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The Retire Advocate < Back to Table of Contents August 2025 GENIUSes at Work: Crypto Buys the Government Michael Righi The Big Beautiful Bill has been voted into law. Now we have the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, passed by the Senate, with the help of 18 Democrats. If this is genius, what are the idiots up to? Other than thinking up ridiculous names, that is. What is a “stablecoin”? It is a type of cryptocurrency. Crypto coins or tokens are privately created assets based on computer blockchain technologies (don’t ask). Boosters want them to be actual money to buy and sell stuff, but they aren’t. They are pure speculation, created out of thin air. Crypto is great for money launderers, illegal arms traders, drug dealers and anyone engaged in fraud or bribery, since it is anonymous, with no traceable bank account. It has no use for anyone with a bank card or a payment app. Yes, those have fees that go to tech firms or bloated banks, but they are a lot more efficient than trading crypto, which takes huge amounts of computer power, and uses outsized amounts of fuel and water. Cryptocurrencies are great for those companies that issue them and rake in fees from trading. Unregulated predatory operators pump up the value of their coins and then sell, leaving smaller purchasers with the losses. Crypto also works well for corrupt politicians like Trump. Used to be you had to furtively hand a bag of cash to the politician you needed a favor from. Now, Trump and family have issued a whole array of crypto assets that tycoons buy, pump up their value, then announce on X that they have put $100,000 into $TRUMP. (That’s an actual case, not a hypothetical. In return, the SEC pauses your fraud case.) They’re Stable, Right? But back to stablecoins. Stablecoins are supposedly backed up one-to-one by liquid dollar assets like government bonds. So they are stable and safe, right? And then traditional financial institutions like banks and insurance companies can lend money to them, and pools of pension and government funds can “invest” in them. Which gives the crypto industry legitimacy. To achieve that legitimacy, crypto super PACs put hundreds of millions into the 2024 election, nearly half of all corporate spending for political candidates that year. They defeated crypto skeptics and elected boosters. They brought in the Trump crime family. They bought the government. The result? The GENIUS Act. Which very lightly “regulates” stablecoin- issuing companies. It will allow banks to issue coins, and lend money to firms who do. It requires minimal reporting of reserve assets of stablecoin issuers, with weak oversight. What could go wrong? Does anyone remember the 2008 financial crisis? The GENIUS Act removes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from regulating or bringing fraud charges. It basically allows private issuers to create their own money, without any customer protections, such as deposit insurance. Maybe it is OK to allow speculative trading in crypto, although many unaware folks are being fleeced of their money. But if that fraud and manipulation finds its way into the banking system, it threatens a financial crisis that affects all of us. And then the GENIUS Act will ensure that crypto speculators get bailed out by the government. Socialism for the rich. Supporting an industry whose main contribution to the economy is to scam people. Monopoly Money The GENIUS Act would also allow big tech firms – Apple, Meta, X – to issue their own stablecoins/currency. Musk, Zuckerberg, and others would have their own private currencies, locking you into their platforms and having access to your data. The rich get richer, and more powerful and in control. We have had laws for 200 years separating commerce and finance; this begins to break that separation down. The huge surge in inequality at the very top (the 0.1%) we have experienced since the 1980’s has occurred in a couple of waves. The first was the rise of hedge funds and private equity. These are predators who buy and sell and break up productive firms, producing nothing themselves but accumulating wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This has come at the expense of jobs and wages, and you would think there’s a limit. But now, notice that private equity firms have moved hard into health care, housing, and even kids’ sports leagues. The second wave of tycoons is our tech overlords, who already control our data and our attention. Now they want a piece of crypto profits as well. This is privatization run amok: from private schools and health care and privately held firms, and now to private weather forecasts and private currencies like crypto. It’s clear who benefits from all this privatization; it’s where our greedy billionaires come from. Michael Righi is a retired economics professor and a member of the Retiree Advocate editorial board. < Back to Table of Contents

Documents and Presentations on the Privatization of Medicare and Documented Issues with Medicare Advantage and AOC Reach Resources: Don’t Privatize Medicare, Level the playing Field Below are additional resources to help you better understand the issue and hopefully join PSARA in taking action to protect Medicare. PS ARA Webinars/Presentations: Is Medicare Advantage Driving Your Providers to Despair? And Why You Should Care . Insurance companies may be forcing your doctor into a crises of conscience, learn more through this Webinar. "Fear & Loathing on the Way to Levelingthe Playing Field” Five National experts discuss PSARA’s strategy to Level the Medicare Playing field. " Is Medicare Advantage Preying on People of Color ” PSARA’s December 4, 2023 Webinar Featuring Dr. Claudia Fegan " Stop Raiding Medicare" Rally Aug 1, 2023 Highlights video "Pirates of the Medicar ibbean ” Slides presented by PSARA members Rick Timmons and Ellen Menshew "Pulling back the Curtain: Lies, Fraud, and Naked Profiteering in Medicare Privatization Schemes. ” Presented by Wendell Potter, Mr. Potter was previously an executive in the healthcare industry. He brings a unique perspective to the overall healthcare debate and the attempted privatization of Medicare. Mr. Potter is currently the President of the Center for Health and Democracy and also a Co-founder of Business Leaders for Health Care Transformation. Dr. Ed Weisbart is the Chair of the Missouri Physicians for a National Health Program. Dr. Weisbart has done three Webinars for PSARA: "Defending Medicare from ACO Reach" " Don’t Let Naked Profiteering Destroy Our Medicare" "We Can Reclaim Medicare From Greedy Profiteers ” presented September 13, 2023 Testimonials /Letters , personal stories and letters concerning Medicare Advantage delay and denial of care: PSARA member's letter to the Senate Finance Committee (Statementsfortherecord@finance.senate.gov ) Gary: Gary had emergency brain surgery. His doctors had a recovery plan. That plan never happened. Watch the video to learn why. Jacob: Too many families, like Jacob’s, are suffering from the predatory management tactics of Medicare Advantage insurers. PSARA is proud to have the support from the Be A Hero campaign to share these personal stories. We must never stop fighting to end the profiteering from these corporate predators. Please join us in this fight to “LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD”. Protect and expand Medicare! Rick Timmons: PSARA member Rick Timmons talks about how a slow approval process and delay in being able to schedule a surgery put his life at risk and significantly complicated his recovery from cancer. More information from other organizations: National Public Radio (NPR): Older Americans say they feel trapped in Medicare Advantage plans Bloomberg Law: UnitedHealthcare Accused of AI Use to Wrongfully Deny Claims (1) “UnitedHealth pushed employees to follow an algorithm to cut off Medicare patients’ rehab care” by Casey Ross and Bob Herman (Nov. 14, 2023). Link is a summary by Center for Medicare Advocacy "Level the Playing Field Between Medicare and Medicare Advantage ” talking points "2023 Convention of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Resolutions #2023.01” Washington State Labor Council passed this resolution on July 20, 2023. The resolution calls out the existential threat to Medicare as a public program that is coming from the privatized Medicare Advantage plans and ACO REACH – a threat that has intensified under the Biden Administration. The resolution calls for leveling the playing field between Medicare Advantage and regular Medicare as well as stopping the overpayments to Medicare Advantage companies and recouping the overpayments already made due to fraud by Medicare Advantage insurance companies. This is an excellent resolution for groups to adopt to communicate to their members and representatives their position on this issue. "Hospitals dropping Medicare Advantage because of Concerns with patient care " 8/16/23 by Diane Archer, Just Care "Grand Theft Medicare " 8/21/22 by Dick Conoboy, NW Citizen "The Stealth Plan to Privatize Medicare for All ", 8/24/22 by Rick Staggenborg, Counterpunch Physicians for a National Health Program resources on DCE/ACO REACH: https://pnhp.org/direct-contracting-entities-handing-traditional-medicare-to-wall-street/ 6/7/18: Kip Sullivan article on CMS evaluation of several "medical home" ACO programs: The verdict is in: All three of CMS’s “medical home” demonstrations have failed – The Health Care Blog 1/16/22: For background on the origins of the ACO REACH program, here's a short article on the key Medicare official who for years has promoted corporate interests in federal health policy. 2/24/22: American Journal of Managed Care https://www.ajmc.com/view/cms-redesigns-direct-contracting-into-an-equity-focused-aco-model 5/19/22: Biden’s Little-Publicized Medicare Privatization Scheme Is Starting To Raise Alarm Bells https://portside.org/2022-05-19/bidens-little-publicized-medicare-privatization-scheme-starting-raise-alarm-bells An excellent webinar that addresses the lack of health equity in the ACO REACH proposal. DCEs & REACH: Health Equity or Private Equity? - YouTube Robby Stern, President of the PSARA Education Fund, was interviewed by Richard Eskow about ACO REACH and the privatization of traditional Medicare. Watch the interview on YouTube by clicking this link: https://youtu.be/6FKFsxRs-Rw Robby Stern was interviewed on Twitter Spaces on Jan. 27 about the Medicare Anti Privatization Campaign. Link here: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1jMKgLrlaOjGL?s=20l Webinar with Rep.Pramila Jayapal and members of PSARA on ACO Reach and privatization of Medicare. Link HERE Read and Download PSARA’s Primer on Leveling the Playing Field

The Retire Advocate < Back to Table of Contents February 2026 Who Owns Your Care Choices? Katie Harris George Orwell’s 1984 envisioned that Big Brother, our government, would be watching us and managing our lives by that year. We didn’t get there in 1984, but, that same year, two companies in the private sector were laying the groundwork to do just that. Forty years later, these companies are reaping the fruits of their vision and controlling significant aspects of our lives and health. In 1985, I happened upon a 1984 annual report for National Medical Enterprises (NME). It was a shocker. The company trumpeted a growth model called vertical integration. NME intended to buy companies, procuring all goods and services a hospital needed. They would source goods and services from companies they owned, at prices they set. They bought psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, and acute care centers. They bought companies providing diagnostic equipment, hospital beds, lifts, wheelchairs, and linens. 1984 was also the year that NME moved into health plans, becoming the second largest investor-owned health care company. This enabled NME to control patients’ access to benefits and fees for medical insurance, as well as the price of everything the patients might need. But NME became mired in scandal. In the 1990s, it had to sell its specialty hospitals after its psychiatric hospitals committed fraud. It then rebranded as Tenet Healthcare, today capitalized at almost $17 billion, with assets of $8.3 billion. But in this universe, $8.3 billion is small potatoes. Also in 1984, a relatively small company called United Health-care went public. Fast forward forty years. In 2025, United Health Group’s (UHG’s) revenues are $435 billion, up 10.48% over 2024. It ranks #3 on the Fortune 500 list of U.S. companies. UHG has swallowed up more than 2,700 companies. It is Orwellian and very Big Brother. UHG has diversified its holdings to include whether we are eligible for care, what care we’ll receive, where we’ll obtain it, how much we’ll be charged, what information we’ll receive about our care, and how our data will be shared. And this strategic approach has landed UHG on Forbes’ List of Most Admired Companies for fifteen consecutive years. Our data is a marketable asset for UHG. Wendell Potter, whose Sunlight Report on United Health Group analyzes UHG’s acquisitions, reports, “The company increasingly even controls much of the information we have available to us online about medical care and health insurance. One of its transactions created RVO Health, which is now a massive, privately held digital media and marketing company that reaches more than 300 million people every month, and manages more than 100 news and information sites.” Potter also notes that information sources appearing to be independent often are not; for example, UHG operates Health-markets, an online site that appears to provide unbiased insurance