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Prison Conditions

This same lack of accountability helps explain other prison policies that have the effect of undermining public safety. Consider the physical location of prisons. Individuals are often locked away far from their homes with more than 75% of people incarcerated more than 50 miles away from home and the average person 100 miles away These distances make it difficult for family and friends to visit, particularly those who struggle to afford transportation to the facilities. One study found that fewer than half of all people imprisoned less than 50 miles away receive visits at least once a month, and the number declines as the distances increases, with only about one-quarter of the people incarcerated more than 100 miles away receiving monthly visits. In Florida, for example, the majority of people are never visited while they are in prison; 58% were never visited in the year prior to their release. Those who do receive visits are much less likely to recidivate when they are released. People incarcerated in state prisons in Florida who had visitors had a 30.7% lower incidence of recidivism than those who did not. Significantly, for each additional visit an individual received, the odds of recidivism declined by 3.8%.

It is not just distance that matters for visits. It is up to each state whether it wants to impose restrictions on prison visits, and the states can consider any penological goal, not just the effect on public safety. Courts usually defer to prison administrators in making these determinations. The result is that many correctional facilities have limited visits as disciplinary measures or for other cost-saving or administrative reasons, such as preventing the transfer of contraband. Visitation policies in maximum-security prisons are often the most restrictive, even though the individuals housed there are likely the ones who need the most help and support for successful reentry. In North Carolina, for instance, prisoners in maximum security can have only one visit per week for two hours. In Oklahoma maximum-security prisoners have up to four hours a week of visitation, while minimum-security prisons allow eight hours. While tightening visitation might aid the administration of the facility, it is a terrible policy if the goal is to reduce crime because maintaining connections with loved ones is critical for an individual's successful reentry. Studies consistently show that visitation reduces and delays recidivism.

Visits should be in-person to have the greatest benefit, but many states are now turning to video visits instead to save administrative costs. To be sure, virtual visitation programs are useful when an individual is incarcerated far from their loved ones or when in-person visitation may be dangerous. But video calls should not replace in-person visits in most cases because virtual visitation does not produce the same strong communal and familial ties that are demonstrated to change individuals' behavior both in and out of prison. Video calls are often interrupted by technical difficulties, and prisoners do not have the same privacy and intimacy that in-person visits afford. Video visitation can also have negative effects on the prisoner's loved ones. Seeing someone on a screen does not provide the same reassurance about his or her well-being as does an in-person visit.106 Despite these negative effects on reentry and ultimately public safety, some jail and prison administrators are nevertheless replacing in-person visits with video visits because it makes their jobs easier, even if the general public pays the price in terms of inferior reentry outcomes.

Facilities often adopt similarly counterproductive telephone policies. The rates for phone calls are often exorbitant because pay phone companies have a monopoly on calls to and from the facilities, and the fees are split between those companies and the prisons and jails. A 4-minute call costs as much as $56. Prisons and jails go along because they reap revenue from this setup, collectively making around $460 million per year in concession fees from the companies. The people incarcerated and their families bear a crushing burden as a result. A retired nurse who spent $100 per month just to talk to her grandson who was in prison in another state brought a civil rights challenge to this structure and pointed out how hard it was on families and the people in prison, many of whom are living in poverty. In 20I5, the FCC implemented rate caps for interstate and intrastate prison calls, but in June 20I7, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the intrastate caps as beyond the agency's legal authority. Roughly 80% of prison phone calls are intrastate, so without FCC regulation, states would have to regulate the rates to keep costs down. But all too often that does not happen, and the result is that calls remain prohibitively expensive. It is not just those in prison and their loved ones who suffer. The public loses out as well because a valuable tool for reentry goes underutilized because the financial interests of the phone companies and the prisons cut against the public interest in getting better post-incarceration outcomes.

There is a similar tension - or at least a perceived tension - in the use of solitary confinement. Many prison administrators believe it is critical to be able to use it to maintain control of difficult individuals in their facilities and to keep their employees and other incarcerated individuals safe. Almost 20% of people in prisons and 18% of people in jails reported spending time in solitary, and the figures are even higher for individuals with a history of mental health problems. President Obama noted that "as many as 100,000 inmates in U.S. prisons are currently held in solitary confinement" and that "as many as 25,000 are in long-term solitary confinement, which involves months if not years with almost no human contact." The effects of solitary confinement on individuals when they are released from prison are devastating. Solitary confinement can produce psychological consequences that outlast the period of confinement and increase the risk of violent recidivism.

Even if separation is necessary to maintain order in some cases, the use of solitary confinement goes well beyond necessity. Many people are placed in solitary because of relatively minor disruptive behavior, such as talking back or failing to obey an order! Before a policy change, corrections officers sent people in South Carolina to solitary confinement for an average of 12 days for violating prison protocol by posting on social-media sites. in 2013, a person was sent to solitary for 37 1/2 years for posting on Facebook 38 times. The conditions of separation also often go far beyond a safety rationale. There is no safety reason, for example, for rules that prevent individuals in solitary confinement from having pictures of their family members or newspapers. Nor is there a prison management reason for facilities to be designed such that individuals in isolation have no access to windows. One former warden of the nation's only supermax facility, ADX Florence, admitted as much in an interview, noting, "This place is not designed for humanity .... When it's 23 hours a day in a room with a slit of a window where you can't even see the Rocky Mountains - let's be candid here. It's not designed for rehabilitation. Period. End of story."

