Month: August 2018

This isn’t Don McGahn’s first trip to the Russian Rodeo

by digby

Emptywheel is very likely to be right about White House counsel Don McGahn being questioned about the conspiracy investigation not just obstruction of justice. He was the Trump campaign’s general counsel fergawdsakes and the GOP’s top campaign finance lawyer for years.

I agree with Wheeler that this is a big fat CYA operation using the NY Times to reassure Trump, not upset him, and it’s likely to do with the fact that many of the laws Trump and his henchmen are suspected of breaking have to do with foreign money in his campaign, transition and elsewhere.

I wonder if people remember that Don McGahn made his bones defending Tom DeLay in a major Russian money scandal in the late 90s? He did:

One of the scandals surrounding DeLay involved a 1997 trip he made to Moscow, where he was joined by Abramoff, paid for by conservative nonprofit, the National Center for Public Policy Research. The group also financed two trips to Moscow by DeLay’s chief of staff, Edwin Buckham, who went on to become a corporate lobbyist.

The trips were organized by prominent Russian businessmen who, joined by the Russian government, were mounting a major lobbying effort for increased foreign aid. In 1998, “DeLay voted for a bill that included the replenishment of billions of dollars in IMF funds used to bail out the Russian economy.”

According to associates of Buckham, Russian oil and gas executives subsequently gave $1 million to the U.S. Family Network, a conservative advocacy group founded by Buckham in 1996. The Network was part of DeLay’s “political money carousel,” and later received $500,000 from the National Republican Campaign Committee, where McGahn was also in-house counsel. The group was named in a RICO lawsuit against DeLay filed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1998.

McGahn defended the huge contribution and denied that it had any ties to Russia when Public Campaign ran political ads in 2006 attacking DeLay for the scandal.

This scandal was obscured at the time by the much more important investigation into Bill Clinton’s pants.

Here’s the full story of DeLay’s Russia money scandal.

Let’s just say that Don McGahn had some very special experience in dealing with Russian money being funneled into Republican campaigns.

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Profiles in passivity

by digby

It is not ok for a president to have his staff sign non-disclosure agreements. It just isn’t. They are public servants.

But it looks like it’s the new normal. For Republicans anyway:

Republican senators, freshly returned to Washington after a week and a half on recess, didn’t have much to say about President Donald Trump’s unprecedented use of sweeping non-disclosure agreements pertaining to unclassified information for White House staffers on Wednesday night, most telling reporters they hadn’t considered the issue.

“I just don’t know what to make of that,” said Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, adding that he hadn’t asked anything similar of his staff: “We’re so boring in our office, no one would want to expose much.”

Trump’s NDAs, intended to prevent his staffers from being publicly critical of him, his family, or his business, were first reported when the Washington Post obtained an early draft of one of the documents this spring. Their existence has since been confirmed by numerous outlets. Most recently, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and Trump himself have alluded to the use of such agreements in their pushback against former administration official-turned antagonist Omarosa Manigault Newman.

As national security and free speech lawyer Mark Zaid points out, the federal government uses NDAs when handling sensitive national security information, but non-disclosure agreements drafted specifically to limit criticism of the president (and his family and his business) are unheard of in government. And as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg argues, the likelihood that these agreements aren’t enforceable may not matter as much as the fact that high-level staffers signed away, in perpetuity, their ability to speak openly about the president.

Still, the issue flew beneath the radar in the Senate on Wednesday, where questions about Manigault Newman’s numerous allegations were overshadowed by the White House’s apparent attempt to flip the script by releasing a three-week-old announcement it had been holding onto for a rainy day.

“I have no clue what that’s about,” Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy candidly answered when asked about the NDAs. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, tied up with various government funding packages over the past few weeks, said he hadn’t thought about the issue. “I don’t know what they’ve done at the White House. You know I’ve never worked down there. But a lot in the private businesses, they have it everywhere—non-disclosure, and confidential stuff and so forth,” he told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “I don’t have it in my office.”

Senator John Kennedy also said he hadn’t asked his staff to sign such an agreement. But, he added, “I’m not going to judge [Trump]. I don’t know.”

