From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files: It is well known that corporations buy tax loopholes from congress and presidents. The practice is called free speech and/or freedom of assembly to petition government. I call it political and corporate corruption. There is even tax break for corporations that break laws and have to pay to settle lawsuits. Truthout writes about a current example:
Though Fox News reached an agreement with Dominion Voting Systems earlier this year to pay one of the largest media settlements in history over the outlet’s repeated lies regarding the 2020 election, the corporation may be able to soften the blow — to the tune of a $200 million tax break, reporters found earlier this year. Now, one Senate Democrat is trying to change that.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) filed a bill on Wednesday that would specifically bar large corporations from being able to take an income tax deduction from certain defamation payments. The legislation is seemingly aimed directly at barring Fox from being able to diminish the impact of its settlement payment over actions that likely had a huge impact on eroding American democracy.
The article points out that Faux can deduct its $787 million settlement with Dominion due to a tax law that allows taxpayers to write off “ordinary and necessary” business expenses. I guess defamation is ordinary and necessary, which in this case it actually was.
However as we all know, the chance of that bill passing in congress is about 0%. Radicalized Republicans in congress are not just arrogant brass knuckles capitalists, they are deeply corrupt (and deeply authoritarian, and incredibly mendacious, and etc.).
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A NYT opinion by a Stanford student, Theo Baker (a reporter for the Stanford student newspaper), describes data manipulation in several important research papers that Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne was the principle author of. The scandal was broken by Baker based on an allegation in an obscure science site that data had been fabricated in some of the Tessier-Lavigne papers. He won a George Polk Award for investigating the allegations of manipulated experimental data in the science papers. Baker writes:
There are many rabbit holes on the internet not worth going down. But a comment on an online science forum called PubPeer convinced me something might be at the bottom of this one. “This highly cited Science paper is riddled with problematic blot images,” it said. That anonymous 2015 observation helped spark a chain of events that led Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, to announce his resignation this month.Dr. Tessier-Lavigne made the announcement after a university investigation found that as a neuroscientist and biotechnology executive, he had fostered an environment that led to “unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices” across labs at multiple institutions. Stanford opened the investigation in response to reporting I published last autumn in The Stanford Daily, taking a closer look at scientific papers he published from 1999 to 2012.In retrospect, much of the data manipulation is obvious. Although the report concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was unaware at the time of the manipulation that occurred in his labs, in papers on which he served as a principal author, images had been improperly copied and pasted or spliced; results had been duplicated and passed off as separate experiments; and in some instances — in which the report found an intention to hide the manipulation — panels had been stretched, flipped and doctored in ways that altered the published experimental data. All of this happened before he became Stanford’s president. Why, then, didn’t it come out sooner?The answer is that people weren’t looking.
Same data presented twice in one paper, but claimed
to come from two different experiments
Same data presented twice in one paper
That is science fraud. It might not look like much, but this was an attack on integrity in science.
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An evangelical Christian comments on the dangers of authoritarian Christian nationalism in an interview the NYT published as an opinion piece:
There are few evangelical Christians who have gotten as much media coverage or criticism in the last decade as Russell Moore. He previously served as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, and became a prominent evangelical voice opposing a Trump presidency. Moore is currently the editor in chief of Christianity Today, which The Times’s Jane Coaston called “arguably the most influential Christian publication” in the United States. I asked Moore if he would speak to me about the evangelical movement and his new book, “Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” This interview has been edited and condensed.Interviewer: Your book delves into Christian nationalism as a component of the evangelical movement. How would you define Christian nationalism? And how has it affected evangelicalism in the United States?
Moore: Christian nationalism is the use of Christian symbols or teachings in order to prop up a nation-state or an ethnic identity. It’s dangerous for the nation because it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. Christian nationalism takes a political claim and seeks to make it ultimate. It says: If a person disagrees with me, that person is disagreeing with God. No democratic nation can survive that, which is why the founders of this country built in all kinds of protections from it.
Christian nationalism is also dangerous for the witness of the church, because Christian nationalism is fundamentally, at its core, anti-evangelical. If what the Gospel means is for people to come before God, person by person, not nation by nation or village by village or tribe by tribe, then Christian nationalism is heretical.
It’s been hard for me to evaluate how widespread this is. Anecdotally, I know a lot of Christians, including a lot of evangelicals, and they would not be considered Christian nationalists. So I often wonder: Is this fringe?
It is affecting almost every sector of American Christianity in varying ways. It’s similar to the Prosperity Gospel of the last generation. Most American Christians wouldn’t identify themselves as Prosperity Gospel adherents. Yet many of them were adopting key pieces of that understanding of the world.
Studies have shown the way that Christian language is being used in Europe and in other places to prop up populist authoritarian movements. You can see this in the way that survey data show how white evangelicals in America are becoming much friendlier to outright authoritarianism — as seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection. I don’t think that it is merely fringe at all. Christian nationalism assumes outward conformity enforced by social or political power. It transforms the way that we see reality with the assumption that the really important things are political and cultural, as opposed to personal and spiritual and theological.We can’t talk about the rise of Christian nationalism without bringing up Donald Trump. You said that he was morally unfit to be president and received intense backlash — even from Trump himself. Were you surprised by the severe criticism from certain Christians for your denunciation of Trump?
It didn’t surprise me that there would be overwhelming buy-in once Trump became the Republican nominee. One of the things I was worried about is that people would say: I’m not supporting him, I’m just voting for him because I think the alternative is worse. I feared, at the time, that the way that American politics works right now is inherently totalizing .... Trump has transformed evangelicalism far more than evangelism has influenced Trump.
I was surprised by the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape. When the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, I was saying to people around me: “Don’t say ‘I told you so.’ We need to have empathy for Trump-supporting evangelicals who are really hurting at this revelation.” But what ended up happening is that white evangelicals made peace with “Access Hollywood,” if anything, quicker than the rest of America did.
I received a castigating email from a sweet Christian lady who had taught me Sunday school when I was a kid. And none of it argued: “You’re wrong about Trump’s moral character.” The argument was: “Get real. This is what we have to have in order to fight the enemy.” That was surprising to me. And disorienting.
That speaks for itself. Christian nationalism is deeply anti-democratic (compromise is treason to God), staunchly authoritarian and aggressive. Opponents of DJT are the enemy that needs to be fought.
Q: Who is the enemy here, intolerant authoritarian Christian nationalism or pluralist secular democracy?
Hint - it's a trick question: From the intolerant authoritarian Christian nationalist point of view pluralist secular democracy is the enemy, but from the pluralist secular democracy point of view intolerant authoritarian Christian nationalism is the enemy. And, like it or not, there's just no way around it.
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