When Harry Alford Speaks Up, a Washington Firm’s Clients Gain - Bloomberg

When Harry Alford Speaks Up, a Washington Firm’s Clients Gain

By Zachary R. Mider

September 14, 2017

By Washington standards, the National Black Chamber of Commerce is a shoestring operation, run by a husband-and-wife team out of an office on the edge of the city.

But Harry Alford, the group’s founder and chief executive officer, matters in this town. When he’s not testifying before Congress or appearing on Fox News, lawmakers are citing his research on the Senate floor, or federal judges are pondering his court briefs. He speaks out on an astonishing range of issues, some of which have only the fuzziest connection to his stated goal of promoting African-American entrepreneurship.

Alford has filed friend-of-the-court briefs in recent years challenging Playboy centerfold Anna Nicole Smith’s claim to an oil fortune, backing a finance executive’s quest for a $7 million severance and siding with Samsung Electronics Co. in a patent dispute with Apple In

Outside the courtroom, he has endorsed a phosphate mine, opposed gambling expansion in Maryland and advocated for the owners of Argentine debt. He has weighed in on a rum-tariff dispute involving the U.S. Virgin Islands and favored restrictions on solar power in Florida. He has both invited and opposed a shutdown of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The common thread: Someone with deep pockets stood to gain from Alford’s words. Many of his efforts also coincided with campaigns run by DCI Group LLC, a Washington consulting firm that gets paid to generate just the sort of advocacy Alford provides. While the chamber doesn’t disclose all of its contributors, it has acknowledged taking money from many companies that benefit from its advocacy.

Alford declined to comment for this story, as did Craig Stevens, a DCI vice president.

Collecting Checks

A former University of Wisconsin linebacker, Alford, 69, ran a minority chamber of commerce in Indiana before founding the national group in 1993 and moving to Washington.

At first, he got headlines for accusing businesses of discrimination, as he had in Indiana. He objected to a casino being built over a slave graveyard in Louisiana, urged a bank to increase lending in black neighborhoods and sued a telephone company, U.S. West, claiming bias against minority vendors.

“He was very helpful in the beginning,” said Herman Malone, a Denver businessman who once served as the chamber’s chairman and urged it to pursue the U.S. West suit.

As time went on, Malone said, Alford seemed to grow more interested in collecting checks from corporate executives than cajoling them.

“He kind of lost his way in who he was truly representing,” Malone said. “He used it as a vehicle to get into the corporate world.”

In a book about the U.S. West case, Malone wrote that some plaintiffs grew suspicious of Alford’s motives after he urged them to settle during a meeting in Colorado and then caught a ride back to Washington on the U.S. West company jet.

“They claimed I sold them out,” Alford wrote in a 2014 syndicated column defending his work. “Nothing bad happened on that plane—the NBCC did not receive a nickel.”

Alford testified against the Kyoto Protocol in Congress in 1998, arguing that limits on greenhouse-gas emissions would harm minorities. By the next decade, the chamber was as prominent for its pro-fossil-fuel advocacy as anything else it was doing.

Environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council have accused the chamber of shilling for the industry. Exxon Mobil Corp., a DCI client, has said it gave the group more than $1 million since 2002. Alford has said he’s proud to take fossil-fuel money.

“Of course we do and it is only natural,” he wrote in a column in black newspapers in 2015. “The legacy of blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil fuel.”

Supporting Role

The National Black Chamber of Commerce has backed many causes that benefit big companies and wealthy investors.

White Paper

Alford, who’s also on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, branched out into other issues. In 2011, he campaigned against a proposed Department of Education rule that would cut off student aid at schools that saddle graduates with too much debt relative to earnings.

Alford released a white paper, held media conference calls, started a website and testified before Congress, arguing that the rule would diminish opportunities for minority students. Education Management Corp., one of the schools affected by the rule and a DCI client, was listed as a sponsor of the National Black Chamber’s annual convention in 2014 and 2015.

Another convention sponsor was Penn National Gaming Inc. In 2012, the company hired DCI to torpedo a ballot measure that would expand gambling in Maryland, threatening Penn casinos. The measure passed despite Alford’s syndicated column in black newspapers urging a “no” vote. A spokesman for Penn said the gambling company has been a member of the chamber since 2008.