Tennessee Republican Bob Corker told reporters an untrusting environment at the White House had everything to do with the use of intimidation tactics such as NDAs. “They’ve brought in a whole different kind of culture over there,” he said.

In Congress, Corker asserted, members often deal with each other in trust. “I know that’s not the case over there. I mean, I’ve had people call me sometimes over there and it sounds like they’re in a coat room or something. The culture is just vastly different, probably, than any administration we’ve seen in modern times.”

Asked whether he thought anything could be done to change that situation, Corker was skeptical.

“I would doubt that,” the retiring senator said.

Whatevs…

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Health care likely to get worse under Trump
by Tom Sullivan

Todd Mouw’s in-home care ended abruptly in March. A quadraplegic since a car accident 32 years ago, he required a ventilator to breathe and help feeding himself. Yet he lived at home for decades thanks to medical staff who visited daily to maintain his health and equipment, the Des Moines Register reports:

That care abruptly ended when a for-profit company that Iowa hired last year to manage the state’s Medicaid program announced that some of the staffers who had attended to Mouw all those years weren’t qualified, and it wouldn’t pay for the cost.

As he and his wife Cyndi futilely searched for qualified help, Todd’s health dissipated. He had to leave his home for care, and on July 8 he died at age 53.

While seeking caregivers Amerigroup would approve, Todd sometimes went days without care. He was eventually hospitalized with pneumonia and, although his health improved, he was never able to return home.

“Don’t get me wrong, his death was inevitable,” Cyndi Mouw told the Register. “But I do believe with all my heart this could have been prevented and he would have lived longer.”

Iowa’s government for decades had managed the state’s Medicaid program, which serves more than 568,000 poor or elderly Iowans.

That changed last year when then-Gov. Terry Branstad decided to move the state’s Medicaid management to three private companies, saying health care would improve and the state would save tens of millions of dollars each year. The companies help decide which health procedures Medicaid will pay for.

Three companies — AmeriHealth, UnitedHealthcare and Amerigroup — began managing the program in April 2016. The three companies were paid $1,041 to $3,313 a month for each Medicaid patient they oversaw.

Since then, hundreds of Iowans have logged complaints, many saying the companies have unfairly denied access to care.

Health care concerns transcend party lines. A Kaiser Family Foundation study last month that 56% of Americans believe the Trump administration are trying to make the Affordable Care Act fail. Polling shows Americans by a 7 to 1 margin believe that’s bad. A key finding from their July polling:

The July Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds a candidate’s position on continuing protections for people with pre-existing health conditions is the top health care campaign issue for voters, among a list of issues provided. This issue cuts across voter demographics with most Democratic voters (74 percent), independent voters (64 percent), and voters living in battleground areas (61 percent), as well as half of Republican voters (49 percent) saying a candidate’s position on continued protections for pre-existing health conditions is either the single most important factor or a very important factor in their 2018 vote.

The Trump administration’s proposing short-term plans that shortcut Obamacare’s minimum care requirements and “are exempt from covering people with pre-existing conditions” contributes to voters’ concerns. Health care was the No. 1 issue in a poll of potential 2018 voters conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal in June. Half of those in the 17 states that have not accepted the Medicaid expansion favor doing so, Kaiser found. Iowa is among the Medicaid expansion states. Medicaid expansion initiatives are on the ballot this fall in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah.

“Things are likely to get worse” under Trump, writes Jonathan Cohn at Huffington Post:

They have passed a tax cut that effectively eliminates the individual mandate penalty. They have slashed funding for enrollment outreach. Now, with this latest regulatory change, they have made it easier for people to purchase ― and then hold onto ― short-term plans that don’t comply with the ACA’s standards.

People struggling with high premiums today will discover short-term plans are a lot cheaper ― and many who opt for that coverage will be just fine. But the buyers who get serious medical problems will face crippling medical bills and in many cases, they won’t know about this exposure until it is too late, because the companies and brokers who sell these plans are notorious for hiding limits and exclusions in the fine print.

Fine print can be worse than the disease. Where’s the cure for that?

