Alan Pyke Archive

The federal minimum wage would rise to $15 an hour under historic legislation passed Thursday by the House of Representatives.

Three Republicans jumped the aisle to support the Democratic-led measure. Six Democrats defected to vote no. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and President Donald Trump can now give tens of millions of working people a raise any time they want.

The bill would double the national pay floor in a plan that would roll out gradually, ticking up from the current $7.25 over a six-year period. The measure also permanently pegs the minimum wage to inflation, automating future increases to break a vicious political and economic cycle that’s become the norm over the past half-century.

Congress has not raised the wage floor in a decade. That hike, too, followed a decade of stagnation. So did its predecessor legislation in the 1990s. The government has slipped into a pattern of ignoring wage policy for long stretches as costs of living rise and erode the earning power of the lowest-paid workers in the country.

That cycle has helped fuel the massive economic inequality that’s ravaged the country for decades, through recessions and economic expansions alike. Today’s $7.25 is worth less than the minimum wage of the 1970s in inflation-adjusted terms.

The $15 wage floor wouldn’t just catch workers up for all that lost time and buying power the way past wage hikes have, though: It seeks to establish a higher standard of living for low-wage workers than the previous record high, set in the 1960s. Nearly 20 million workers would see their pay increased by the measure, and an estimated 1.3 million people would be lifted out of poverty.

The sheer magnitude of the hike — more than doubling the pay floor nationwide — has dismayed even some economists who are typically supportive of minimum wage raises in general. Supporters shrug off those worries, noting that the current wage system is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, who are left to make up the difference between corporate poverty wages and what it costs to keep a family alive in the 21^st century.

Sorry, America’s middle class: President Donald Trump’s signature tax code overhaul has not generated any meaningful new economic growth that wasn’t already underway, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) has found.

The new numbers inject further complexity into a contentious and ongoing debate around the landmark tax legislation as to who actually benefited from its passage. But the study should also offer additional clarity: With hard numbers now available on the economy’s performance in the first full year of the legislation, it’s easier than ever to talk instead about who got what and how — and the answers, so far, aren’t pretty.

Large corporations with shiny accounting departments ended up being the largest beneficiaries of the tax bill’s largesse, with the rate of tax they actually pay dropping by half in 2018, according to the CRS analysis. But the vanishingly insignificant comparative break Trump’s law gave workaday people lays the game bare. This tax bill is already reshaping the real-world economy in ways that limit the prospects of ordinary people, potentially reinforcing the structural inequities that adversely impact democratic society.

Trump and his congressional allies had forecast massive jumps in GDP growth and working-family incomes from the package. None materialized in year one. Annual growth hit 2.9% – identical to the 2015 mark, well below the 3.3% the Congressional Budget Office forecast when it sought to predict the tax bill’s impact in April of 2018, and right in line with what the CBO had predicted the economy would have done without Trump’s corporate-tax munificence.

The report’s findings underscore the deceitful nature of the administration’s first-term sales pitch.

Working people were supposed to benefit from the slashed corporate income tax rate and related rules tweaks intended to lure offshored profits back into the U.S. economy. American companies weren’t hiding $3 trillion in profit outside the country out of malice, the argument went. Rather, they were afraid of seeing it taxed too sternly, and would happily bring it home to make productive and equitable use of it just as soon as they felt it was safe from the taxman.

Credit card interest rates would be capped at 15% nationwide under a new federal usury law proposed on Thursday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

The pair’s Loan Shark Prevention Act draws upon a long tradition, not just in legislative politics but in human moral thought. Most major faith traditions have characterized usurious lending as a grave sin, and the background materials prepared by the populist pair make pains to reference the “special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell” such lenders are accorded in late-medieval depictions of the inferno.

“Today we don’t need the hellfire, the pitchforks, or the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law that caps interest rates on credit cards and consumer loans at 15%,” a briefing document on the proposal states.

Average annual interest rates on credit card debt have climbed steadily in modern times and now stand at almost 18%. Many cards charge annual percentage rates as high as 27%, the supporting white-paper notes, adding that the finance and retail firms offering this high-cost credit have become alarmingly reliant on the interest income their uncapped charges generate.