Rachel Barkow " Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration" (2019)

Wouldn't it be marvelous if someone else paid your income taxes? Imagine all that extra money in your paycheck. You could pay your debts, set aside a few dollars, or splurge on something special. Of course, if someone else had to pay your income taxes it would not be such a good deal for them. They would have to pay their own income taxes and yours. You wouldn't want to be that person, would you?

Well, in a sense, you already are. There's a federal regulation that makes us pay someone else's taxes and, worse yet, that somebody is exempt from federal income taxes, meaning they pocket the tax money we give them as extra profits.

This policy comes from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

FERC sets the level of water behind hydroelectric dams and oversees electricity grids and wholesale electric markets whose initial rules were written by Enron and then adopted by government. FERC also sets the rates pipelines charge to transport oil and natural gas across state lines but which are exempt from corporate income tax.

As federal agencies go, FERC is small. Its budget amounts to about a quarter of a billion dollars a year, less than a tenth of a penny on each dollar in the federal budget. And its staff is modest, too, about fifteen hundred people.

Most federal agencies have struggled for years with flat or shrinking real budgets, but not FERC. Its 2010 budget was 9 percent larger than in 2009, which in turn was 10 percent more than in 2008. Congress approved these increases because the energy industry wanted FERC's budget to grow. That may seem odd, given how often we hear how businesses dislike being regulated. But FERC's funding is just one of its peculiarities.

As it happens, FERC's budget does not come from the taxes you pay to Washington. Instead, the commission is financed with fees paid by the industries it regulates, industries that get their money from you. Energy companies gladly pay those fees because they help ensure incredible profits, like those earned by pipelines.

To put this into perspective, tax records show that the 5.8 million corporations in America keep as profit about six cents on each dollar of revenue. The 14,000 largest do better, keeping as profit roughly a dime on each dollar of revenue. And how well do oil pipelines do? Their profit is forty-two cents on the dollar.

Measured against assets, the story of bloated profits is the same.

American companies earned 6.7 percent on their assets in 2010, according to calculations done by the federal Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs. But among the 175 interstate oil pipelines, three earned more than 30 percent, three more earned more than 40 percent and apipeline owned by Sunoco made an astounding 55 percent.

One reason they did so well is that you paid these pipelines for corporate income taxes, both federal and state. Problem is, most pipelines do not pay the corporate income tax. That means the taxes you were forced to pay - but that never got passed on to government - were really just extra profits.

How do you pay this tax? You won't find it cited anywhere on a bill you get. Looking at your utility bills and gas station receipts, you would never know that the federal government lets pipeline owners drill a hole in your pocketbook. But if natural gas warms your home, if you use electricity that comes from a generation plant that burns gas, or you drive a car fueled by gasoline, chances are the fuels travel via monopoly pipelines, meaning you paid your piece.

If you have never heard about this tax-gouging rule, that's not surprising. The major news media have missed it completely. News outlets rarely cover FERC. When they do, the stories tend to be superficial and based on press releases. Without a watchdog to watch, much less bark, how are you to know you're being ripped off by an entire industry? The way this rule came about is a perfect example of how big companies use the fine print of regulations to enrich themselves unfairly at your expense.

THE PIPELINE PROFIT

Pipelines collect all of their revenues from their customers, the energy companies that produce fuels and natural gas. The money they collect pays their costs, from pipeline operations to expense-account lunches; what's left over becomes profits for investors. Since there is no competitive market to determine prices, government regulators stand in for market forces. In theory, the FERC holds hearings, gathers evidence, scrutinizes accounting records and then determines the prices, or rates, that can be charged for moving oil and gas through America's more than five hundred thousand miles of transport pipelines.

A simple legal principle - "just and reasonable" - is supposed to guide this process. On one side of the equation, investors are entitled to reasonable costs and a reasonable profit so that the business is viable and the service reliable. On the other, customers are entitled to just and reasonable prices so that they pay what they would in a competitive market.

Historically, calculations of what is "just and reasonable" were made on the basis of money actually spent. But FERC had a better idea: it decided you can be charged for fictional expenses, not just actual ones. The real world of costs and prices once defined the limits, but with fiction, there are no boundaries.

This shift to picking your pocket rather than settling for "just and reasonable" rates based on actual expenses began with a provision in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, which passed Congress with bipartisan support and which President Reagan signed. Many excellent aspects of that law looked to make the tax system fairer, but the legislation also harbored hundreds of subtle favors to industries and individuals. One provision - the one that, in time, would allow charging for fictional costs - didn't make the news. But it changed the way that partnerships, specifically master limited partnerships, are treated under the tax law.

Before 1986, any partnership allowing its shares to trade like a stock was subject to corporate income tax. That meant the partnership might as well organize as a corporation, in which the company is taxed on profits and then its owners are taxed again on dividends and gains on shares sold at a profit. This is known as the double taxation of corporate profits. But the 1986 law allowed shares of "master limited partnerships" to trade just like stocks, only without the partnership being subject to the corporate income tax. Investors in a master limited partnership, or MLP, escape double taxation because they pay only one level of tax, their personal income taxes, on profits.

Historically, corporations owned pipelines. But once the 1986 law changed, so did the structure of the pipeline business. Many corporations created master limited partnerships and put their pipelines into them. Nearly two hundred master limited pipeline partnerships existed by 2012.