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Who is America? – BlacKkKlansman (****)

By Dennis Hartley

“I-I am going to be a storm-a flame-
I need to fight whole armies alone;
I have ten hearts; I have a hundred arms;
I feel too strong to war with mortals-
BRING ME GIANTS!”

-Edmond Rostand, from Cyrano de Bergerac

[To two members of the KKK, while pretending to capture Bart]

Jim: Oh, boys! Lookee what I got heyuh.

Bart: Hey, where are the white women at?

-from Blazing Saddles; screenplay by Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor, and Alan Uger

To bring in something, such as a fish, by winding up the line on a reel.

-from The Free Dictionary’s definition of the phrase “reel something in”

So what do you get if you cross Cyrano de Bergerac with Blazing Saddles? You might get Spike Lee’s new joint, Black KkKlansman. That is not to say that Lee’s film is a knee-slapping comedy; far from it. It does contain laughs, but there is nothing funny about some of the reaction it has sparked after only a week. From an Indie Wire article:

[Actor] Topher Grace contacted police after receiving a threatening phone call reacting to his role as former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke in Spike Lee’s “Black KkKlansman”. According to reports (via TMZ) Grace told police that someone called him over the phone and referred to him using a gay slur. The mystery caller also warned Grace that his role as Duke would “ruin race relations in America.” […] Grace reportedly described the caller as “aggressive” and “angry.”

Speaking of “race relations in America”, here’s something even less amusing. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are 917 hate groups currently operating in the U.S. And (to paraphrase Gimli the dwarf) it gets even better! If you go to the SPLC website and click the “100 Days in Trump’s America” report, there’s lots of fun facts:

As he spoke to the nation on Jan.20 [2016], President Donald Trump reminded white nationalists why they had invested so much hope in him as their champion and redeemer. He painted a bleak picture of America: a nation of crumbling, third-world infrastructure, “rusted-out factories,” leaky borders, inner cities wallowing in poverty, a depleted military and a feckless political class that prospered as the country fell into ruin. He promised an “America First” policy that would turn it all around. […] 

Despite his failure to achieve any major legislative victories, Trump has not disappointed his alt-right followers. His actions suggest that – unlike the economic populism of his campaign – Trump’s appeals to the radical right did indeed presage his White House agenda. On Jan. 31 [2016], former Klan leader David Duke tweeted: “everything I’ve been talking about for decades is coming true and the ideas I’ve fought for have won.”

Well fuck me. There’s that fine fellow David Duke popping up again! When Mr. Wizard Tweeted he’d been “talking about” certain ideas “for decades” …he wasn’t exaggerating. The “David Duke” depicted in Lee’s film is the David Duke of the 1970s, right around the time he became the public face of the “National Association for the Advancement of White People”. This was also when he dropped the hood and robes for a suit-and-tie look.

Trump would call him a loser

by digby

You know he would:

ORANGE CITY, Ia. — Thirty-two years ago, a vehicle accident left Todd Mouw a quadriplegic, unable to feed himself and needing a ventilator to breathe.

Yet for decades he was able to live at home with the help of family, aided by medical staff who visited him daily to help provide 24-hour care.

That care abruptly ended when a for-profit company that Iowa hired last year to manage the state’s Medicaid program announced that some of the staffers who had attended to Mouw all those years weren’t qualified, and it wouldn’t pay for the cost.

As he and his wife Cyndi futilely searched for qualified help, Todd’s health dissipated. He had to leave his home for care, and on July 8 he died at age 53.

Now, Cyndi Mouw is speaking out, blaming her husband’s death on Iowa’s decision to turn over its Medicaid program to for-profit companies she believes are unilaterally denying or revoking medical services to potentially thousands of other disabled or elderly Iowans.

“If they’re trying to do this because they need to save money? Well, find other places,” Cyndi Mouw said. “And, yeah, I’m sure he’s not the only one.”

Her criticisms have echoed those of other families who complain that the private companies now managing the state’s Medicaid program are denying care that the state once approved.

And the state’s long-term care ombudsman said she has received hundreds of complaints from Medicaid recipients who are appealing decisions of the private managers hired by the state.