information, despite its inherent conflict of interest. Vertical integration is hitting specialized caregiving industries, too. For example, Redwood Family Care Network (RFCN) provides residential programs, community homes, specialized home care, community supports, day programs, employment supports, and behavioral services. On a given day, a client might proceed from a community home to a day program, and then receive therapies and job coaching, all under RFCN’s umbrella, while appearing to receive services from discreet providers. The rapid pace of consolidation affects service quality, as well as the bottom line. Since 2020, my family has experienced issues three times. My mother required caregiving in New York. A small agency provided aides, supervision, and medical coordination. Then the company was bought out. Mom’s care went sideways. A social worker, assigned to oversee her care, worked for a different agency under the same umbrella. My mother’s caregiving agency didn’t supervise the social worker, and the social worker wasn’t supervising Mom’s aides. My daughter, who has disabilities, is in Supported Living, a DSHS program. Her service provider was bought out by a company offering diversified caregiving services. Staff turnover was astonishing. My daughter’s home had five managers in three months. She missed appointments. Her household supplies disappeared at an impressive rate, and the promised inventory system wasn’t implemented. I transferred my daughter’s care to another provider. Within weeks, her new provider was bought out by yet another company for $835 million. The purchasing company added 14,000 to its client base of 50,000 in 40 states. The company tells us that nothing will change. But, actually, my experience is that it just takes the purchaser a while to implement changes. As for now? I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Please join me for a deeper look at the impacts of vertical integration in health and caregiving industries in upcoming issues of The Advocate. If you have examples of your own that you’d like to share, please send them to organizer@psara.org and put Vertical Integration in the subject line. Katie Harris is the Retiree Advocate's copy editor and a member of the Retiree Advocate Editorial Board. < Back to Table of Contents

Seattle’s 42nd Annual MLK Celebration: We Rise Against Project 2025 Seattle’s MLK Jr. Organizing Coalition invites PSARA members to Seattle’s 42nd Annual MLK Day Celebration. The election underscores the need to mobilize against broad and sustained assaults on human and civil rights under the incoming administration, as outlined in Project 2025. We expect a robust turnout for the Career and Opportunity Fair, Community Workshop Series, rally, and march on January 20, and the community discussions taking place in the preceding week. The day begins with the MLK Career and Opportunity Fair, where job seekers take steps toward exciting career opportunities and meaningful connections. Over 50 vendors include companies ready to hire, apprenticeship programs, and organizations focused on career exploration. Attendees can polish their resumes with coaching, attend career workshops, or simply explore opportunities. We’re creating an inclusive, welcoming space with multilingual support and accommodations for all attendees, plus snacks and hospitality. The Fair kicks off at 8 a.m. on January 20 at Garfield High School. We’ll build pathways to success while honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy of equity and economic justice. This year’s MLK Community Workshop Series builds bridges between movements and communities to build solidarity and resist threats to democracy and justice. We’ll offer 15 workshops on the morning of MLK Day (January 20 from 9:15 - 10:40 a.m.) at Garfield High School. We’ll also host standalone workshops on Thursday, January 16 and Saturday, January 18 to support deeper presentations and community discussions on critical topics. Workshop information will be posted on the MLK Coalition website. Please look for detailed information on the site starting in early January, and be sure to check back for any changes and additions. A printed workshop brochure will be available on site at Garfield. Our Monday workshops will focus on strategies and resources for effective movement building. Among the offerings are: Choosing Your Cause Well-Being for Activists Support for Immigrant Justice While the Movement Is Under Threat Keeping Us Safe in Seattle’s Surveillance City Creating Community-Centered Housing and Economic Systems Climate Justice Panel: People of Color on the Frontlines Strategies for Countering Right-Wing Movements Building Solidarity in Opposition to Project 2025 Healing Together: A Community Event for Violence Prevention Cultural Reconnection: Return to the African Homeland Building Support for African American Reparations Reclaiming Education: BIPOC Youth Leading the Way to Transformation For the past two years, we’ve piloted more extended community discussions on urgent community issues in the week preceding MLK Day. This year, we’ll hold two. JR to 25 : We Cannot Turn Back centers on the state’s troubling juvenile rehabilitation plan, including new facility construction, which doesn’t address the paucity of therapeutic services and staff’s inability to control violence at its facilities. Sponsored by Team Child and Kids Are Kids, the event begins at 5:30 with a community meal followed by discussion from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. The event takes place at Washington Hall on Thursday, January 16. A community discussion on youth gun violence will be held on Saturday, January 18 from 1 - 3 p.m. at the Northwest African American Museum. Please join community leaders, activists, and families as we learn about causes and dynamics of youth gun violence, who perpetrates it, how we are affected by it, and strategies to mobilize against it. The event will be followed by a community meal at 3 p.m. and a program organized by the MLK Coalition’s Young Leaders program at 4 p.m. Following the Monday morning workshops, the rally will begin at 11 a.m. in the Garfield gym. Our focus this year will be on Project 2025 and youth gun violence. We will honor the legacy of the late Dr. Maxine Mimms, the visionary founder of the Evergreen State College’s Tacoma campus. The Reverend Dr. Kelle Brown will be among our speakers. The march will leave Garfield High School at 12:30 p.m. Please dress warmly and come with your signs, banners, bullhorns, and whatever else you need to make your presence visible and powerful. Please check the MLK Coalition website for final details on transportation, food, and other details. This is the time to stand in solidarity for our rights! Let’s flex our political muscle. Please join us, and bring 10 of your friends and allies.