With the resulting elimination of the corporate income tax, you might think that monopoly pipeline rates would go down. After all, their costs went down by the amount of the corporate income tax once it was eliminated for MLPs. And since only actual expenses are supposed to be considered when regulators set "just and reasonable" rates, then rates, in theory, should decline.

Yet, even in the absence of a corporate income tax, FERC permitted master limited pipeline partnerships to include a charge for corporate income taxes in their rates. The organization that represents the owners and developers of natural gas wells, the Natural Gas Supply Association, objected. It said that including fictitious taxes in pipeline charges amounted to an "under the table" rate increase. Consumer groups, few and lightly funded, let the issue slide.

From the point of view of a pipeline monopolist, charging customers the corporate income tax and then pocketing the money makes an already lucrative business extraordinarily profitable. Court records from a test case that challenged the nonexistent tax that one oil pipeline charged show just how much. For each dollar of after-tax profit earned under the old system of actual costs, pipeline owners could now pocket $1.75. That 75 percent boost in after-tax profits came out of the consumer's pocket.

The pipeline that first got approval to charge the nonexistent tax is called the SFPP. Its name comes from the initials of the former Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads, which merged a quarter century ago. During the one-term administration of George H. W. Bush, the first Texas oilman to become president, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission let this pipeline charge rates that assumed it paid a 42.7 percent corporate income tax on profits. Two of the pipeline's wholesale customers, BP (British Petroleum) West Coast and ExxonMobil, appealed FERC's approval of the fictional tax to the federal district court of appeals in Washington, which hears challenges to regulatory actions.

The court reversed FERC's decision. Judge David B. Sentelle and two colleagues held that regulators "cannot create a phantom tax in order to create an allowance to pass through to the ratepayer." Monopoly rates set by government cannot include "phantom income taxes [the MLP] did not pay." The court ruled that under the "just and reasonable" rule, including a nonexistent tax was, in short, inherently unjust and unreasonable.

That might have been the end of it. But by the time that case was decided a former oil and gas tax-shelter salesman, George W. Bush, had become president. His administration hustled to remake the regulatory landscape to the liking of the energy industry, especially Enron, which had been Bush's single largest source of campaign funds. His vice president, Dick Cheney, had created a secretive advisory panel that put forth energy policy proposals which, years later, were revealed to be almost word for word what Enron and other energy companies proposed. And which companies pushed hard for these new rules to include fictional corporate tax expenses in monopoly pipeline rates? Enron and Kinder Morgan Management, a pipeline company headed by a former Enron president.

Cheney's point man regarding pipeline regulations was a career regulator named Joseph Kelliher. He must have done a reliable job for Cheney because in 2003 Kelliher got a promotion to FERC commissioner. In 2005, President Bush promoted Kelliher again, this time to FERC chairman.

Kelliher and other Bush appointees wanted to restore the fake tax that Judge Sentelle struck down. They also wanted the matter resolved - and avoid years of regulatory litigation - before someone less in the pocket of the oil industry got to the White House or Admiral's House, where the vice president lives. A clever trick made things move quickly. FERC announced in 2005 it would develop a "policy statement" on whether to include "actual or potential" taxes in pipeline rates.

Most legal matters in America involve administrative and regulatory law. The regulatory system, however, doesn't ordinarily recognize "policy statements," only formal rule making. But by creating this regulatory twilight zone, the commission effectively suspended the rules on making rules. When the rules are in effect and a case is under way, private meetings between commissioners and parties to cases, such as pipeline lobbyists, are generally prohibited. Lawyers call these meetings "ex parte" - from one side only-because other parties are excluded, making the meetings inherently unfair and one-sided.

But in the invented world of "policy statements," no such limitation existed. Kelliher and other commissioners could, and did, meet privately with pipeline lobbyists while giving little or no time to those who did not share their inclination to allow pipelines to charge for nonexistent taxes.

The Bush appointees' fealty to the pipeline industry ran deep. Once they had heard all they wanted from pipeline lobbyists and lawyers, they allowed only a brief opportunity for comments on the not-yet-issued "policy statement." As for the customary practice of letting parties respond to what their opponents say, that went out the window. Each side was given only a few days to file, and no rebuttals were allowed before FERC adopted the policy statement. Then in 2007, Kelliher and the other commissioners relied on the policy statement in approving new rates for the SFPP, the same pipeline controlled by Kinder Morgan that had been the subject of the earlier federal appeals court decision. These new rates included the corporate tax even though, as a master limited partnership, SFPP was exempt from corporate income taxes.

This decision on the added tax was more than a little odd because the second President Bush had pledged never to raise taxes. Bush signed a no-more-taxes pledge much stronger than what Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform bullied many other politicians into signing. "If elected president," Bush wrote to Norquist in 1999, "I will oppose and veto any increase in individual or corporate marginal income tax rates or individual or corporate income tax hikes." Since no major news organization covered the FERC beat, the broken pledge went unreported. Even so, it's a truism that even if a tax falls in the forest of Washington regulations and no one reports it, the tax is still there.

Technically, one could argue that the pipeline rule that makes you pay other people's income taxes does not violate the presidential pledge. That tortured reasoning runs this way: the rule does not raise your marginal tax rates or hike taxes, it just makes you pay a tax that the law does not impose.