New England grocery store workers have won significant concessions from the Dutch firm that rules their day-to-day lives after an 11-day strike, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) announced Monday.

More than 30,000 Stop & Shop employees walked off the job on April 11 after negotiators from Netherlands-based multinational food retailer Ahold Delhaize spent weeks insisting the grocer’s frontline workforce would have to absorb higher health care costs and major changes to retirement benefits.

Such collective action has become rare in the private sector, where union membership levels are at historic lows and complex ownership arrangements involving multinational holding companies have attenuated the connection between the people who do a business’ actual work and the well-to-do executives calling the shots.

But the nearly two-week work stoppage drew high-profile support from both local and national leaders. Multiple 2020 presidential primary contenders visited striking workers in person, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), and former Vice President Joe Biden (D). Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D) and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) also showed their faces and shared supportive remarks at rallies with the strikers. Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) tweeted their support for the cause.

Pitched as the long-awaited salvation of a broken system, President Donald Trump’s overhaul of the corporate tax code appears to have in fact doubled the number of major profitable corporations that find a way to pay zero dollars in income tax.

There were 60 such firms listed on the Fortune 500, a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) showed Thursday, with a combined $79 billion in pre-tax revenue and nothing paid to the U.S. government in income tax. The group’s previous research had found an average of 30 profitable zero-tax firms per year in the decade before Trump’s tax law.

But such pay-nothing corporate takers would disappear under a new tax proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), announced Thursday in a blog post from her presidential campaign’s web team.

Warren’s proposal breaks from stubborn technocratic complexity, leaving messy, convoluted corporate tax code to one side – in a file marked “fix this later” – in favor of a new, separate, and simple levy on only the highest profits.

The first $100 million a firm nets in a year would be untouched by the new proposal. For every dollar of profit they claim to shareholders beyond that, firms would have to send seven pennies to the government.

As ITEP senior fellow Matt Gardner told ThinkProgress, “We know that in many cases companies are playing games with two sets of books. Requiring them to stick with one story in terms of profitability has a lot of appeal.”

After six years of strikes, lawsuits, and damning public scrutiny of how the fast food business model relies on taxpayer-subsidized poverty wages, McDonald’s formally withdrew from efforts to block a federal minimum wage hike on Tuesday.

The chain will also stop working against minimum wage increases at state and local levels, its executives told lobbying partners at the National Restaurant Association in a letter.

Workers and organizers involved in the six-year campaign of walk-outs, demonstrations, and litigation, dubbed the “Fight for $15,” immediately celebrated the about-face and pressed their advantage.

“It’s also time the company respect our right to a union. Since day one, we’ve called for $15 and union rights and we’re not going to stop marching, speaking out, and striking until we win both,” Kansas City McDonald’s worker and prominent Fight for $15 leader Terrence Wise said in a statement. “McDonald’s decision to no longer use its power, influence and deep pockets to block minimum wage increases shows the power workers have when we join together, speak out, and go on strike.”

Wise’s mix of praise and warning reflects some murkiness attending the company’s decision. McDonald’s hasn’t renounced its membership in the “other NRA,” just forsworn corporate support for an ongoing lobbying effort funded in part through its own dues payments to the group. And it’s unclear if the company now welcomes the $15 wage floor workers have consistently sought since 2012, or if it merely accepts some smaller increase is inevitable.

The details of how minimum wage hike policies come together are always tricky, as business organizations fight to carve out certain sizes of business and to slow the phase-in period of a wage hike beyond what workers and progressive economists say is reasonable. The nation’s first $15 hourly wage floor deal was the product of months of vigorous negotiations where “everybody left… a little bit of blood on the floor,” as Seattle Hospitality Group leader Howard Wright told ThinkProgress after that city brokered the first low-wage labor peace of the conflict-oriented era workers like Wise created.

Here is a picture of neglect: Out of every 100 taxpayers who reported more than $1 million in income last year, just three got audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The feds were similarly reticent to examine the filings of corporate taxpayers, auditing less than half of the 633 separate business entities that currently hold assets whose value exceeds $20 billion.