In the Advocate May 2025: We Remember Iris Rosechild Editor's Note: The Advocate mourns the passing of our friend and colleague Iris Rosechild. Iris volunteered as a proofreader for the Advocate for many years, and her way with words made the Advocate a better publication. She always kept us laughing and was a pleasure to work with. We'd like to share a remembrance of Iris by her friend Carla. Iris Rosechild, born Iris Chaya Golub in Brooklyn, New York, Oct. 27, 1943, died at the age of 81 in Seattle in the hospital, nine days after a fall in her apartment. Her father, Barry Golub, came from Russia when he was 11 to join his father here in America. He was an interior house painter, and his father was a tailor. Her mother, Rose Golub, was a housewife and the first generation from Austria. Rose and Barry spoke Yiddish to each other and were Socialists. Iris was the youngest of six daughters. Her Jewish identity was very important to her. Iris left home at 17 to be a bohemian with her boyfriend in Greenwich Village. Her favorite place was the Caricatura coffee house. She moved to the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco in the 60’s, became a flower child, and protested the Vietnam War. Eventually she moved to Seattle to attend the University of Washington and graduated with a BA in Women’s Studies. She was the first coordinator of the Feminist Therapy Referral Service, which was started by her partner, Cameron Justam, in 1976. Before that she was a counselor at the YWCA. Iris had a small business selling fashionable hats called Mad about Hats in the Bon Marché in downtown Seattle. She also sold socks in a business called Café Socks in Pike Place Market and in the former Broadway Market on Capitol Hill. She returned to New York to take care of her father and her sister who were dying. She earned a Master’s in Grief Counseling at Pace University. She got a job as a counselor in New York helping the homeless find permanent housing. She loved her job but quit to return to Seattle and Cameron. She did proofreading since 2018 for the Retiree Advocate, where her keen sense of the rhythm of words was appreciated. This was just one of her many volunteer commitments. She volunteered for the Seattle International Film Festival, the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, as well as Seattle Town Hall. She and Cameron have been in a lesbian film group for five years. She had an inimitable sense of style in everything she did. She had a signature sense of humor. She made great chicken soup. She was a reader and big library user. She was warm and caring for other human beings. She was a big animal lover. Her most recent pet, Cozmo, was a three-legged orange female cat who Iris doted on. Iris is survived by two sisters, Dorian and Ruth, four nieces, one nephew, and her partner of 49 years, Cameron. BACK TO THE ADVOCATE

The Retire Advocate < Back to Table of Contents January 2026 Inside CMS’s Troubling WISeR Vendor List and the Power It Hands to Private Contractors By Seth Glickman, MD, and Rachel Madley, PhD CMS’s chosen WISeR vendors include firms tied to insurer-backed venture funds, former Big Insurance executives and private equity. (Reprinted from HEALTH CARE un-covered) Earlier this year, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) announced plans to begin the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model in 2026. The model will retain private companies currently using AI to process prior authorizations in the private Medicare Advantage (MA) program to use those processes in the traditional Medicare (TM) program on services that will newly require prior authorization or pre-payment review. As we previously published in HEALTH CARE un-covered , the WISeR model is more than just some small administrative update. The new model dramatically shifts how traditional Medicare patients will access care. Under this demonstration program, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will let private, for-profit contractors and their AI tools decide whether seniors get treatments their doctors recommend – and those contractors will be paid based on how much care they deny. After months of speculation and anticipation, CMS this week announced the private companies selected to participate in the model beginning January 1, 2026. The six companies selected are Cohere Health, Inc., Genzeon Corporation, Humata Health, Inc., Innovaccer Inc., Virtix Health LLC, and Zyter Inc.. Those six companies now have the ability to decide if seniors or people with disabilities in traditional Medicare get the care recommended by their doctors for 17 medical procedures that previously did not require prior authorization. This is a lot of trust to put in private companies, so we dug more into the ones chosen by CMMI to participate in the model. We previously described how insurers and affiliated venture capital firms use their influence and leverage to “self- deal," in effect creating opportunities to boost their profits. The WISeR program and the participants selected appear to follow the same playbook. Most of the companies CMS selected are backed by insurer-linked venture funds or staffed by former insurance industry executives, including from Elevance, Optum, Kaiser, Highmark, and HCSC. For example, Humata Health lists four venture capital firms backed by insurance companies as key investors: Blue Venture Fund (backed by Blue Cross Blue Shield), Optum Ventures (backed by UnitedHealth Group), LRV Health (backed by over 30 health systems and insurers), and Highmark Ventures (backed by Blue Cross Blue Shield insurer Highmark Health). These concerning ties are replicated in other model participants including Cohere Health, which is funded through venture capital and contract ties to Humana, and Innovaccer, which is funded by Kaiser Permanente and Banner. Several already operate in Medicare Advantage, in which private insurers routinely use prior authorization to delay or deny coverage for needed care. Between the lines: WISeR effectively imports the same harmful machinery into traditional Medicare for the first time in the program’s history. Amplifying this concern is that several are pure technology companies without any medical oversight or leadership. This raises serious questions about how they will comply with state and federal regulations requiring licensed clinical personnel to oversee utilization decisions (for good reason). Precious little is known about other participants. The website of one of the participants, Virtix Health, doesn’t disclose any executives or board members. It doesn’t even list a physical address or phone number, and the last time the company uploaded a news story was in 2021. These are hardly things that inspire the public’s confidence about its legitimacy, let alone entrusting it to oversee the care of Medicare beneficiaries. What is known about Virtix Health is that it offers risk adjustment coding services, such as chart reviews, to MA plans. These chart reviews are used by MA insurers to add medical codes to an enrollee’s chart, making them appear sicker than they are in order to receive a higher payment from the government. Overpayments, driven largely by coding intensity, means MA plans will be paid $84 billion more than traditional Medicare in 2025; cumulative overpayments between 2025-2034 could reach $1.2 trillion. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz pledged in his confirmation hearing to go after excessive coding by insurers, which is at odds with his agency giving a contract for the WISeR model to a company that enables this practice as its main line of business. All this begs the question: How were these companies chosen? It’s an important one, especially given the strong ties between current and past leadership at CMMI and the health insurance and venture capital industries that will profit from this program. We have previously called for the disclosure of financial conflicts of interest in the selection of vendors by health insurers (and in this case CMS, which controls billions of our tax dollars), including any underlying financial relationships with the vendor and/or related investors. CMMI has not disclosed whether or how they managed these potential conflicts of interest in the selection process. The American public deserves to know. A coalition of lawmakers have introduced the Seniors Deserve SMARTER Care Act to stop WISeR before it launches. The lawmakers warn that the model “creates a dangerous incentive to put profits ahead of patients’ health” — and they’re right. At the same time, public confidence in insurers’ use of AI has cratered amid lawsuits and reports of algorithms overriding physicians’ judgment. Even President Trump has blasted insurers as “BIG,”“BAD,” and “money-sucking.” Yet WISeR hands many of these same corporate players a new federal revenue stream — and unprecedented authority over seniors’ care in traditional Medicare, which has historically been a safe haven from Big Insurance meddling in coverage. But now, with CMS barreling toward a January 2026 launch, we know, for the first time, exactly which companies will have that power. Editor's Note: Virtix Health is the company selected by CMS to determine prior authorization In Washington State. Rachel Madley, PhD, is Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Center for Health & Democracy. She previously worked for Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. She received her PhD from Columbia University and has written for publications including The New York Times. Seth Glickman, MD, is a former insurance and health system senior executive. He now is a researcher and advocate for reform in the health care finance space. < Back to Table of Contents

The Retire Advocate < Back to Table of Contents January 2025 Tariffs Are Not Evil, They Are Just a Tool Michael Righi Trump is “Tariff Man,” right? He appears to love them. Therefore, one would think, tariffs are wrongheaded. But then, what about Biden keeping and extending Trump’s tariffs? And why do several of our national unions support the judicious use of tariffs as part of a pro-worker economic policy? Let’s start at the beginning. A tariff is a tax collected by the government on imports from other countries. The tax is collected from the importer. But who really pays it? Controversy and simplistic claims start here. Does the exporter (from China, say) lower its prices and absorb a loss in profits in order to remain competitive? That is Trump’s assertion – since China is supposedly devastating our economy, along with immigrants and liberal elites, he is planning to punish China with even higher tariffs than the ones he and Biden have already implemented. Another possibility, the position usually taken by mainstream economists, is that, like any tax, the tariff is just passed on by, say, Walmart or whoever the importing corporation is, in the form of higher prices. That would mean consumers pay, not “China.” (We have to be careful here, since some imports are produced overseas by US corporations taking advantage of low wages, not by Chinese firms.) So, it’s complicated. Trump putting an across-the-board tariff on Mexico would likely raise grocery prices, since we import much of our fresh produce from Mexico, and production within the US or elsewhere could not immediately ramp up to replace Mexican avocados, for example. Much like the Washington State sales tax, those price hikes would disproportionally hurt lower-income families, who spend a much bigger percentage of their income on food. A Brief History of Tariffs Targeted tariffs are a different story. The early independent United States raised tariffs against British textiles and manufacturing in order to develop its own industry. A country doesn’t become prosperous for very long by just exporting raw materials and not diversifying into manufacturing. In the post-WWII period, developing countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and then China used tariffs as part of their industrialization strategy. But US corporations, and neoliberal policymakers, used US financial and military power to “negotiate” low tariffs and free trade to give US capital access to markets and the ability to ship jobs to low-wage countries. But now that China produces 35 percent of the world’s manufactured goods, and the US share is down close to 10 percent, things have changed. Neoliberalism has been shown to benefit US corporations and elites and devastate working families. Now the US needs an industrial policy. Carefully targeted tariffs have to be part of that. To be clear, tariffs are only one tool. Industrial policies should include tax incentives and subsidies for research and innovation. The Inflation Reduction and Chips Acts, and infrastructure spending, all under Biden, have done some of that. But we have to do more – you cannot just shovel money and protection to US corporations. They will just raise prices and buy back stock and raise CEO pay and dividends to wealthy stockholders. There have to be targets for investment; goals for carbon reduction; requirements for unionization, wages, and job training; and worker participation in decision making. Yes, the list is long – the time of corporate plundering has been long. Back To Tariff Man None of that is what Trump has in mind, of course. He thinks he can restore US domination through intimidation. Or bluff and threaten and use tariffs as a symbolic “I’m on your side” to divert attention from tax and regulatory cuts. So he is threatening Mexico (and Canada?) with tariffs unless they do something about immigration and fentanyl exports. He threatens Brazil and others for moving away from using the US dollar in foreign transactions. Trump is telling other countries to play ball or get whacked. He is using US workers to support an America First agenda. But he has no intention of supporting unions or limiting the freedom of capital to do what it wants. We need fair trade, not free trade. Smart tariffs would penalize imports of nickel from toxic Indonesian mines, imported BMW’s from the factory that pays Mexican workers $1.50 an hour, and any import that contributes significantly to climate change. Tariffs are a tool that can be used judiciously, as part of an overall strategy to support working-class jobs and wages and training and innovation. But we do not want to buy into America First. We want trade policy that benefits all workers. Michael Righi is a retired economics professor and a member of the Retiree Advocate Editorial Board. < Back to Table of Contents

The Retire Advocate < Back to Table of Contents March 2025 Protecting our Assets and Protecting Our Asses Jeff Johnson "We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks, and dead ideas. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020 Novelist Arundhati Roy likens the Covid pandemic to a portal which allows us the opportunity to make the same mistakes again and again or to envision a new world where we listen to and fight for our better angels. I believe her poignant imagery and prose brilliantly describe the choice we have facing climate change. Scientists have discovered five past catastrophic events in our history where the diversity of life has plummeted - five periods of species extinction. Given the current rate of species decline and cataclysmic climate disasters, some are arguing that we are entering the Sixth Extinction. The question is, are we just doomed? Or can we mitigate climate change? I believe that if we act thoughtfully, focus on the common good, and act with sufficient urgency, we can go through the climate portal fighting for an equitable, just, and sustainable economy and world. “Protecting Our Assets and Protecting Our Asses” is the first in a series of articles makingthe case for divesting from fossil fuel assets and investing in Green New Deal solutions. The Challenge In January 2016, fresh from being part of the US labor delegation to the Paris Climate Accords, I testified before the Washington State House Environmental Committee, saying that “climate change is an existential crisis.” Speaking as president of the Washington State Labor Council,AFL-CIO, I received raised eyebrows by a number of committee members and a few knowing nods from others. Eight years later, the horrifying devastation caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton in the Southeast and the multiple forest fires around Los Angeles should have convinced even the most skeptical among us that human-caused climate change poses an existential threat to life as we know it. Never, in our lifetimes, has the planet issued such a clear and resounding clarion call to do something. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that we are being told to leave fossil fuels in the ground; to make massive investments in non-fossil fuel renewable energy sources; to electrify our transportation infrastructure; to practice large scale regenerative agriculture; to invest in systemic energy retrofits to public and private buildings; and to figure out a global plan to address the accelerating climate refugee crisis. Unprecedented crises require unprecedented changes. We should invest in Green New Deal projects as if there were literally no tomorrow. Because if we don’t, our tomorrows will be pretty bleak. The Benefit Washington State Initiative 1631 was an attempt to go through the climate portal in an equitable, just, and sustainable way. Had 1631 passed, about $1.5 to $2.0 billion of clean energy projects a year would have been decided by a majority vote of environmental justice, labor, tribal, and environmental community leaders. These projects would have created tens of thousands of jobs with high labor standards – project labor agreements, prevailing wages, apprenticeship utilization standards, and local hire provisions. The initiative would also have created a “Just Transition” fund providing wage replacement, health care and pension benefits, and retraining benefits to displaced workers, keeping both workers and communities whole during the transition period. And of course, carbon emissions would have dramatically fallen, and there would have been no dubious carbon offsets to deal with. What Else Initiative 1631 was defeated by over $30 million contributed by the fossil fuel industry to sway the vote, and by not enough people recognizing the threat that climate change poses to our jobs, income, lives, and property. What has become increasingly clear is that climate change is a job killer, a budget killer, and a species killer. Every additional dollar invested in fossil fuels contributes to arable land becoming increasingly scarce; shrinking fresh water reserves; a further loss of jobs, lives, and property; and tens of millions of climate refugees fleeing for their lives. There is a moral imperative to divest from fossil fuels, since every dollar in- vested in fossil fuels accelerates climate disaster. There is an economic and budgetary imperative to divest from fossil fuels, since every dollar spent cleaning up climate disasters is a dollar not spent on education, health care, addressing poverty and inequality, affordable housing, or public safety. This, of course, translates into thousands of lost jobs and a declining quality of life for most of us. There is a fiscal imperative to divest from fossil fuels, since fossil fuels are consistently underperforming other assets. Sometime in the future, fossil fuel assets will become stranded assets. Financial prudence should, if nothing else, dictate replacing underperforming fossil fuel assets with climate-affirming assets with a promise of higher returns. I have hope that in Washington State we are prescient and bold enough to go through the climate portal by investing in the clean energy economy as if there were no tomorrow. We should dramatically reduce our public and private consumption of fossil fuels and divest our state funds and public and private union pension funds from fossil fuels as well. There is still time left to make good choices. How about we save our assets and our asses at the same time. Jeff Johnson is a former President of the Washington State Labor Council and the Co-President of PSARA. < Back to Table of Contents

The Retire Advocate < Back to Table of Contents July 2025 The Long-Term War on Social Security Steve Bauck In last month’s Retiree Advocate, Steve Kofahl described the devastating impact of staffing cuts and rules changes on Social Security beneficiaries. While newly implemented, they are part of long-term attack on Social Security. In 1983 the Cato Institute produced an article titled “Achieving a Leninist Strategy”. It called for “guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it.” The long-term goal was to shift the $1.5 trillion we pay into Social Security each year out of Social Security and into IRA or similar private accounts. Their strategy has had considerable success in reducing confidence in the fiscal soundness of Social Security. An April 2025 poll by the AP and University of Chicago found that 52% of those surveyed were not confident that Social Security benefits would be available when they need them. The Social Security staffing cuts have nothing to do with reducing the federal deficit or debt. Social Security is completely self-funded. Administrative costs, including staffing, come from the contributions we make into Social Security. Currently administrative expenses for Social Security amount to a miniscule 0.9%. Were administrative expenses to be raised back to 1.26% where they have historically been, SSA could have the full staffing it needs to adequately serve the public and it wouldn’t impact the federal budget at all. But the cuts do serve the purpose of eroding confidence in Social Security’s ability to deliver benefits to those who have earned them. They are also likely to cut costs by deterring deserving beneficiaries from accessing their benefits. Similarly, the DOGE theft of Social Security personal data in the name of rooting out fraud has nothing to do with saving billions in fraudulent Social Security payments. DOGE has not been able to demonstrate that there is fraud because it is almost nonexistent in Social Security. A recent Social Security oversight report found an “improper payments” rate of 0.3%. They noted that only a sliver of that low rate is due to fraud. The focus on fraud reinforces the idea that Social Security is an entitlement program giving benefits to undeserving beneficiaries who haven’t earned them and that the federal government isn’t competent to administer the program. The data is also being used as a weapon by declaring people to be dead and thus denying them access to employment, banking and virtually all economic activity in the country. When we first start working, we don’t know when we are going to retire, how long we will be retired or what financial resources we will have. We also do not know if we are going to become disabled and unable to work (only a third of workers have disability insurance be- side Social Security Disability) or if we will die young and leave dependents without a source of income. Social Security is not a retirement savings program, it is an insurance program. Our contributions are pooled to ensure that all covered workers have a monthly benefit in all these situations. Although by law Social Security can never go bankrupt, there is a future funding issue. In 1983 the stagflation of the 1970s caused a funding crisis for Social Security. It was solved primarily by benefit cuts. Projections indicated that the changes would take care of all future needs. What was not anticipated at the time was the theft of wages over the past 40 years. Almost none of the gains in productivity have gone to workers. Currently the Social Security Trust Fund surplus built up to provide for the surge of baby boomer retirement is projected to be depleted in 2033. This is not a new issue. It has been known for over 30 years. There will need to be either a 21% cut in benefits or an increase in revenue. Overwhelming majorities of Americans favor increasing revenue over benefit cuts. The most obvious source of additional revenue is to “Scrap the Cap” and make those who have received most of the gain in productivity pay their fare share. Currently wages above $176,100 are not taxed for Social Security. Had the cap been eliminated 30 years ago when the looming funding issue was first identified it would have solved the entire problem. It would still solve a large portion of the problem and is essential to any realistic plan to avert benefit cuts. We need to counter the assault on Social Security by exposing the lies that have eroded confidence in Social Security’s future and insist that the rich pay their fair share by scrapping the cap. Steve Bauck is Co-Chair of PSARA's Social security Task Force and a member of PSARA's Executive Board. < Back to Table of Contents