After the Bush administration put the "tax" back in place, ExxonMobil and other oil companies that shipped their products through the 2,700-mile SFPP pipeline filed new challenges. Based on the earlier decision, it looked like an open-and-shut case since nothing substantive had changed. A fake expense was still included in monopoly pipeline rates, and Judge Sentelle had said that was not allowed.

This time Judge Sentelle, joined by judges Thomas Griffith and Brett Kavanaugh, took a different view. The decision made it dear that they disliked FERC's new policy of imposing fake taxes, as the judges suggested that ignoring taxes altogether in setting rates might be a good idea, certainly a better idea than including nonexistent taxes in rates. They wrote that rates based on a fictional corporate income tax charge "and the policy statement upon which they are based incorporate some of the troubling elements of the phantom tax ... disallowed in" the earlier SFPP pipeline case.

But their decision then took an unexpected turn. Judge Sentelle and his colleagues ruled that chairman Kelliher and the rest of the commission had "justified its new policy with reasoning sufficient to survive our review." How did the appeals court stand its earlier decision on its head? Judge Sentelle wrote that it was not the court's place to decide what regulation was best or smart, but only to make sure it was "not arbitrary or capricious or contrary to law." This was the same legal reasoning that permits monopoly railroads to charge customers like the Lafayette Utilities System in Louisiana a monopoly price for hauling coal 1,520 miles when there are parallel tracks for all but 20 miles of that journey. Whatever the flaws in the FERC's reasoning, Judge Sentelle said, the fake tax could be charged to customers. He and his confreres made no mention of two obvious and essential questions: How can any fictional expense be fair to customers? And how can any fake cost be "just and reasonable"?

In California, SFPP sought to impose the same corporate tax charge for oil it moves within the state. There, rates are regulated by the state Public Utilities Commission. An administrative law judge who heard evidence in that case, which began in 1997, issued a proposed ruling denying any allowance for a fake tax. But late in 2010 Commissioner Timothy Alan Simon put out an alternative decision that included the tax. Simon, who was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is a securities lawyer who worked for investment firms engaged with energy businesses.

What happened next shows how a spotlight, even a small one, focused on government can produce positive change. I wrote a column about Simon's proposal to impose this tax in State Tax Notes, a small public policy magazine; the column was also posted at tax. com, its sister Web site. That prompted several people to notify the commission that they wanted to speak about it during the next public comment period. Rather than hear them, the commission put off the vote. Six months later, with Simon gone, the commission rejected the proposed fake tax.

The amount of money at stake was small, about $9 million per year or twenty-five cents per resident. But that one brief article and the action of readers who asked that their voices be heard will save Californians that $9 million, inflation adjusted, which should give heart to those trying to make government more responsive to people and less friendly to corporations.

The money taken from you by all of America's pipelines together is too small to be worth any individual putting up a fight. I estimate the chrge for this nonexistent tax comes to about $3 billion a year, which is about $20 annually per American household, something like a nickel a day. But to the two hundred monopoly pipelines that stand to benefit, it is a lot of money, enough to justify huge spending on campaign contributions, lobbyists and litigation.

Unless consumers rise up and fight this, one thing is certain: unelected officials, backed by judges with lifetime appointments, will authorize and then approve more ways to pick your pocket because of what judges Sentelle, Griffith and Kavanaugh did. In a clear miscarriage of economic justice, they destroyed the legal principle that "just and reasonable" rates rest on actual costs, at least for pipelines. This fake tax may be extended to other utilities and to the railroads. Achieving this requires only a simple change in federal law. All that would be required is the insertion of a list of industries that can be owned through publicly traded master limited partnerships without being subject to the corporate income tax.

A prominent regulatory lawyer and former chief counsel for FERC told me he expects that is what will happen. Gordon Gooch joined FERC as a young lawyer, after clerking for a Supreme Court justice, and rose to become FERC's general counsel. Later, as a private lawyer representing ExxonMobil, he lost the case in which Judge Sentelle allowed fake taxes to be added as a cost in pipeline rates.

Gooch says that corporate-owned electric utilities are salivating at the prospect of getting out of paying corporate income tax while pocketing the money. Their trade association has already defended collecting income taxes from customers, monies that are never turned over to government. The industry trade association Edison Electric Institute basically said its members just do what the law allows. "The electric utilities would be master limited partnerships now," Gooch said, "except that when the law was changed in 1986 the Edison Electric Institute was uncharacteristically asleep at the switch."

If Congress amends the law, or some creative judicial interpretation effects such a change, then the cost to consumers of this fake tax would soar. Instead of being a nickel per day, each family of four could be hit for more than a dollar a day, and $400 annually for a family of four is real money. It is the weekly after-tax pay for a single worker at the median wage in 2010.

How many other rules like this one benefit the heavily subsidized energy industry but lie buried beneath layers of legalese? The answer is: plenty. Just ask Calvin Johnson, a professor of tax law at the University of Texas, who has devoted years to uncovering hidden tax favors. Hidden in the legal and regulatory fine print Johnson found an astonishing profits booster for independent oil and gas companies. They get extra dollop after extra dollop of tax breaks on top of the thick layers of official favors the energy industry already enjoys.

Consider two companies, each of which earns a 10 percent pretax return in the market, but one of which is an independent oil and gas company. Johnson showed how energy industry tax rules create an additional profit of 41 percent. The independent oil and gas company investors will earn 14.1 percent instead of the market profit of 10 percent.