These alarming figures are just the continuation of a multi-year downward trend on basic accountability for those taxpayers who are best positioned to pay fancy accountants to skulk through the tax code looking for places to hide their loot from the public.

The decline in the number of audits of high-income individuals is particularly stark, as Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) noted in their report on the data, released Thursday. Twice as many million-dollar earners were audited in 2010, at which time the IRS identified $5.1 billion in unpaid taxes from 32,494 audits. Last year’s considerably more torpid effort to provide oversight of the well-to-do pulled in just $1.9 billion, per TRAC.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has a message for the federal consumer watchdog workers fighting to protect your wallet from white-collar predators: Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

In an open letter, the prominent progressive darling and long-time leader of the House Financial Services Committee’s Democrats sought to encourage Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) employees who’ve seen stark changes under the new management of Republican appointees who would rather their agency not exist.

The morale-boosting missive also served as a reminder to employees that a whistleblower portal can protect them from recriminations should they feel the need to report malign conduct by President Donald Trump’s administration.

“Let me assure you that actions to weaken the Consumer Bureau from within as Director Mulvaney attempted to do will not go unchecked or unnoticed,” Waters wrote to the staffers. After the Democrats took back the House, Waters became chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee.

“If, in the course of your work, you are a witness to waste, fraud, abuse or gross mismanagement, please do not hesitate to alert me and my staff,” she wrote.

 The letter also directed concerned staffers to a confidential whistleblower reporting tool housed at the Financial Services Committee website.

After attracting more scandals in 18 months than his four predecessors managed in  16 years, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke quietly shut the door to further public scrutiny of his office over the Thanksgiving break.

The secretary gave control of incoming Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to former Koch Industries adviser and longtime Zinke consigliere Dan Jorjani in an order dated November 20 but first uncovered Monday afternoon by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Zinke’s move on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving is best understood as a reshuffling of his resources, from attack to defense. Jorjani has worked for the agency since at least May 2017, serving as the chief lawyer putting Zinke and Trump’s agenda into black-letter policy action. He worked with energy industry interests to pen the rollbacks of Obama-era regulatory decisions protecting migratory birds and rejecting a mining proposal at the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, according to reporting by Pacific Standard’s Jimmy Tobias.

As Zinke’s management of the department drew scandalous scrutiny — like so many other Trump cabinet secretaries, Zinke appears to play fast and loose with ethics rules governing travel costs — Jorjani wrote to a colleague that Interior staffers’ primary responsibility is to protect Zinke from negative press. He will now be the central gatekeeper of the agency’s documents when journalists, watchdogs, and other citizens seek insight into the conduct of their government

In exchange for leaving out a key program protecting about 800,000 undocumented immigrants, Senate Democrats have pried several billion dollars in funding increases for other domestic policy priorities out of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

A document circulating among House Democrats and outside ally groups like NDD United labels the total haul of the deal as “a $131 billion increase for non-defense programs.” That figure is calculated based on how spending levels would have automatically dropped if lawmakers failed to reach a deal to waive so-called “sequestration” — the automatic annual cuts to spending that Congress has partially waived each year since 2012.

Compared to that same kind of routine sequestration mitigation budgeting, the deal’s increases to spending on domestic programs are smaller, a combined $57 billion over two years. That is a large number in a vacuum, but small in context of the massive figures involved in providing services to the public. The first year of the deal, for example, adds $26 billion more than simply canceling sequestration would have done  — making the new cap $542 billion total, which is still less than the inflation-adjusted spending Congress approved on such services in 2011. Schumer has in effect won a 5 percent bump to domestic spending caps that leaves the long-suffering cash-starved systems like public housing far behind the funding levels experts say they need.

The document also boasts that the deal between McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would flout President Donald Trump’s will. Trump proposed a $54 billion cut to the category for Fiscal Year 2018, meaning the Schumer-McConnell “non-defense funding cap will be $117 billion higher than the level requested by President Trump,” the sheet says.

Kansas won’t have Sam Brownback to kick around anymore.