In recent years, Alford has taken an interest in the rights of investors in securities, an emerging DCI specialty. In 2009, he urged Congress to punish Argentina for refusing to repay bonds whose owners included hedge fund manager Paul Singer. And last year, he wrote a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan asking him to consider the rights of holders of Puerto Rican bonds.

Alford filed legal briefs in two court cases that indirectly helped shareholders of the mortgage company Fannie Mae, another DCI cause. They are among more than a dozen the chamber has filed as a friend of the court in the past decade on issues ranging from retirement advice to labor unions. They include two that supported another DCI client, the family of Texas billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, in feuds with his widow Anna Nicole Smith and the Internal Revenue Service.

Feeding Lines

Sometimes, Alford’s public statements leave clues that someone else is feeding him lines. The Huffington Post pointed out that his 2015 op-ed in the Hill defending Education Management contained a parenthetical note to Alford from the piece’s actual author that hadn’t been removed.

A 2010 chamber press release about the Marshalls’ battle with Smith was written by a junior DCI employee, whose name appears as the electronic document’s author. The same goes for a 2013 Alford letter to the U.S. International Trade Commission defending Samsung in the patent dispute with Apple.

Alford’s campaigns haven’t always meshed with DCI’s. He’s a critic of the Durbin Amendment, which limits debit-card swipe fees. DCI’s retailer clients support it. In 2014, Visa Inc., one of the biggest opponents of Durbin, sponsored a reception at the chamber’s convention in Chicago.

DCI was founded in 1996 by three public relations executives who had worked for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. They’d pioneered the use of smokers’ rights groups to promote the industry’s message. At DCI, their client base expanded to include companies such as AT&T Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The chamber isn’t the only nonprofit that has frequently worked alongside DCI. The public-affairs firm recruited the 60 Plus Association, which bills itself as a conservative answer to the AARP, to lead a campaign in favor of holders of Puerto Rican bonds, according to the New York Times. The Center for Individual Freedom, created by a tobacco operative in 1998, has taken positions on behalf of Fannie Mae shareholders, Puerto Rico bondholders and the Marshall family.

The chamber has just two executives, Alford and his wife, according to a 2014 IRS filing. A man who answered the door one morning in August at the group’s otherwise unoccupied office in Washington’s Friendship Heights neighborhood said Alford wasn’t there and meets by appointment only.

Although the chamber says it has 140 local chapters and “reaches” 100,000 black-owned businesses, revenue from membership dues was just $2,114 that year. “All other contributions,” a category that can include corporate donations, provided $1.3 million, almost all of the chamber’s annual budget. The chamber isn’t required to disclose its donors.

Last year the Checks and Balances Project, a pro-clean-energy watchdog group, complained to the IRS that the chamber’s “primary activity appears to have been direct and grassroots lobbying to advance the agenda of its various corporate sponsors.” The IRS hasn’t acted publicly on the complaint.

What It Would Take to Make Bernie Sanders’ Single Payer Health Care Plan Work - Fortune

What It Would Take to Make Bernie Sanders’ Single Payer Health Care Plan Work

Sy Mukherjee

Senate Democrats, including nearly all of the party's potential 2020 presidential candidates, haven't so much been jumping on Bernie Sanders' single payer, "Medicare for all" health care bandwagon as they have been elbowing past each other to snatch a prominent political seat on it. But the increasingly popular idea, unveiled by Sanders and at least 16 Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate Wednesday, is already brushing up against scrutiny from the medical industry and some health care analysts who question how the proposal would be paid for and implemented in practicality.

The Sanders bill makes lofty promises. Under the 2016 presidential hopeful's Medicare for All Act, universal health coverage under a unified government-run plan (the eponymous "single payer") would be guaranteed to all Americans (including undocumented immigrants) at pretty much zero cost. That means no premiums and no out-of-pocket spending for doctors' visits. The current system of employer-sponsored health insurance would essentially be eliminated and even popular existing programs like Medicare and Medicaid would all be rolled into the new entity. (Sanders' latest bill differs from his previous offerings by allowing a four-year transition period for Medicare beneficiaries and a temporary option to either buy into Medicare or purchase some sort of public insurance option.)

Donald Trump Says Obamacare Is 'Death'

The senate will vote on a replacement.

‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli Heads to Jail For Placing Bounty on Hillary Clinton’s Hair

It isn't surprising that those sorts of marquee features are tremendously popular, especially considering Sanders' frequently-made point that the U.S. and its residents spend far more on medical care for worse health outcomes than pretty much any other developed (and even some not-so-developed) nations. A "single payer" system is also a more comprehensible system than the notoriously fragmented and federated American health scheme, which involves complex and often inscrutable interplays between the government, hospitals, insurance companies, drug makers, benefits managers, and all sorts of other middlemen.