Johnson and others disclosed their findings through the Shelf Project, which is published in State Tax Notes. Its goal is to show ways that Congress could raise more money just by closing loopholes, fixing flaws in tax laws, and undoing unjust decisions like Judge Sentelle's shameless gift to pipeline MLPs. So far Johnson and his colleagues have shown how Congress, by closing loopholes, could raise $1 trillion each year without any new taxes or tax rate increases. That would be enough to nearly balance the federal budget in 2013.

After the election of Barack Obama, FERC chairman Kelliher decided it was time to leave. But before going, he found one more way to gouge our wallets. During the first week of 2009 Kelliher announced that on Inauguration Day he would step down as chairman of FERC but stay on as a commissioner. He also announced that he would recuse himself from FERC business because he would be meeting with energy companies the commission regulates to "explore other career opportunities." In other words, Kelliher hung around for two months doing no work, but collecting a paycheck until he got a new job. Kelliher's new post? He became an executive in charge of the regulatory team at what is now NextEra Energy, a holding company that owns Florida Power & Light and, yes - you guessed it - pipelines.

David Cay Johnston "Free Lunch" (2007)

He who hesitates is lost
(proverb)

I don't know how many people listening to this program, there must be literally dozens, are going to Ian and Cynthia Hope-Willaby's fancy dress party tomorrow. But if any of you who are listening are going, then I'm going to tell you something which will make somebody there happy.

They have sort of schemes and you always have to come as something. So this year the invitation came and it was "Come as a Sin"

I must be able device a costume immediately recognizable. So, I paraded myself in front of my wife, and said "What are you going as?"

And she said, "I'm going as lust."

And she showed me her costume. I must say it was pretty good. It was immediately recognizable after about an hour and an explanation in writing.

It was a pair of flame-colored tights, on which she'd embroidered, or was going to have embroidered, slogans like "Kiss me quick I'm nearly forty." And this represented lust. I didn't hold up much hope for her. But I thought very carefully about mine. And I got my daughter's old very long fur coat, which she bought for one and nine at a white elephant store in the village market and buttoned that up at the neck and I sewed the skirts together to make sort of trousers and I put my gum boots on and I cut two wedges in the toes of the gum boot and I was going as a sloth.

And I thought if I hang upside down with my fur coat on (you have to climb up on a step ladder). If you hook your toes in the gum boots over the edge of a door, you can really hang quite reasonably. There's a tendency to get bloodshot hair after about an hour. It is not dangerous at all, unless somebody comes rushing in the door, which happened, and not only was the back of my head bumped against the wall, but I came out of my gum boots and landed on my head.

And when the doctor had given me sedatives the twitching, (this is yesterday) stopped. But he said, "You mustn't go out, you must take it very calmly. It's OK to do My Word, 'cause that's no problem, just sitting there pretending you know things, but you can't go tomorrow to the party."

And I thought, "Well, I can't go."

And I was explaining that to my wife as she came rushing in and said, "The most terrible thing. I took my red tights, my flame-colored, lustful tights, soon to be embroidered with 'kiss me quick I'm nearly forty' to Cynthia, the woman who does all the embroidering, and she'd delivered the wrong ones."

And my wife hadn't gotten her flame tights embroidered with 'kiss me quicky, I'm nearly forty' on them. Instead she got a voluminous pair of trousers with a slice of bacon stitched onto the kneecap, obviously gluttony. And her tights are gone, some fellow obviously got hers, so she couldn't go to the party either. So neither of us is going tot he party, which is marvelous

But if anybody is, any of you in the audience tomorrow. That fat chap is going to have (who left his trousers with a slice of bacon) is going to have my wife's tights on. and you know who he's meant to be, so at least recognize his instantly and make his evening.

All you've got to remember is the garment she was wearing: flame tights embroidered. And, so when you get in tomorrow look around all the company, and he who has her tights is lust.

Frank Muir 731127 b

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One more issue needed resolving before rehearsals started: what was the show going to be called? The authors and Prince had batted around ideas for months and they all agreed only that "Tevye" was too bland and too vague. "A Village Story," "To Life," "Listen to the Fiddle," "Make a Circle," "Once There Was a Town": their list kept growing, but nothing zinged. "To Light a Candle," "My Village," "Three Brides and a Man," "A Village Tune," "Homemade Wine," "Not So Long Ago," dozens more. The authors liked "Where Poppa Came From," but Prince preferred a name that suggested that the show was a musical. In late March, he called the question. "Anything on the list will do," Stein told him. "I don't care anymore." Prince scanned the list and made the choice. "But it doesn't mean anything," Stein said. Prince shrugged and replied, "Well, that's the title." Fiddler on the Roof went into rehearsal on June 1.

Alisa Solomon "Wonder of Wonders" (2013)

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson worked to advance the U.S. relationship with India throughout the first year of the Trump administration. The South Asian republic, the world's most populous democracy and one of its fastest-growing economies, was a natural ally the United States. Tillerson felt strongly that America needed to fortify its alliances and block rivals, chief among them China, from taking advantage of any gaps or friction between the United States and its strategic partners. To that end, he believed that if the United States strengthened its transpacific alliance with India, Japan, and Australia, with open trade and shipping routes, it could keep China at bay.