The second-term Republican governor who wrecked his state’s economy and ruined the education system to give rich Kansans a tax break will quit his job to accept a new posting as Ambassador-At-Large for International Religious Freedom.

Brownback’s nomination marks the second time President Donald Trump has tried to help the onetime presidential hopeful move on from the economic and political crisis he fueled on the High Plains. The first — a cushier gig in Rome working on food policy — fell through a couple months before Brownback’s political situation went from “bad” to “humiliating.”

The recent nomination, announced by the White House on Wednesday, is a political bailout for Brownback. The governor now leapfrogs a shortlist of experts Trump’s team had already prepared in order to run away from his failures that have harmed the quality of human life in his home state.

Brownback’s governorship was defined by what he called a “real, live experiment” in extreme right-wing fiscal policy, a version of Reaganesque trickle-down ideology with the volume knob turned to 11. The state all but eliminated taxes for the wealthy, not just slashing rates but allowing anyone who could afford some creative accounting to pretend to be a small business and start paying zero percent state income tax.

Taxpayers and striving would-be students alike lost big on Wednesday. Twice.

The federal government will abandon two signature efforts to hold for-profit colleges accountable to the taxpayers who fund them or the Americans who take out loans to attend their classes, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced.

DeVos has canceled a pair of new regulations intended to thwart firms that over-promise and under-deliver on higher education credentials marketed primarily to lower-income adults eager to trade low-wage jobs for long-term careers. The move comes two months after DeVos rescinded another Obama-era policy aimed at protecting student loan borrowers from predatory debt servicers.

One of the now-ended federal policies is known as the “gainful employment rule.” It was hammered out over years of research and compromise, and was finalized in 2014. The policy restricted companies’ access to taxpayer-funded student loan dollars if too few of their graduates ultimately find jobs that pay well enough to allow them to repay their loans. While some critics worried the final rule was too lax, the outgoing Obama team announced that some 800 programs nationwide were failing to meet its standards as of early January.

Last winter, you helped six million American households — all of them poor and most of them home to a senior citizen, young child, or disabled adult — keep the heat on through the winter.

You didn’t do it on purpose. The government did it for you, through a program American lawmakers created in 1980 in hopes that no one in the world’s richest country would have to choose between buying groceries and avoiding hypothermia.

Since the dawn of the Reagan era, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) has subsidized the utility bills of tens of millions of Americans through hoary northern winters and blistering southern summers.

That nearly four-decade legacy would end forever under President Donald Trump’s first budget proposal. The plan’s broader fiscal irresponsibility is clear — it hands wealthy people hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks while paring back or outright canceling scores of public services and investments in the nation’s future — but its true cruelty is easier to spot down in the details.

“As far as I’m concerned we have no proposed changes” to the food stamps program, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue told congressmen last Wednesday. “You don’t try to fix things that aren’t broken.”

Perdue’s comments, delivering during a Wednesday House Agriculture Committee hearing, seemed to signal that President Donald Trump would not seek to shrink America’s efforts to help low-income families feed themselves.

Yet just five days later, a leaked budget document seems to show the White House is going back on Perdue’s commitment — contemplating some combination of policy changes and outright budget cuts for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) and other key food supports for the poor.

The leaked spreadsheet lists proposed budget requests for thousands of different government line items, without any of the accompanying policy information that would explain the changes underlying shifts in spending. Without those details, observers can only speculate about what is driving Trump’s proposed changes to federal spending. But the document shows clear and substantial cuts from 2017 budget levels.

For most people, the food stamps program is about fighting hunger.

For North Carolina state Sen. Ralph Hise (R), however, it seems to be about fighting the concept of unfairness — even if it means booting 133,000 human beings off of the food assistance rolls.

Hise defended the Republican senate leadership’s decision to rescind a 2010 expansion of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) eligibility by arguing that the current system, under which more people are less hungry, isn’t fair.

The 2010 rules make anyone who qualifies for another North Carolina poverty assistance program eligible for food stamps as well, for households with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level. It’s a common policy known as broad-based or categorical eligibility, which streamlines the administrative process for poverty programs whose benefits come from federal dollars, not state budgets.