If you’re not rich enough to afford all the health care you need that’s your own fault:

MAGA

Remembering impeachments past

by digby

John Dean was White House counsel too

by digby

It’s pretty clear who has been behind the leaks over the past year and a half that make Don McGahn look very heroic. There’s only one person who would have so much to gain by it. Here’s the latest:

The White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, has cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, sharing detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others briefed on the matter.

In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours over the past nine months, Mr. McGahn described the president’s furor toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged Mr. McGahn to respond to it. He provided the investigators examining whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice a clear view of the president’s most intimate moments with his lawyer.

Among them were Mr. Trump’s comments and actions during the firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and Mr. Trump’s obsession with putting a loyalist in charge of the inquiry, including his repeated urging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to claim oversight of it. Mr. McGahn was also centrally involved in Mr. Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which investigators might not have discovered without him.

For a lawyer to share so much with investigators scrutinizing his client is unusual. Lawyers are rarely so open with investigators, not only because they are advocating on behalf of their clients but also because their conversations with clients are potentially shielded by attorney-client privilege, and in the case of presidents, executive privilege.

“A prosecutor would kill for that,” said Solomon L. Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation, which did not have the same level of cooperation from President Bill Clinton’s lawyers. “Oh my God, it would have been phenomenally helpful to us. It would have been like having the keys to the kingdom.”

Mr. McGahn’s cooperation began in part as a result of a decision by Mr. Trump’s first team of criminal lawyers to collaborate fully with Mr. Mueller. The president’s lawyers have explained that they believed their client had nothing to hide and that they could bring the investigation to an end quickly.

Mr. McGahn and his lawyer, William A. Burck, could not understand why Mr. Trump was so willing to allow Mr. McGahn to speak freely to the special counsel and feared Mr. Trump was setting up Mr. McGahn to take the blame for any possible illegal acts of obstruction, according to people close to him. So he and Mr. Burck devised their own strategy to do as much as possible to cooperate with Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that Mr. McGahn did nothing wrong.

It is not clear that Mr. Trump appreciates the extent to which Mr. McGahn has cooperated with the special counsel. The president wrongly believed that Mr. McGahn would act as a personal lawyer would for clients and solely defend his interests to investigators, according to a person with knowledge of his thinking.

In fact, Mr. McGahn laid out how Mr. Trump tried to ensure control of the investigation, giving investigators a mix of information both potentially damaging and favorable to the president. Mr. McGahn cautioned to investigators that he never saw Mr. Trump go beyond his legal authorities, though the limits of executive power are murky.

Mr. McGahn’s role as a cooperating witness further strains his already complicated relationship with the president. Though Mr. Trump has fought with Mr. McGahn as much as with any of his top aides, White House advisers have said, both men have benefited significantly from their partnership.
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Mr. McGahn has overseen two of Mr. Trump’s signature accomplishments — stocking the federal courts and cutting government regulations — and become a champion of conservatives in the process.

But the two rarely speak one on one — the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and other advisers are usually present for their meetings — and Mr. Trump has questioned Mr. McGahn’s loyalty. In turn, Mr. Trump’s behavior has so exasperated Mr. McGahn that he has called the president “King Kong” behind his back, to connote his volcanic anger, people close to Mr. McGahn said.

This account is based on interviews with current and former White House officials and others who have spoken to both men, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation.

Oh Don, you’re such a great guy.

And your boss is really, really dumb isn’t he?

McGahn has been covering his ass from the beginning. One imagines he’s been safe from reprisals  because the GOP backs him for their court packing project which, at this point, is their only serious  strategy for future survival. This latest coming at a time of peak Trump hysteria will test how much clout Mitch McConnell and the federalist society really has with Trump.

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Oligarchy FTW

by digby

Following up on the post below where I point out that Republicans failing to care about deficits when a GOP president is in office is business as usual for them, I would just note that this would be cause for revolution if it happened under a Democrat:

Several wanted to fiddle with the punctuation, some wanted to add nice things about John Brennan; others thought it would be wiser to pare them back.