In October 2017, Tillerson telegraphed the administration's hopes for the region and India in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and then jetted to New Delhi to discuss the alliance in person with Prime Minister Narendra Modi: Tillerson was immediately impressed by Modi. The prime minister was a serious person, an experienced deal maker who was motivated by the prospects of a strategic partnership with the United States. Modi was candid with Tillerson about his challenges. He was operating in a tough neighborhood. On one border was Pakistan, India's greatest threat, and on another was China which had been trying to partner with Pakistan. To the north was Afghanistan, which was ravaged by war, highly unstable, and vulnerable to Russia and other countries. As he considered allies for India, Modi had options. He was inclined to deal with the United States, but if things ever went sour, Russia was knocking on his door.

The second week of November, President Trump took his first trip to Asia, a five-country, ten-day journey that concluded in the Philippines, where he attended a global summit of leaders. On November 13, Trump sat down with Modi in Manila on the sidelines of the summit. Tillerson had high hopes for the meeting - even though, back at the White House, Trump was known to have affected an Indian accent to imitate Modi, a sign of disrespect for the prime minister.

As with most of his foreign leader meetings, Trump had been briefed but didn't appear to have retained the material and instead tried to wing it. He took a hard right turn into a nitpicky complaint about trade imbalances. Modi tried to refocus on the threats India faced from Afghanistan, China, and Pakistan. His mention of Afghanistan led Trump off into a lengthy tangent about how stupid it had been for the United States to maintain its military presence in Afghanistan for so many years. When Modi mentioned his concern about China's ambitions and aggression in the region, Trump revealed a stunning ignorance about geography.

"It's not like you've got China on your border," Trump said, seeming to dismiss the threat to India.

Modi's eyes bulged out in surprise. Aides noticed him giving a sidelong glance at Tillerson, who accompanied Trump as part of the U.S. delegation. The Indian prime minister considered Tillerson among the best-versed Americans on the region's security challenges, and together they had been plotting a new partnership. Tillerson's eyes flashed open wide at Trump's comment, but he quickly put his hand to his brow, appearing to the Indian delegation to attempt not to offend the president as well as to signal to Modi that he knew this statement was nuts.

Trump did not appear to notice their silent exchange. He just kept rolling, droning on about-unrelated topics. Modi tried to keep the conversation an elevated plane, hoping to follow the path Tillerson had laid out for them in the previous weeks to work together to protect India and fend off China's Belt and Road Initiative. But each time Modi tried to get Trump to engage on the substance of U.S.-India relations, the American president veered off on another non sequitur about trade deficits and the endless war in Afghanistan. Those who witnessed the meeting that day in Manila were disheartened. Modi's expression gradually shifted, from shock and concern to resignation.

"I think he left that meeting and said, 'This is not a serious man, I cannot count on this man as a partner,' " one Trump aide recalled. After that meeting, "the Indians took a step back" in their diplomatic relations with the United States.

The meeting with Modi was a major setback not only for U.S.-India relations but also for the administration's hopes of checkmating China in the region. The meeting came at a time when Tillerson's influence with Trump was growing simply because the president had tired of others in his orbit. In preparation for the Asia trip, John Kelly asked Tillerson if he could add another duty to his already-full portfolio: Could he give Trump his national security briefings on the road?

This request was odd. Briefing the president was normally the responsibility of the national security adviser. Tillerson asked Kelly why.

"He doesn't want to see McMaster," Kelly responded.

The signs of Trump's fraying patience for H. R. McMaster had been painfully obvious throughout the fall. McMaster's loyal staff hated to admit it, but they knew this relationship was no longer working.

A military intellectual and policy maestro, McMaster was widely respected in Washington's foreign policy establishment and on Capitol Hill, but he did not easily fit into Trump's orbit. This much was evident right away. In his first town-hall meeting of the National Security Council staff after being appointed in February 2017, McMaster emphasized that as a nonpartisan army officer he did not vote. He wanted the professional staff to know that he valued their input, but his admonition about voting unwittingly sent a message to Trump, who demanded political loyalty from everyone in his administration.

McMaster lived by paperwork and process. He believed his duty was to give the president information so that he could make the best decisions, and then to help carry out the commander in chief's will. But his briefings to Trump were academic and detail-oriented, and the two men's stylistic differences inspired epic clashes.

McMaster had difficulty holding the president's attention. Trump, meanwhile, would get annoyed with what he considered McMaster's lecturing style. The president felt his national security adviser was always determined to try to "teach me something." Indeed, Trump constantly shifted and grumbled when staff were trying to bring him up to speed on a topic, immediately threatened by the notion that his knowledge wasn't sufficient if he needed experts. As the president repeatedly told Kelly when he proposed a subject briefing: "I don't want to talk to anyone. I know more than they do. I know better than anybody else."

McMaster came across as a tank commander in his bearing and didn't seem able to change gears to the far more politically cautious mode of White House hedging and dodging. He had a barking kind of voice, which had reliably conveyed strength and directness in his previous world. But it proved to be a pitch Trump disliked instantly, as if it were a piercing dog whistle.

Some mornings, Trump would come down to the Oval Office and see the President's Daily Brief on his schedule, followed by a meeting with the national security adviser, and complain. "I'm not fucking doing that," he told aides. "I'm not talking with McMaster for an hour. Are you kidding me?" Instead, the president would step into his private dining room, turn on the television, and summon National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, or commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to come over and keep him company.

