all he sees are pictures of Latinos on Fox News and gets all upset because he knows they are rapists and murderers who are coming to kill his voters in their beds.

So he told Mexico to stop it and they did. Because he’s the president of the whole wide world and everybody knows it because he has such big hands.

Your president ladies and gentlemen.

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Trump’s muse

Selling America for parts revisited
by Tom Sullivan

Oakland stolen car chop shop.

Percolating around the edges of the deconstruction of a once great power is talk of privatizing Veterans Administration hospitals. Abruptly fired last week by the president who hired him (the White House now claims he resigned), former Department of Veterans Affairs secretary David J. Shulkin takes a dim view of privatization. In his New York Times op-ed, he catalogues improvements he believes occurred on his watch: reduced wait times, more and better mental health services, and a streamlined claims and appeals process. Nonetheless, he writes, the vultures are circling:

It seems that these successes within the department have intensified the ambitions of people who want to put V.A. health care in the hands of the private sector. I believe differences in philosophy deserve robust debate, and solutions should be determined based on the merits of the arguments. The advocates within the administration for privatizing V.A. health services, however, reject this approach. They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed. That is because I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans.

I am not a veteran. But by most accounts, the VA hospital located here provides some of the best care in the system. Talk of privatizing VA health care prompted someone on a local Facebook thread to solicit opinions on privatization. I have one.

Privatization of any public service is not about quality. It’s about ideology and about into whose pockets tax dollars flow. It arises from the privatizer’s belief that any product or service provided by “we the people” that might even in theory be provided by the private sector is a crime against capitalism. They don’t see a need to be filled or a service to be improved or a duty to be met. They see billions of dollar$ budgeted annually of which they are not getting their cut.

They want to privatize public education — a middle-man in every middle school — because the single largest component of every state’s annual budget is education and They. Want. Their. Cut. So they have demonized teachers and public pensions and public servants who stand between them and their payday. They have cut budgets to degrade services and hasten institutional decline to pave the way for eliminating the public from public service and services.

Thousands of Oklahoma school teachers this week went on strike after getting a significant pay raise. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten told NPR teacherscare striking because overall spending has not increased. The pay raises come by shifting dollars at the expense of colleagues and core spending when some districts already use textbooks 50 years old. Teachers see school spending as a public investment. Privatizers just see a cost.

Those promoting privatizaton want to sell off publicly owned infrastructure for a song, public trusts you, your parents and grandparents and I paid through our lifetimes to build and maintain. Privatizers do not want to fix public infrastructure. They want to extract profits from it. They are rentiers looking to suck even harder off the public teat with far less accountability.

The VA is yet another program they hope to turn into a profit-producing venture by cutting costs and shortchanging patients under the rubric of “efficiency.” And when they have sucked all the profit they can from it, they will abandon it for the next investment opportunity and discard its empty husk, like a retailer with an underperforming big-box store.

And public education? They want to privatize it as well, slowly weakening its funding by diverting resources to vouchers and charters because, you know, choice and competition. The real goal is to increase the pressure to fully privatize public education mandated by state constitutions from the Atlantic to the Pacific since their adoption, thus to open “the Big Enchilada” to private investors. They too will cut costs and services to shave off more public tax dollars for themselves, meaning less for children’s education.

The vultures are slowly privatizing prisons as well, and perversely incentivizing lawmakers, judges and law enforcement to keep prison beds filled and investors’ portfolios padded. I’m wondering when individual Americans get vouchers from the Pentagon to purchase their own national defense. Because, you know, choice and competition.

But what happens to public schools and children’s education, for example, when the system is fully privatized and hollowed out, and investors decide the hot new investment opportunity lies somewhere else? They just walk away. Investors have no commitment to the public good, no faith to keep with public trust, only to their bottom lines, especially for services like the VA’s that are not and were never intended to be for-profit. Want to improve the VA? Improve the VA. Privatizing it is its death sentence.

Privatizers are the Midas cult. They believe anything that can be turned into gold should be, including wounded veterans and children. They are the corporate raider from Pretty Woman, who believes more in making money than in building things. They don’t believe in this country. They believe in stripping it. Their lobbyists have turned our legislatures into chop shops so they can sell off America for parts. They have no shame, because shame is not as profitable as having none.

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