The Retire Advocate < Back to Table of Contents July 2026 Mary Metlay Kaufman: Anti-Fascist Hero Tim Wheeler Mary M. Kaufman A few nights ago, I watched the Netflix film, “Nuremberg,” featuring actor Russell Crowe in the role of Nazi Reichsmarshall, Herman Goering, on trial for genocide at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1947-48. This was the first ever war crimes tribunal and established the basic principles of international law that outlaws war crimes and crimes against humanity. It enshrined the “Nuremberg Principle” that if a person engages in acts of genocide, they cannot plead that they were just lowly subordinates “obeying orders” given to them by someone above. Everyone is responsible to stand up against genocide. A name popped into my head as I watched this film: Mary Kaufman. I knew her. I heard Mary Kaufman speak more than once at meetings in New York of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Mary Metlay Kaufman was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1947-1948. She was a founder of the National Lawyers Guild, a lawyer who defended leaders of the CPUSA in the Cold War anti-communist witch hunt trials of the 1950s. Her clients were Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones, and Betty Gannett, all leaders of the CPUSA tried and convicted under the infamous Smith Act, incarcerated for years at Alderson Federal Women’s Penitentiary in remote southeast West Virginia. Mary Kaufman made the arduous trip down to visit her clients at Alderson many times and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn painted a loving portrait of Kaufman, Claudia Jones, Betty Gannett and other inmates in her book, “Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner.” Mary Kaufman defended women and men arrested for protesting the military draft and the war in Vietnam---which included my wife, Joyce, arrested along with about twenty other women in a sit-down protest against the Vietnam War and military conscription in front of the Whitehall Induction Center in New York City. Mary Kaufman was also one of the main organizers of the National Committee to Free Angela Davis and it was in that role I heard her speak. Mary Metlay Kaufman, born poor in Atlanta to Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia, was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, one of six or seven women on the prosecution team led by Brigadier General Telford Taylor and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Kaufman was assigned to prepare the indictment of top executives of the I.G. Farben Chemical Trust, one of the richest corporations in Germany that poured millions of Reichsmarks into Nazi coffers bankrolling Adolph Hitler’s “Thousand-Year-Third-Reich.” Her research helped expose the hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks squeezed from millions of Jewish, Russian, Polish, French, Dutch, Belgian, French, and Italian “prisoners of war” by these Nazi banks and corporations during World War II. It was a system of outright slavery, one of the defining characteristics of Nazi rule along with mass extermination. The task assigned her had a title: “De-Nazification.” The aim was to dismantle the Nazi-infested banks and corporations that put Hitler and the Nazis in power. Later, this principle was embraced by Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman at the Pots-dam Summit. Yet within months of the end of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Cold War anti-communists were plotting the return to power of these very same banks and corporations that squeezed billions in profits from slave labor and extermination in Nazi Germany. Kaufman returned from Nuremberg burning with the conviction that never again must we sit idly by while fascists, funded by billionaire banks and corporations, scheme to seize power in a fascist coup d’etat. She looked around her and saw mean, cunning, lawmakers like Rep Martin Dies instigating their fascist-like witchhunt against the Communist Party, against the labor movement, against the Civil Rights movement and people of color. It smelled to her like a repeat of the Nazi rise to power in Germany. She had just completed an assignment revealing the role of giant German banks and corporations in the rise of fascism. Her life motto was, “FASCISM NEVER AGAIN!” She plunged into the fight-back and gave every ounce of her energy to the defense of these women and men who, like her, were fighting against the fascist threat to our freedoms. Mary Metlay Kaufman was an anti-fascist hero. She should be honored and revered for her lifelong struggle to defend democracy, the rights of workers, the poor and the oppressed. Yet I look around me: Where is the statue dedicated to Mary Metlay Kaufman? And why not books celebrating her life and explaining the principles she stood for? There is mostly silence. Even the film, “Nuremberg,” a worthy effort to expose the fascist danger has not a single line about Mary Kaufman and the case against I.G. Farben, Alfried Krupp of Kruppstahl and the other Nazi billionaires. There is a concerted effort to hide this central truth about fascism enunciated by the great anti-fascist, Georgi Dimitroff, who defined fascism, as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most chauvinist warlike sections of finance capital.” I am now gathering background information for a biography of Mary Metlay Kaufman. Her papers are at the Sophia Smith Archives at Smith College in Northampton, MA, with the papers on the Nuremberg tribunal forwarded to the Lillian Goodman Law Library at Yale. I am reading the transcript of the I.G. Farben trial online at the Harvard Law School Nuremberg Trials Project. It is chilling to read the thousands of pages in this document that exposes just how gruesome the Nazis were in their greed for profits. I am already pondering the title to the book. “MARY METLAY KAUFMAN: ANTI-FASCIST HERO.” Dear reader, if you have information about Mary Metlay Kaufman, please share it with me. It will go in my book. greenpastures164@gmail.com Tim Wheeler is a veteran activist and journalist and a leader in PSARA's Clallam County organizing committee. A version of this article first appeared in People's World. < Back to Table of Contents

The Retire Advocate < Back to Table of Contents January 2026 Building Community Power Jay Stansell (Reprinted by permission of the Jewish Coalition for Immigrant Justice) While we have all become accustomed to the workshop labels "Know Your Rights" and "KYR," what we really need to teach each other is our collective "Community Power." Though mechanics of KYR remain key, when we invoke those rights today we will likely face illegal ICE response. Knowing our rights is no longer enough. We now teach and celebrate the Community Power that gives strength to our rights. Community Power strengthens each of us and invites others into our work, so that not one, but many, allies and at-risk Community Members come out to nonviolently face, expose and slow ICE enforcement; so that not one but many activists come out to video-record ICE, send text alerts to neighborhood watch groups; so that we speak to agents in large numbers but one voice: "We don't answer questions! Don't open your doors, ICE is present! You are not welcome in this space, in this community! We want you out of here!" And Community Power expands and grows the resistance. Each one of you has someone for whom you are a role model and an example of how to respond to the darkness around us all. Each of you has many more people who look to you for advice, knowledge and information about the challenges we face. We can bring these family, friends, and colleagues into the movement, and keep building our communities of care, compassion and resistance. The propaganda from ICE and the government wants us to believe that ICE