In March, McMaster was in the Oval Office briefing Trump on the visit of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a favorite foil for the president. Trump got so impatient that he stood up and walked into an adjoining bathroom, left the door ajar, and instructed McMaster to raise his voice and keep talking. It was unclear if the strange scene was a reflection of Trump's feelings about McMaster or Merkel or both.

McMaster felt it was his duty to speak truth to his commander, to notify the president of critically important issues, and even to highlight bad news and the cons of a particular strategy Trump was considering. That's how McMaster had always spoken to his wartime commanders, when he was reporting from the battlefield: "Things have gone to hell, sir. Here's how bad it is." But Trump's intelligence briefers downplayed or withheld new developments regarding Russia's election interference or cyber intrusions, so as not to agitate the commander in chief. When they left a key piece of information out of the verbal President's Daily Brief, McMaster would later raise it directly with Trump, only to become a punching bag for the president when he inevitably blew up. The routine frustrated McMaster.

Part of McMaster's process entailed providing Trump with written briefing documents on each big decision, with detailed descriptions of the risks and possible rewards. He had tried to be concise from the get-go, boiling the material down to three pages, but McMaster and his team almost immediately realized the president wasn't reading any of briefing books, or even the concise three-page version. Staff secretary Rob Porter would synthesize the memos in a one-page cover letter, written in prose the president might find easier to digest. As one of Trump's confidants said, "I call the president the two-minute man. The president has patience for a half page." But McMaster understandably resented the fact that Trump was reading Porter's version of CliffsNotes. Porter and Reince Priebus suggested an alternative approach: McMaster could deliver verbal briefings to Trump. Nothing in writing.

"Everyone agreed we needed to stop giving the president paper to read," one former National Security Council staffer recalled. "H.R. was uncomfortable with this. McMaster kept saying, 'How are we not going to give the president any papers?' "

McMaster and his deputies were mindful of history and fearful of failing to document a risk or of missing an important alarm. Preside George W. Bush had faced withering criticism when it was discovered that in the summer of 2001 he had been briefed on intelligence suggesting Osama bin Laden planned to orchestrate terror attacks using airplanes. Bush had actually received briefing books on this, but the intelligence did not prompt any corrective action. Eliminating briefing books for the president seemed to tempt disaster. McMaster came up with yet another plan that the staff put into full effect in September: note cards with bulleted factoids.

Other top officials in the White House saw McMaster and some of his top deputies as overly suspicious. They fretted about the national security adviser's standing with the president and fought at times with others in the building, including Keith Kellogg, another army lieutenant general who served as the chief of staff on the NSC but was loyal to Trump above all.

By the time of the November trip to Asia, Trump was openly mocking McMaster. When McMaster arrived in his office for a briefing, Trump would puff up his chest, sit up straight in his chair, and fake shout like a boot camp drill sergeant. In his play, he pretended to be McMaster. "I'm your national security adviser, General McMaster, sir!" Trump would say, trying to amuse the others in the room. "I'm here to give you your briefing, sir!"

Then Trump would ridicule McMaster further by describing the topic of the day and deploying a series of large, complex phrases to indicate how boring McMaster's briefing was going to be. The National Security Council staff were deeply disturbed by Trump's treatment of their boss. "The president doesn't fire people," said one of McMaster's aides. "He just tortures them until they're willing to quit." The cruelty also was uncomfortable for Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Kelly, and other advisers to watch. Kelly was weary of McMaster's inability to take the hint that Trump was done listening. One day in the fall, Trump was meeting with a group of his advisers in the Oval Office, and Kelly decided the president was growing more obstinate on an issue and it was time for the gathering to break up.

"Thank you very much," Kelly said. "Everyone can leave now."

McMaster moved closer to. the Resolute Desk and said, "Mr. President, I'd like to keep talking to you. I have a few more things."

Kelly did not take kindly to McMaster disobeying his order. The chief of staff stood nose to nose with the national security adviser and decreed, "I said the meeting was over."

Here was a four-star marine general and a three-star army general nearly coming to blows in front of the president of the United States. Trump loved it, later telling another adviser that he was impressed by Kelly's willingness to confront McMaster and the sheer machismo he exuded. "This guy is an animal," the president remarked, complimenting Kelly. That the president's narrow bandwidth might have been the root cause of the disagreement didn't seem to cross his mind.

On the Asia trip, both Tillerson and McMaster hopped into the president's vehicle in succession to give Trump his morning update before the motorcade took off for its appointed meetings. But as McMaster spoke, Trump frowned, turned his back, and interrupted him midsentence to ask Tillerson a question. It was a not-very-gentle cue for Tillerson to take over the role of updating the president on the key facts he needed to know. Tillerson engaged in a little small talk, then returned to tee up the debates Trump would tackle in his meetings that day.

"As H.R. was saying, Mr. President," Tillerson began, a sign of respect and deference to the national security adviser at an otherwise painful moment. Tillerson didn't always agree with McMaster on style or process, but he told aides the man was selfless and dedicated to the mission.

McMaster had occasional disagreements with Trump, such as over the long-term strategy in Afghanistan and the Iran nuclear agreement. Unlike several other senior advisers, though, he genuinely tried to help implement the president's wishes. Rather than impose his own agenda, McMaster generally sought to curate the opinions of the relevant administration officials and present a range of options to Trump.