But there's no such thing as free health care, particularly given rising medical costs stemming from advances in technology and the United States' high health service and product prices. These would have to be kept in check (and, in that sense, either otherwise compensated for or rationed) to achieve the advantage to consumers. And Sanders originally didn't detail how such a system would be funded—a critical question for such a massive overhaul, as the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation's senior vice president Larry Levitt puts it. Taxes would have to rise significantly, for one thing.

Single payer typically replaces premiums with taxes. You can bet opponents would focus more on the tax increases than the premium savings.

Larry Levitt @larry_levitt

Most people support the idea of single payer, but hearing that it would increase taxes erodes support.

And as Dan Munro, author of Casino Healthcare, pointed out in an interview with Fortune, there are plenty of other factors to consider down the line. For instance, would doctors be transitioned into salaried roles, as they are in some other nations with single payer systems? "We can't really discuss this kind of universal health care reform unless we also talk about medical education reform," he says, noting that becoming even a general practitioner in America is such an expensive undertaking that many might be loathe to settle for the lower reimbursement rates Medicare offers compared to private insurance, or a preset salary.

Sanders put out a white paper suggesting some ways to pay for his program shortly after its unveiling. These include income-based premiums paid by employers, an income-based premium for households, general income and business tax reforms, some form of negotiations or price controls with drug companies, and the ostensible savings from a transition to the new system.

All of this is easier said than done, including for a seemingly slam-dunk issue like drug prices. The U.K.'s National Health Service judges treatments based on whether or not their prices correspond with quality-of-life improvements. There have been recent rumblings in the U.S. of moving toward health outcomes-based pricing models (as opposed to the current system, where pharma companies have carte blanche on list prices); but it's not hard to imagine patient groups balking at a government agency cutting off access to even a modestly-effective treatment because of its price.Still, Munro says the advent of Obamacare makes it likely that universal coverage—whether that be through single payer or a more multi-party system that preserves some private players—will become an inevitable goal. The devil is in the design, the details, and the dinero.

Swamp politics: Why Trump's tax-cut push is tricky, even for Republicans - Fox News

Swamp politics: Why Trump's tax-cut push is tricky, even for Republicans

Howard Kurtz - Sept.13, 2017

By Howard Kurtz Published September 13, 2017 Fox News

Trump to launch a cross country blitz for tax reform

The goal would seem to be right smack in the party’s wheelhouse: Republicans cutting taxes.

But so far, it hasn’t been easy.

Nearly eight months into an administration that hasn’t won a major victory on the Hill, there is plenty of motion but no plan.

President Trump’s initial goal was to achieve tax reform, and he might still be able to slash some deductions and declare victory. But reform involves a royal battle with every lobbying interest on the planet. At this point, the GOP would be thrilled to lower tax rates by Christmas and campaign on that in 2018.

The problem—and this may sound familiar—is that Republicans in Congress are divided.

"The White House and GOP congressional leaders agree with the goal of slashing the corporate income-tax rate and also cutting individual income taxes to benefit the middle class," says the Washington Post. "But they have yet to agree about which existing tax breaks should be eliminated to pay for it all."

For instance, the White House would like to ax the massively popular home mortgage interest deduction, but Hill folks say it’s too popular to kill—and they’re probably right.

The challenge with big tax cuts is paying for them, at least under the assumption, long argued by conservatives, that they shouldn’t blow a further hole in the deficit. You can get into rosy scenarios and dynamic scoring, but you need to find some offsetting dollars somewhere.

And then there is the classic split between Republicans who want to provide more relief for those at the top of the income scale and Democrats who attack such plans as a giveaway to the rich.

Trump’s new friends Chuck and Nancy may not be much help here, although it’s easier to wheel and deal when you’re giving money away. The Wall Street Journal editorial page says “if the president really wants Democratic votes on tax reform, he’ll have to prove first that he has 50 Republican votes to pass it in the Senate.” Only then, says the paper, could he get Heidi Heitkamp or Joe Manchin—two moderate Democrats who were at a bipartisan dinner at the White House last night--to provide the 51st vote. (Of course, he actually needs 60 votes in the Senate unless they use the budget reconciliation process, which failed on ObamaCare.)