But in 12 hours, a couple of former CIA senior aides pulled off a first in American history. CIA directors who had served every previous president going back to Ronald Reagan had signed on to a letter doing something they would never have imagined doing: publicly criticizing the president of the United States.

They were objecting to President Trump’s announcement that he was stripping the security clearance of Brennan, who was CIA director under President Obama.

“I call it the rigged witch hunt, [the Russia investigation] is a sham,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal. “And these people led it!”

And there may be more coming … The WashPost’s Karen DeYoung and Josh Dawsey report: “The White House has drafted documents revoking the security clearances of current and former officials whom President Trump has demanded be punished for criticizing him or playing a role in the [Russia] investigation.”

“Trump wants to sign ‘most if not all’ of them, said one senior White House official.”
“[C]ommunications aides … have discussed the optimum times to release them as a distraction during unfavorable news cycles.”

The letter’s startling roster includes former CIA directors Webster (Reagan, George H.W. Bush), Gates (George H.W. Bush), Tenet (Clinton and George W. Bush), Goss (George W. Bush), Hayden (George W. Bush), Panetta (Obama) and Petraeus (Obama).

“As former senior intelligence officials, we feel compelled to respond in the wake of the ill-considered and unprecedented remarks and actions by the White House regarding the removal of John Brennan’s security clearances,” the letter begins.

The addition of this “subject to” was one of the late edits: “You don’t have to agree with what John Brennan says (and … not all of us do) to agree with his right to say it, subject to his obligation to protect classified information.”

Nick Shapiro — a former CIA deputy chief of staff in the Obama administration, who helped orchestrate the letters — tells me that a major concern of many of the signatories was President Trump’s implicit threat to current intelligence officers:

“It’s setting up a system where the national security and intelligence apparatus is being told: ‘You better just agree with the president, and you can’t give him news he doesn’t like.'”

“That’s a very dangerous thing: It’s the exact opposite of the climate and culture you want in your intelligence team.”

The letter was endorsed by 15 former intelligence officials of the director or deputy director level.

But other CIA alumni wanted to join in. So late yesterday, a second letter was circulated, signed by 60 former CIA officers (analysts, station chiefs, operations officers, a former President’s Daily Brief briefer):

“Our signatures below do not necessarily mean that we concur with the opinions expressed by former Director Brennan or the way in which he expressed them. What they do represent, however, is our firm belief that the country will be weakened if there is a political litmus test applied before seasoned experts are allowed to share their views.”

Another person coordinating the letters tells me: “[R]equests from many other senior CIA alumni who would like to have signed it are pouring in.”

Think about this. The right wing lost their minds when the Democrats passed a market friendly health care bill. Imagine what they would have done if a Democratic president messed with the CIA and FBI like this?

The spooks need to be scrutinized. But that’s not hat’s happening here. He’s just abusing his power to intimidate anyone who crosses him. There are a lot of lower level FBI and CIA whose futures depend on having top security clearances. I’d guess many of them will be careful not to do anything that might upset Trump and his henchmen going forward. Or, at least, they will be very circumspect about anything that would reflect badly on the president.

I think it’s hilarious that he’s being egged on in this by Rand Paul, our alleged civil liberties hero. Sure, he’s always been a harsh critic of the Intelligence Community, often for good reason. But he shows his true colors when he helps this monster cover up his crimes.

Despite their paeans to freedom, Libertarians often have a strong authoritarian streak that manifests itself as a worshipful attitude toward money and the power that comes with it. A corrupt oligarch is their perfect leader.

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Deficit reduction for dummies

by digby

There was a time when this headline would have resulted in the Freedom Caucus, Tea Partying wingnuts having a full-blown, hysterical freak out:

This isn’t just Trump sycophancy, unfortunately. Republicans have been silent about the deficit and debt under their own administrations for decades. That’s because during their administrations, the debt always rises from their massive tax cuts for the wealthy even as they cut necessary programs for real people, which is the perfect result. They can pressure the Democrats to cut the deficits when they come back into office. It’s tried and true.