is at war with the "worst of the worst" in our communities, that their numbers are so massive and armored that resistance is futile, when we, the people who live in these communities, know that they are attacking day-care workers, health care aides, roofers, landscapers, and the families that we see, respect and value every day. We train each other in Community Power, because there is strength, beauty and poetry in Community. We are many -- and growing more each day -- and the cruel and uncaring people in power right now are far fewer in comparison, and far less powerful than they believe. Thank you all for the work that you each do. It is a privilege to be among you in the effort to rebuild a better world. I'll close with some words from long-time activist Cleve Jones who spoke at San Franciso's No Kings rally on October 18, which perfectly capture how I view community: The pronouns I use the most are the ones probably understood the least by those in the White House today. They are WE, US and OURS. We are in this together. And it is up to us to be the leaders we need to save our country and our democracy. [...] What will you do to imagine and launch and sustain the massive campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience and non-cooperation that history informs us is now required? Look to your hearts and find the abiding strength that dwells there. Look to the sky and all the magnificent beauty that surrounds us still. Look to those who stand proudly at your shoulders. Look to your ancestors and claim your future. We are the people. Now is the time. This is the moment. Jay Stansell is a retired immigration attorney who has led Know Your Rights trainings with the Jewish Coalition for Immigrant Justice. < Back to Table of Contents

The Retire Advocate < Back to Table of Contents August 2026 The Tech Tools of ICE Katie Harris A recent report, The Tech Behind ICE: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement and the Threat to Democracy, (Mijente, Just Futures Law , Surveillance Resistance Lab, 2026), provides a sobering look into surveillance tools being developed with vast implications for our privacy and daily lives. But it’s not just that sophisticated tech tools developed for immigration enforcement are making their way into broader use; how they’re deployed rests increasingly in the hands of the very same tech oligarchs who benefit from their purchase by the US Government. This article is the first in a series on tech tools, used by ICE, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and other government entities, that are creeping into broader use to surveil activists, journalists, and communities. I’ll describe which tools are in use, who is surveilling, who is being surveilled, and how this surveillance violates our rights. I’ll look at the revolving door and conflicts of interest between tech company leadership, tech sector leadership, and government leadership. There’s no question about it; the fox is definitely guarding the henhouse. Finally, I’ll explore the strategies needed to build the movement to dislodge the surveillance state. The events of September 11th, 2001 provided the pretext for the surveillance state to take root with minimal oversight or consideration of its implications. Congress passed the USA Patriot Act 45 days later, which provided for increased surveillance of both citizens and non-citizen immigrants. The following year, the Department of Homeland Security was created. Where-as the Patriot Act institutionalized mass surveillance, the Department of Homeland Security created the infrastructure to support surveillance. While some provisions of the Patriot Act have sunsetted, many others remain in force. For example, Section 412, which became part of the amended Immigration and Nationality Act, allows for the indefinite, mandatory detention of non-citizens if the Attorney General believes that “reasonable grounds” exist to believe that the person’s activities endanger national security. Section 411, which broadens grounds for deportation, remains active law. Section 411 also provides cover to label activists as terrorists. Against this background of demonization of immigrants and their allies, high tech companies consolidated their profitability by contracting with the US Government to produce the tools of surveillance. Predictably, they then have sought new markets for them. The technologies that monitor immigrants are being repurposed to surveil activists, journalists, event attendees, and whole communities, all in the name of security. Together, these tools form an increasingly interconnected web of data about our individual movements, habits, relationships, finances, priorities, and plans. That information is gathered without our knowledge or consent, eroding constitutional guardrails. It is used to develop the predictive capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), which are then applied to decide who we are, what we have done, and what we will do in the future, often erroneously. The breadth and depth of this information gathering have accelerated to an un-precedented pace in the second Trump administration. In order to develop counterstrategies, we first need to understand the tools and how they’re deployed. The tools fall into ten categories: Cell phone and computer spying software and devices Cell phone tracking Data analytics Data brokers Automated license plate readers (ALPR) surveillance and driver surveil-lance Drones Detention and deportation tracking Bounty hunters Facial recognition and street-level tracking Web scraping and social media surveillance We’ll start by looking at how ICE uses our cell phones to gather information about us. ICE has numerous contracts for remotely hacking into phones, reading messages, accessing files and listening to conversations. For example, ICE had a contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli company, whose Graphite spyware hacked into the phones of journalists and activists. Another software, GrayKey, unlocks passwords and allows ICE and CBP officers to access photos, deleted files, and location. ICE also has numerous tools to track cell phone location. For example, “stingrays” mimic cell phone towers, gathering location data of every phone in proximity. They can then identify their target. CellHawk monitors activities of specific targets, flagging phones entering a specific area, monitoring how they relate to other phones in the area, and sending texts and emails to enforcement officials. GeoFence collects phone data on who is in a given geographic area through a Fourth Amendment loophole that allows phone and other location data to be purchased by the federal government from commercial data brokers. Originally used to zero in on suspects of unknown identity, its use is now contested on Fourth Amendment grounds, namely that it constitutes unreasonable search and seizure and that an individual has a right to privacy related to location. This case made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6 - 3 to return the case to the lower court for whether the search was reasonable. The case is now pending. TechOps Specialty Vehicles are specially outfitted vehicles that serve as mobile units to analyze that data, conduct surveillance, and coordinate missions. ICE and CBP also use so-called administrative subpoenas to request data from social media companies, internet providers and cell phone carriers. These companies assert that they own our data. However, these requests frequently violate first amendment protections. One concerning example relates to an ICE request to Reddit, Discord, and other platforms; ICE sought data for those who posted online about the surge in ICE enforcement operations in Los Angeles. CBP has even purchased data from makers of software that determines which ads pop up on our devices as we interact with our phones. In next month’s Retiree Advocate , we’ll look at the staggering reach of other tech tools that are growing the surveillance state and abridging the rights of immigrants and their allies. Katie Harris is the Retiree Advocate's copy editor and a member of the Advocate's editorial board. < Back to Table of Contents