"Sometimes you have very forceful differences of opinion among the president's senior advisers," Senator Tom Cotton, a McMaster ally, said at the time. "H.R. is indispensable in helping the president hear all those viewpoints and have the information he needs, and framed in time for the president to make a decision."

U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley added, "When we're in those meetings, he's all about getting options on the table for the president."

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig "A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America" (2019)

Nothing to indicate that no resuscitative care should be provided. But Bob Manning had no interest in dying; after almost forty years of living with almost complete paralysis, he was a remarkably vital man.

As Dr. Chew noted when he told me about this incident, end-of-life decisions are a fit subject for a physician to discuss with a patient. But this nurse was not a caregiver; she was an agent of a company that would lose money if Manning went on living and would profit from his death.

"She was asking me to die," Manning told me.

Dr. Chew agreed: "She wanted Bob to have a DNR order and was quite insistent."

The nurse turned out to be an employee of a medical advice company called Concentra. When I asked Tom Fogarty, the doctor who is a cofounder of Concentra about this, he did something unusual. Unlike the top executives who will not come to the phone or who speak only through written statements, Fogarty set out to find out what happened. When he got back to me he was guarded about what he shared, but he made it clear he was aghast that any medical professional representing a financial interest in someone's life would even inquire about a DNR order. He also volunteered that after a brief spell, his company had gotten out of the line of business that the nurse had been part of. How much better American business would be if we had more chief executives who dealt forthrightly with issues instead of hiding behind publicists and lawyers, not to mention squads of burly security guards.

Now, to be clear, I do not think for a moment that Warren Buffett knew that the nurse working for his Cologne Re insurance company was going to ask Bob Manning, in effect, to die the next time he had a medical emergency. But that does not mean Buffett is free of responsibility for what happened. Buffett often says that his style is to let his managers run their shops, as long as they make their numbers, meaning their expected level of profit. His management style is widely praised in news reports and in profiles of the "Oracle of Omaha." By giving managers the freedom to run their business units as they see fit, Buffett takes on a duty to demand the highest ethical standards. That would not, in my opinion, include gouging customers on coal shipping rates as his BNSF railroad does. Nor would an ethical chief executive allow anyone in his employ ever to suggest that anyone should die to bolster a company's profits. But that is what happens under the Buffett style, in which by his own account he focuses on whether managers, some of whom resort to immoral conduct to give their billionaire boss what he demands, "make their numbers."

The reality is that what Manning had been saying all along, even before we met in 1997, was true. The insurance company wanted him to die. They had made it difficult for him to get care, they had for years refused to replace the crane Helen used to hoist him out of bed after the gears were stripped, they made it hard for him to get supplies to avoid infections. And finally a nurse hired by a Warren Buffett company carne right out and asked him, in effect, why he was not going to die the next time he had a medical emergency.

Bob Manning lived until 2009. To this day, his family says they are still owed money to which he was entitled. They are owed more than that.

David Cay Johnston "Free Lunch" (2007)

The Pirates of Penzanze
(operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan)

When I went into a cafe the other day and said to the man behind the counter, "Could I have a hamburger, please?" he said, "Do you want to eat it here or take it away?"

And I said, "With a bit of luck, I'd like to do both."

Now I mention that, because what it emphasizes is the strange phenomenon which has absolutely revolutionized English eating habits: take-away foods. Now that is a completely new development. There's so many varieties of take-away food you can get: kebab, that's a fancy name for what, when you get it home, turns out to be nothing but a fry-up on a skewer. And still in the east there's the Indian take-aways, which offer chipotees and pop-a-doms and curry with the singe on top. And there's Japanese take-aways. I don't really know WHAT they sell; I imagine it must be those karate chops. And then the most successful of all are the Chinese take-aways. Our local one has done so well, they've bought a wacking great limousine to make deliveries in. We call it the Rolls Rice.

However, what you may have noticed about all these things is that they have one common factor, all these take-away places, and that is the foods they offer are all of foreign origin. And that's why I think a mate of mine, called Ben, is on to what could well turn out to be a gold mine. Because he has an idea for opening a shop that will sell take-away steak and kidney pies, real English steak and kidney pies, which are to be cooked by his elderly Aunt Em and his elderly Aunt Bea.

Now, unfortunately, his plans have set suffered a setback. Like all simple, old-fashioned aunties. Auntie Em and Auntie Bea will cook ONLY with the very best ingredients. And where steak and kidney pies are concerned, that means the very best steak and the very best kidneys.

Now, have you any idea what that costs?

There are those who will deny that meat is that expensive. My butcher does. And his butler. And his two undergardeners. Nevertheless there was a story in the paper the other day about a gang of thieves who broke into a Smithfield cold store, stole a quantity of filet steak to the value of sixty-eight thousand pounds and got away in a Volkswagon.

So you perhaps appreciate why it is that Ben's plan for Auntie Em and Auntie Bea's Take-away Steak and Kidney Pie Palace, although it's a good idea in theory, in practice, what it looks like is enough steak and kidney pies to feed four people will work out to the rate of something like nine pounds, seventy-six p.

Well the ironic thing is, that my poor friend looks like LOSING a fortune on the very thing that made Gilbert and Sullivan gain a fortune.

In other words, the pie rates of Ben's aunts.

Dennis Norden 731127a

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