But to Hise, local NBC affiliate WRAL reports, that program creates a pernicious “double standard” for food assistance.

When police first found a hunting guide and his client bleeding from gunshot wounds on a south Texas ranch in early January, everyone on the scene had their stories straight.

The hunters told police they suspected the shooters were undocumented immigrants they had seen on the ranch earlier in their trip. Their story soon jumped into online right-wing circles, thanks in part to Texas Commissioner of Agriculture and Donald Trump ally Sid Miller.

But it was a lie, according to police and, now, a grand jury. Investigators determined that guides Walker Daughetry and Michael Bryant in fact shot at one another by accident, striking Daughetry and hunter Edwin Roberts in the process. Daughetry and Bryant were indicted for third-degree felonies last Wednesday.

Miller, who previously courted online infamy with a vulgar tweet about Hillary Clinton during last year’s election campaign, deleted his initial Facebook post about the incident after news broke that police were suspicious of the hunters’ story. But his leap to promote the hunters’ story in the immediate wake of the shootings was more labor-intensive than simply sharing a news report.

resident Trump has nominated longtime Republican attorney Alex Acosta to head the Department of Labor, after his initial choice Andy Puzder withdrew in the face of withering criticism late Wednesday.

It remains to be seen if Democrats will find Acosta as objectionable as Puzder, a fast food CEO who embodied almost every policy idea and character trait the party has fought against in recent years. But if Acosta’s nomination does become a flashpoint, it would not be the first time his candidacy for a job drew critics out of the woodwork.

The black marks on Acosta’s resume have cost him at least one job he coveted, and cast a significant shadow over his current role as head of Florida International University’s law school.

Connections to Bush-era civil rights sabotage

Acosta, 48, was already “a young superstar of conservative legal circles” back in 2006 when George W. Bush made him the top federal prosecutor in Miami. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito even showed up for Acosta’s swearing-in as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, in recognition of a friendship dating back to Acosta’s time as a clerk for the conservative judge in the 1990s.

Before taking the top prosecutor job in south Florida, Acosta served the second Bush administration in other capacities. Acosta was a member of the National Labor Relations Board from December 2002 to August 2003 — and was confirmed to the post rather than recess-appointed like most of President Bush’s NLRB picks.

The board issued 251 decisions in Acosta’s 8-month run, including 27 published on his final day in the post. Acosta authored 125 of those opinions himself, according to a bio on the website of Florida International University’s law school, where he is currently dean.

But Acosta’s other work for the Bush team may, oddly, prove more significant during his confirmation hearings than his NLRB stint.

Low-wage Capitol Hill workers had planned to protest Thursday against the Senate’s scheduled confirmation hearing for President Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary nominee. But after fast food CEO Andy Puzder officially withdrew his name on Wednesday evening, the strike protest transformed into a victory rally.

“Our voices have been heard. That man will not be Secretary of Labor,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said, to cheers from workers assembled outside a Senate office building.

The workers rallying Thursday are part of a movement that goes back nearly four years. The federal government contracts out for service work at most of its facilities, shipping billions in taxpayer money to companies that squeeze their labor costs to increase profits from the contracts. The results are especially ugly in Congress, where millionaire elected officials are served by cafeteria staff who earn so little that they cannot keep their families together, let alone achieve basic financial security.

Puzder’s nomination was a symbolic thumb in the eye to federal contract workers. As the CEO of fast food conglomerate CKE Restaurants Holdings, Puzder oversaw the same kind of exploitative business model at Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, and other chains.

They’ve gone to court to fight every flavor of modern highwayman, from payday loan companies, abusive debt collectors and for-profit college frauds to petty scammers who loot payouts from lead poisoning victims.

They’ve fought through sabotage every step of the way from Wall Street-backed politicians determined to undermine their independence.

And for over five years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has danced between the raindrops, uncovering proof of nickel-and-dime scams, writing new rules to derail them, and winning about $12 billion for wronged soldiers, taxpayers, and students.

But now the agency that protects Americans from financial predators big and small is facing the same unpredictably bleak future as its older, slower colleagues in the federal public service sector. President Donald Trump is the biggest threat to the CFPB’s hard-won autonomy to date.