National Review Editor Rich Lowry says the “dalliance with Schumer” can “only add another layer of distrust and dysfunction atop an already fraught relationship with the GOP leadership at a time when it is grappling with an enormously complex legislative task."

The president said over the weekend he will "ask for a speedup" in light of the devastation caused by Harvey and Irma. This creates visions of a grand bargain that ties together tax cuts, hurricane aid, the debt ceiling and legalizing the Dreamers program.

Of course, grand bipartisan deals play better with pundits and editorial writers than actual politicians. Just ask John Boehner and Barack Obama.

Tax cuts remain Trump’s best bet for a big legislative win in 2017. But it’s far from a done deal.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m.). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

Congress votes to call on Trump to denounce hate groups - Reuters

Congress votes to call on Trump to denounce hate groups

Alex Dobuzinskis

(Reuters) - The U.S. Congress passed a resolution late on Tuesday calling on President Donald Trump to condemn hate groups after Trump was criticized for his response to the violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a month ago.

The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously adopted the resolution, U.S. Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, said in a statement. The Senate approved the measure on Monday.

“Tonight, the House of Representatives spoke in one unified voice to unequivocally condemn the shameful and hate-filled acts of violence carried out by the KKK (Ku Klux Klan), white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville,” Connolly said.

The joint resolution, passed with the support of both Republicans and Democrats, will go to Trump for his signature.

Representatives for the White House did not respond immediately to an email seeking comment.

The Congressional resolution calls on Trump to condemn hate groups and what it describes as the growing prevalence of extremists who support anti-Semitism, xenophobia and white supremacy.

It also urges Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate acts of violence and intimidation by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups.

Trump alienated fellow Republicans, corporate leaders and U.S. allies and rattled markets last month with comments about the violence in Charlottesville, where white nationalists and neo-Nazis clashed with anti-racism activists on Aug. 12.

One woman, Heather Heyer, was killed and several people were wounded when a suspected white nationalist crashed his car into anti-racist demonstrators.

The Congressional resolution calls Heyer’s death a “domestic terrorist attack.” James Alex Fields, a 20-year-old Ohio man who authorities say drove into Heyer and other protesters, has been charged with second-degree murder and other criminal counts.

On Aug. 12, Trump denounced hatred and violence “on many sides,” a comment that drew sharp criticism from across the political spectrum for not condemning white nationalists.

White nationalists had gathered in Charlottesville to protest against the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, who led the pro-slavery Confederacy’s army during the U.S. Civil War. Trump defended Confederate monuments last month.

At a rally in Phoenix on Aug. 22, Trump accused television networks of ignoring his calls for unity in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville.

“I didn’t say I love you because you’re black, or I love you because you’re white,” Trump said at the rally. “I love all the people of our country.”

The resolution also acknowledged the deaths of two Virginia State Police officers whose helicopter crashed as they patrolled the Charlottesville protest.

Trump’s Impulsiveness Has Again Been Mistaken for Something Deeper - Intelligencer ( New York Magazine )

Trump’s Impulsiveness Has Again Been Mistaken for Something Deeper - By Benjamin Har

It’s a new Trump! (Again.) Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty

Last Wednesday, President Trump made a surprising, curious deal with Democrats. Rather than bow to the wishes of his fellow Republicans by attempting to raise the debt ceiling for six or more months, Trump undercut (for roughly the 15-thousandth time) his baffling reputation as a master negotiator and acceded to Democrats’ demands for a shorter extension straightaway, setting up a fiscal showdown in December that few in his party are looking forward to.

The arrangement was limited in scope and represents a minor victory, at best, for Democrats. But Trump’s supposed apostasy provided a convenient excuse for Republicans to loudly denounce their unhinged president, separating themselves from a man they think gives conservatism a bad name. Their protestations also colored the way the deal was covered in the mainstream press — as some sort of tectonic shift instead of the 1.2 tremor on the political Richter scale it really was.

This gap between the magnitude of the events and the perception of them was evident in media coverage over the weekend. On Saturday, the New York Times published an article, pegged to the deal, with the headline: “Bound to No Party, Trump Upends 150 Years of Two-Party Rule.”