Look for a huge return to “fiscal responsibility” as soon as they are no longer in charge. Someday it would be nice if the Democrats would refuse to play this game.

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Deprogramming the economic cult
by Tom Sullivan

One reason Sen. Bernie Sanders picked up support along the spine of the Appalachians in 2016 is working people there, as elsewhere, know the status quo is rigged by and for high-rollers. They have a sense a country generating such yawning inequality doesn’t want or need them. There, and in more suburban areas, Donald Trump played to cultural grievances and insecurities feeding people’s sense of being left behind. Students heard Sanders’ anti-establishment pitch for wiping clean college debt and for free tuition and flew to it like moths to a porch light. Both Sanders and Trump met pent-up demand for disrupting the status quo.

When Sanders fell short in the Democratic primaries, over twice as many Millennials did not vote as did. Why bother? Configured as it is, the current economic and political system serves “the best” and leaves the rest. It offers Millennials little, now or in the future. Their cynicism is palpable. Beyond that demographic, some Obama voters who might have supported Sanders opted for Donald Trump instead. Because Wall Street pillaged the country’s wealth and destroyed countless families’ lives, and neither party held financiers accountable. Democrats paid dearly for not disrupting the corrupt system in 2010 and 2014. The world paid for it in 2016 when three million less than half of American voters bought a snake oil salesman’s empty promises.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts this week offered a game-changing plan for leveling the playing field for the little guys. As a senator in the minority, she may not have the leverage to bring corporate criminals to justice. But Warren has instead drafted a plan for rewriting the DNA of large corporations and bringing them to heel. That is long overdue. A former legislator I heard from called the plan transformational.

In a press release announcing her Accountable Capitalism Act, Warren makes her move against the system as it stands:

“There’s a fundamental problem with our economy. For decades, American workers have helped create record corporate profits but have seen their wages hardly budge. To fix this problem we need to end the harmful corporate obsession with maximizing shareholder returns at all costs, which has sucked trillions of dollars away from workers and necessary long-term investments,” said Senator Warren. “My bill will help the American economy return to the era when American companies and American workers did well together.”

Rather than adding taxes to punish corporate misbehavior or tax breaks to incentivize better corporate citizenship, Warren proposes saving capitalism from itself. “The bête noire of the Republican business class” is not advocating demolishing capitalism, but rather giving it an upgrade, as I have advocated before:

What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.

Warren rolled out her plan in a companion Wall Street Journal column on Tuesday. Before “shareholder value maximization” ideology took hold, she argues, workers shared more in the wealth their labors produced. Since the early 1980s, however, shareholders have come first, leaving workers’ salaries as strangled as corporate reinvestment:

The problem may get worse, because executives have a strong financial incentive to prioritize shareholder returns. Before 1980, top CEOs were rarely compensated in equity. Today it accounts for 62% of their pay. Many executives receive additional company shares as a reward for producing short-term share-price increases. This feedback loop has sent CEO pay skyrocketing. The average CEO of a big company now makes 361 times what the average worker makes, up from 42 times in 1980.

Corporate charters, which define the structure and obligations of U.S. companies, are an obvious tool for addressing these skewed incentives. But companies are chartered at the state level. Most states don’t want to demand more of companies, lest they incorporate elsewhere.

That’s where my bill comes in. The Accountable Capitalism Act restores the idea that giant American corporations should look out for American interests. Corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue would be required to get a federal corporate charter. The new charter requires corporate directors to consider the interests of all major corporate stakeholders—not only shareholders—in company decisions. Shareholders could sue if they believed directors weren’t fulfilling those obligations.

This approach follows the “benefit corporation” model, which gives businesses fiduciary responsibilities beyond their shareholders.

Speaking with Warren this week, Jim Cramer of “Mad Money” remarked, “I mean, a lot of people think you’re just this left-wing firebrand. Isn’t what you describe the way this country was in 1980?”