The agency currently has at least 16 open litigation cases covering a wide range of specific allegations, from overdraft abuses by banks to robocalling debt collectors to dishonest online lenders. In the three days leading up to the new president’s inauguration, CFPB unveiled a major lawsuit against student loan servicing giant Navient and a smaller, sexier one against a banker who named his personal yacht “Overdraft.”

Chief executives at the 350 largest American corporations made $15.5 million each on average last year, roughly 276 times what the typical U.S. worker earned.

CEO pay was slightly down from the year before in both raw-dollar terms and in comparison to worker earnings, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s updated figures. Stock markets struggled in 2015, causing the figures to dip from a $16.3 million average compensation and a CEO-to-worker pay ratio north of 300-to-1.

But CEO pay is still up 46.5 percent from its 2009 levels despite the decline in executive earnings that mostly come in the form of stock options, EPI notes.

Market fluctuations break both ways for heavily invested wealthy Americans. The financialization of the broader economy works wonders for people with a large portfolio. The richest sliver of the nation captured literally all of the total real income gains from 2009 to 2012. Working families have to endure the long-term effects of recessions large and small in ways that simply don’t cut into the financial security of people whose wealth comes from Wall Street rather than from sweat.

Food service managers at the Pentagon have been illegally retaliating against workers for going on strike, attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board have found.

Multiple employees at a Pentagon cafeteria managed by Seven Hills, Inc., participated in strikes alongside other federal contract workers across the Washington, D.C., area in recent years. The campaign is the first of its kind, and has already won the support of the Obama administration in both word and deed.

Some of the striking Pentagon workers were later reprimanded for missing work, had their schedules cut by managers, and faced discipline for telling customers about having their hours cut. Managers also stifled the workers’ organizing activity by threatening to fire people who joined the strikes or wore stickers in support of the actions. At least two workers were ultimately fired for striking, according to the agency.

The labor agency wants to force Seven Hills, Inc., to hold a meeting with staff at Department of Defense (DOD) headquarters to spell out the workers’ rights to collective action without reprisals. The company, which did not respond to a call for comment, will have a chance to argue its case to an administrative law judge before the charges are finalized.

The largest-ever corporate merger to skip out on American tax obligations is now kaput.

Drug giant Pfizer is giving up on its corporate marriage to Ireland-based Allergan after an Obama administration policy change designed to prevent U.S. companies from fleeing taxes by moving their mailing address abroad. The $160 billion merger cemented last fall would have produced significant tax savings for Pfizer, at the expense of the American public.

The sudden collapse of the deal comes as news organizations the world over comb through the huge Panama Papers leak that exposes how individuals take similar advantage of the cracks in international tax law to conceal their personal holdings and business dealings with offshore shell companies. The leaks are bringing a burst of fresh attention to a long-standing problem: It’s very easy, and often legal, to slip out of the taxman’s grasp by way of clever accounting.

Founded in Brooklyn in 1849, Pfizer is one of the longest-running corporate success stories in the American economy. It has benefited from U.S. taxpayers’ investments in roads, education, scientific research, and global stability for almost 160 years, growing from $2,500 in seed money from Charles Pfizer’s father into the top-selling drugmaker in the world.

But for the past several years, Pfizer’s executives have tried desperately to move away. The company sought what’s called an inversion merger, in which two corporations combine and use accounting schemes to shift almost all of their profits into a country with low tax rates.

With journalists and law enforcement officials still combing through a massive leak of documents to uncover the global networks of offshore companies the wealthy and powerful use to hide their activities, President Obama made a rare appearance at the daily White House briefing to call out some of the people who encourage and enable such deception.

After laying out new Treasury Department rules intended to discourage American companies from using international mergers to get out of paying their taxes, Obama connected the dots between such “inversion” mergers and the revelations of the Panama Papers. While the early stories to come out of the leak focus on foreign figures and sanctioned governments, he said, powerful Americans use the same elites-only financial clubhouse too.