“Although elected as a Republican last year,” Peter Baker writes, “Mr. Trump has shown in the nearly eight months in office that he is, in many ways, the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the current two-party system around the time of the Civil War.” Baker notes that Trump originally thought of running for president on the Reform Party ticket in 2000, cites Trump’s consistent attacks against fellow Republicans like Mitch McConnell as proof of his refusal to be boxed in by party, and even speculates that Trump will ditch the GOP when he runs for reelection.

The label “independent” implies that a political figure isn’t bound to the dogma of one of the two major parties — and there is very little evidence that this is true for Trump. He did once hold far more liberal views than he does now, and he has been relentless in attacking his own party. But none of that changes the fact that the president has seemed eager to govern as an extreme right-wing ideologue on almost every issue. The notion, popular during the campaign, that Trump would fuse nativist impulses with big-government largesse has fizzled; instead, he has thrown his weight behind hugely regressive tax cuts and massive cuts to Medicaid and abandoned his plan to fix the nation’s infrastructure. (He has, of course, stuck with the hard line on immigration, the one area where he has bucked traditional Republican orthodoxy.)

Another problem with the thesis is that attacking “Establishment” Republicans like McConnell or Paul Ryan hardly counts as aberrant behavior for a bomb-throwing GOPer these days — that kind of behavior has been firmly part of the culture of the party since at least the tea-party wave of 2010. If Donald Trump isn’t really a Republican, what about Ted Cruz or the members of the House Freedom Caucus?

The article quotes Ben Domenech, editor of the Federalist, who says Republicans should not think of Trump as their party leader. But the idea that Trump is some sort of anomalous fake Republican is wishful thinking by Domenech. The GOP base still largely embraces the president, and sides with him, not tut-tutting party functionaries, on his most divisive ideas. The appearance of political independence on Trump’s part is mostly a function of a fractured and dysfunctional party.

Axios’s Mike Allen also seemed ready to accept the idea that Trump’s deal with Democrats marked an epochal shift in the direction of independence. In an item headlined “Why Trump Hopes the New Trump Sticks,” Allen wrote:

A Trump adviser says that after a tumultuous seven months in office, it had finally dawned on the president: “People really f@&@ing hate me.” For someone who has spent his life lapping up adulation, however fake, it was a harsh realization. This is a man with an especially acute need for affirmation.

The question of why Trump would arrive at this realization now, as opposed to any point over the last several years (or decades) goes unanswered.

It’s tempting, as always, to believe that Trump has finally had his come-to-Jesus moment and realized the error of his divisive ways. But the truism that Trump is governed by the need to be loved is belied by the fact that almost everything he says and does is profoundly unpopular. But Trump didn’t win in 2016 by pandering to the average American; he won by tailoring a message for tens of millions of aggrieved white people. And there’s been no real sign since his presidency began, one day’s worth of bipartisanship notwithstanding, that he’s uncomfortable with maintaining that approach going forward.

(Axios also reported over the weekend that Trump will meet with black Republican senator Tim Scott in what could be a “racial reset” after the president’s botched responses to the violence in Charlottesville. It notes that “the moment could be fleeting or consequential, depending on whether Trump realizes that, at 71, he has a lot of catching up to do.” A wild guess: It will be fleeting.)

Almost eight months into his decidedly abnormal presidency, there remains a persistent and surprisingly widespread impulse among political journalists to transmogrify Trump into a traditional president, one who makes decisions based on long-term strategy, one not governed by pure id — a president who has something in common with men who came before him. (Perhaps there’s something comforting in that?)

This impulse animated the never-fulfilled expectation that Trump would “pivot” to a more traditional presidential pose during the 2016 election. It showed up again when Trump kind of, sort of eschewed his nuttier side during Hurricane Harvey. And it has appeared once more, now that Trump has made a very slight gesture toward bipartisanship.

Ken Tremendous ✔ @KenTremendous

In spirit, Pennywise isn't a murderer or a clown. He's a free-spirited entertainer who has his own way of relating to children. https://twitter.com/costareports/status/906540818575630336 …

Yet just three weeks ago, Trump was touting the merits of white supremacists. His dark, Manichaean view of the world is not going to change; nor will his impulsiveness, impetuousness, or any of the other characteristics that make him so ill-suited to be president. Waiting for him to transform into some semblance of a normal human being, much less a president governed by anything beyond impulse, will be a long wait indeed.

Meanwhile, Trump connected Hurricane Irma to the apparently urgent need for “tax reform” — one of the 15 things he does every day that would have counted as scandalous for any other president, but which the country has become so inured to that it barely makes a ripple.