Yes, sort of. Warren told him, “I believe in all of the wealth that markets produce. But markets have to have rules. And together, we decide those rules. You know, like you’ve got to have a cop on the beat.” A cop that, say, prevents banks from charging customers fees on accounts it secretly opened in their names. But that is not the thrust of Warren’s proposal. She aims to deprogram Milton Friedman’s cultist offspring and mitigate their propesnity for behaving badly the first place. The modern corporate model, after all, was not handed down from God. People designed it. We can improve it.

As outlined in her press release, Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act:

• Requires very large American corporations to obtain a federal charter as a “United States corporation,” which obligates company directors to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders: American corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue must obtain a federal charter from a newly formed Office of United States Corporations at the Department of Commerce. The new federal charter obligates company directors to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders – including employees, customers, shareholders, and the communities in which the company operates. This approach is derived from the thriving benefit corporation model that 33 states and the District of Columbia have adopted and that companies like Patagonia, Danone North America, and Kickstarter have embraced with strong results.
• Empowers workers at United States corporations to elect at least 40% of Board members: Borrowing from the successful approach in Germany and other developed economies, a United States corporation must ensure that no fewer than 40% of its directors are selected by the corporation’s employees.
• Restricts the sales of company shares by the directors and officers of United States corporations: Top corporate executives are now compensated mostly in company equity, which gives them huge financial incentives to focus exclusively on shareholder returns. To ensure that they are focused on the long-term interests of all corporate stakeholders, the bill prohibits directors and officers of United States corporations from selling company shares within five years of receiving them or within three years of a company stock buyback.
• Prohibits United States corporations from making any political expenditures without the approval of 75% of its directors and shareholders: Drawing on a proposal from John Bogle, the founder of the investment company Vanguard, United States corporations must receive the approval of at least 75% of their shareholders and 75% of their directors before engaging in political expenditures. This ensures any political expenditures benefit all corporate stakeholders.
• Permits the federal government to revoke the charter of a United States corporation if the company has engaged in repeated and egregious illegal conduct: State Attorneys General are authorized to submit petitions to the Office of United States Corporations to revoke a United States corporation’s charter. If the Director of the Office finds that the corporation has a history of egregious and repeated illegal conduct and has failed to take meaningful steps to address its problems, she may grant the petition. The company’s charter would then be revoked a year later – giving the company time before its charter is revoked to make the case to Congress that it should retain its charter in the same or in a modified form.

Matt Yglesias explains, “The conceit tying together Warren’s ideas is that if corporations are going to have the legal rights of persons, they should be expected to act like decent citizens who uphold their fair share of the social contract and not act like sociopaths ….”

Successful artificial persons produce profit rather efficiently, but operate at the level of appetite and instinct, survival being the strongest. What makes it hard for them to act as decent citizens is we designed these artificial persons without souls. But souls so get in the way of pursuing staggering wealth — just the way Midas cultists like it. They won’t like the Accountable Capitalism Act.

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

This is one of the first complete frontal assaults on the economic theories that have ruled American politics in one form or another for the past four decades. It is one of the first substantial efforts to treat the ascendancy of conservative economic ideas as a thoroughgoing blight that must be reversed, and it does so by turning the achievements of which conservative economic ideologues are proudest back on them. Corporate personhood? OK, then we’re going to have corporate jail, too. A rising tide lifts all boats? We’re going to be sure everyone has a seat.

Conceived in law and born on paper, these beasties turned on their creators long ago. People should be holding the corporate leash instead of wearing the collar. Yet, that’s how it feels even if people cannot properly identify the ubiquitous source of their unease. Scan your room for items not produced by a large corporation. How much did the workers who produced them share in the profits?

I don’t want to raise hopes that Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act is a magic bullet. Changing corporate behavior is as much about changing cultures as drafting new rule sets. Asking the Commerce Department, the Department of Labor, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to police this new corporate model (if it ever becomes law) remains contingent on having an administration committed to enforcing it. The law professor behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau knows that better than anyone.

But while other rumored 2020 Democratic presidential candidates will run on their “profiles” and electability, Warren has a written plan for change Democrats would be wise to embrace whether or not she chooses not to run. Many who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 — and many who didn’t vote at all — wanted a leader willing to disrupt the status quo and improve their lives. Warren brings more than braggadocio.

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