“In the news over the last couple of days we’ve had another reminder in this big dump of data coming out of Panama that tax avoidance is a big global phenomenon. It is not unique to other countries because frankly there are folks here in America who are taking advantage of this same stuff,” the president said. “A lot of it’s legal, but that’s exactly the problem. It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed that they allow people, if they’ve got enough lawyers and accountants, to wiggle out of responsibilities that ordinary citizens have to abide by.”

The networks of global wealth-concealment now coming to light thanks to the Panama Papers leak often serve a very different purpose from the inversions Obama’s administration is targeting. But they take advantage of the same basic weaknesses in international disclosure and tax regimes. Inverted firms are “getting all the rewards of being an American company without fulfilling the responsibilities to pay their taxes the way everybody else is supposed to pay them,” Obama said.

As winter sets in around the country, thousands of the nation’s poor are struggling to keep the heat on thanks to intentional underfunding of a key federal progam.

Pennsylvania saw an 11 percent increase in applications for heating assistance but granted benefits to just 1 percent more households than last season. There are more than 24,000 households in the state going without normal utility service at the start of the coldest months, a 14-year high.

And in Idaho, state officials expect to assist at least 2,000 fewer households than last year after a streamlined process and more generous per-household benefits drained the state’s allotment of funds. The state “still has crisis funding available for individuals who have a crisis situation” later in the year, program administrator Kristin Matthews said in an email. But in the meantime, the state is encouraging low-income households left out in the cold to seek help from charities.

In both cases, the increase in people going without heating assistance for the winter reflects an unnecessary strain placed on the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) by Congress.

In just three months, 15,000 people in Wisconsin have already lost food stamps thanks to Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) decision to enforce full work requirements for the program in Milwaukee despite economic conditions dire enough to trigger a federal reprieve.

Walker’s administration made the policy change in April. Since then, anyone deemed to be an able-bodied adult with no dependents to care for must prove they are working or participating in job training programs for at least 20 hours per week. Failing to meet that standard means losing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits after three months.

The 15,000 bumped from the rolls from May to July is only half the number the state predicts will ultimately lose food stamps because of the move.

The 20-hour weekly work requirement is typically waived when economic conditions are too tight. Since making people hungrier doesn’t create jobs where none exist, the federal government alerts states each year to the areas within their borders where the work rules can be suspended. Other linkages between SNAP enrollment and a person’s willingness to work a job if offered one remain in place, but the hard-and-fast hourly rule is waived.

Over the holiday weekend, the man who’s done more to expose the financial crimes of the rich and powerful than almost anyone else in the 21^st century was sentenced to five years in a Swiss prison. The harsh punishment to protect bank secrecy comes amid a comparatively lax pursuit of justice for in cases where the public has been wronged by banking industry actors.

Herve Falciani spent two years gathering data about how the bank HSBC handled and concealed the wealth of clients at its Swiss branches. The files he stole offered information about 30,000 separate accounts with HSBC, as well as internal correspondence revealing how the British bank’s Swiss branch did business. Falciani allegedly sought money from various international governments who would have used the data to prosecute citizens who used HSBC to duck taxes.

The trove still delivered a major shake-up for the opaque world of international money-hiding. Journalists eventually used Falciani’s data to illuminate HSBC’s willful and aggressive defiance of tax law on behalf of its wealthiest clients. The bank “aggressively marketed schemes likely to enable wealthy clients to avoid European taxes” and helped a cast of characters that include alleged blood diamond trader Emmanuel Shallop, Victoria’s Secret owner Les Wexner, and accused war profiteer firm Katex Mines.

The United States is closing in on its first major free trade deal in years. Controversy and speculation have followed the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for months, but soon both lawmakers and voters will have a chance to see the treaty for the first time. Negotiators struck a final pact on Monday after more than five years of work.

Many questions still remain about the substance of the deal, the likely fight over it in Congress, and its impact on the world if adopted. Here are five we can answer:

What happens now?

The text of the deal must be public for at least 60 days before Congress renders a verdict, and it cannot begin to debate the deal formally until the text has been out for at least 30 days. Lawmakers forced these transparency concessions as part of the legislation granting Obama Trade Promotion Authority, commonly referred to as fast-track.

President Obama struggled to win support for fast-track, which has been a staple of trade negotiations since the 1970s, as the left flank of the Democratic caucus blanched. Many liberals have long opposed the deal on the grounds that free trade agreements historically harm U.S. workers and fail to deliver the exports boost promised by supporters. Members across the ideological spectrum have criticized the TPP’s system of international tribunals to resolve disputes, worrying that the tribunals could circumvent the constitutional court system and allow multinational corporations to override U.S. policies that harm their profits. And internet freedom groups warn the treaty will allow corporations and totalitarian governments alike to restrict free speech online in subtle, irreversible ways.

After treating Wall Street with kid gloves throughout the seven years since the financial crisis, the Department of Justice is trying to toughen up its punches.

In a memo to federal prosecutors nationwide on Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates formally urged DOJ staff to pursue criminal charges in white collar criminal cases whenever possible. The memo’s guidance both underscores existing policy and establishes some new practices for cases involving corporate crime, according to the New York Times.

“The public needs to have confidence that there is one system of justice and it applies equally regardless of whether that crime occurs on a street corner or in a boardroom,” Yates told the paper, adding that prosecuting “flesh-and-blood people” for corporate crimes is crucial to shoring up that confidence.

The single most significant item in the Yates memo will require companies under investigation to give up specific information about individual employees involved in the alleged misconduct. Companies that withhold the details prosecutors would need to prosecute individual white collar lawbreakers won’t be considered to be cooperating with investigators – a designation that “can save companies billions of dollars in fines,” the Times notes.

Tens of millions of vulnerable Americans would lose their food stamps benefits if Republicans bent on defunding Planned Parenthood force the second government shutdown of the Obama era next week, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) warned on Tuesday.

Unlike the 2013 shutdown when cash reserves allowed Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to be disbursed as normal, “USDA will not have the funding necessary for SNAP benefits in October and will be forced to stop providing benefits within the first several days of October,” a spokeswoman told the Associated Press. The agency notified state SNAP administrators on Friday that they should not begin the process of doling out October’s food stamps dollars this week as they normally would.

Without a deal, funding for normal government operations will run out at the end of September. In response to the news that a shutdown would cut off food stamps to as many as 45 million people, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) issued a statement saying the way to avoid a shutdown is for Democrats to get on board with cutting off federal funding for women’s healthcare. “The best way to ensure SNAP recipients receive needed support is to vote for the [continuing resolution],” Roberts told the Huffington Post. “I’m prepared to do so, and if members are worried about SNAP funding, they should too.”

The funding measure Roberts referenced would zero out federal funds to Planned Parenthood, the national women’s health organization that’s been smeared by pro-life activists as improperly profiting off the sale of aborted fetal tissue. Many of Roberts’ House colleagues have pledged to shut down the government if the group doesn’t have its funding cut off. State lawmakers in some parts of the country have already moved to restrict the group’s ability to provide a wide range of health services to low-income women who depend on Planned Parenthood clinics. In a quarter of all the counties where the group has a presence, the clinics are the only source of affordable contraceptive services for women of little means.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has decided that a man who believes low-income parents might intentionally poison their children with lead in order to score free housing from the state should continue to administer Maryland’s public housing system.

During a public event Friday, State Housing Secretary Kenneth Holt said that state laws regarding lead abatement in homes are too strict and invite abuse. The secretary told the crowd “the current law could motivate a mother to put a fishing weight in a child’s mouth to elevate the level of lead in his bloodstream and qualify for free housing at the landlord’s expense until the child turned 18,” according to a paraphrase of the comments in the Baltimore Sun. Holt declined to defend his hypothetical child-abuse scheme with evidence that it has ever happened, according to the paper.

Holt quickly apologized over the weekend, and on Monday evening Hogan’s office told the Sun that the governor had decided to keep Holt on despite the comments. “The governor expressed his disappointment and directed the secretary to continue reaching out…to reassure [people] of his commitment to the safety and health of all Marylanders,” spokesman Doug Mayer told the paper. A group of 30 Democrats from the state legislature had called for Holt to resign, but Hogan “remains confident that he can continue to effectively lead this department,” the spokesman said.