What is the probative value of a Trump-released transcript?: Shifting the burden of proof

12:20 PST: Bloomberg cable is reporting that tomorrow the president claims he will release a transcript of his phone call to the Ukraine to dispel any criticisms about Ukrainegate -- a sleaze operation directed to extorting a foreign government into helping him discredit Joe Biden.

In view of our president's proven track record of unprecedented lying, including hiding his conversations with foreign dictators, enemies and governments, one question pops right up: will the transcript our president releases be honest?

It is reasonable to believe that whatever the president releases to the public will be a pack of lies. His supporters will cheer his patriotic honesty and transparency. Skeptics like me will demand to hear the phone call and have it confirmed as unadulterated by honest, unbiased experts, not anti-fact and anti-truth operatives working for our corrupt, treasonous liar president.

The fact checkers have made the breadth and depth of the president's lying abundantly clear. Normally I cite my sources, but the liar's track record is easy to find and clear to everyone with an open mind. It is no longer worth my time to cite the fact checkers, just like it is no longer worth it to cite the evidence that climate science deniers are wrong. Some things are just matters of settled fact.

What??

That is what logically happens when a person dedicated to facts, truths and logic (conscious reason), e.g. me, comes to believe that some things are settled matters of fact as best the human species can settle complex things. The loss of trust can be complete, and in my case it is complete for our corrupt, lying, treasonous president.

The burden of rebuttal proof is on people who disagree. I'm done wasting my time showing closed minds counter evidence here. Closed minds are impervious to facts they don't like. The burden of proof is hereby shifted to closed minds to show their evidence.

For smaller things, I'll still show evidence.

If the closed minds don't like being asked for evidence or refuse to provide it, they can get the hell out of here and don't come back.

Fired for “conduct unbecoming a county employee”

This note of bizarre comes from a New York Times article about a country employee in Georgia being fired for bad conduct. The bad conduct was a male employee joining a gay softball league because doing that, and/or maybe something else constituted “conduct unbecoming a county employee.”

The Supreme Court will take up the case to determine if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 guarantees nationwide protection from workplace discrimination to gay and transgender people. At present, 27  states do not offer any protections. Employers are free to fire all non-heterosexual employees, possibly for no reason other than being non-heterosexual.

Some commentators argue the court will allow the county to fire the employee, while others argue the court will extend civil rights protection to the employee and save his job. The NYT summarizes the two sides legal thinking: “The question for the justices is whether the landmark 1964 law’s prohibition of sex discrimination encompasses discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Lawyers for the gay and transgender plaintiffs say it does. Lawyers for the defendants and the Trump administration, which has filed briefs supporting the employers, say it does not.”

As usual, the facts are contested. The county claims that the employees’s sexual orientation had nothing to do with his firing. Instead, the county claims he misused county funds.

In a federal appeals court court ruling in a companion case with similar facts, the NYT comments: “Writing for the majority, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann concluded that ‘sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination.’” It is possible that the Supreme Court’s decision will turn on acceptance or rejection of this legal rationale. That depends on how much evidence the county has to show misuse of funds. If the evidence is strong, the court could ignore the alleged sex discrimination and rule that the employee was fired for misconduct. That is also a plausible outcome, but that would not affect the companion case where the issue would still be central to a decision.

Does the Rule of Law Apply to Politicians and Elites?

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”
-- Sociologist Brooke Harrington commenting on how many very wealthy people see the rule of law

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”
-- President Richard Nixon commenting on the law and the president

In an interview on the NPR program Hidden Brain, sociologist Brooke Harrington discussed her experience as a financial advisor to extremely wealthy people. Harrington took classes to train herself as a financial advisor. In the interview, she noted that her clients generally viewed both the rule of law and government differently than most people understand it. In general, the financial advisor works to maintain secrecy about the scope and amount of the client’s wealth above all other considerations. They deal with family problems such as cutting family members out of the will and hiding assets from a spouse in advance of a divorce.

Other common tasks are minimizing taxes legally (tax avoidance) and hiding assets to illegally avoid paying taxes (tax evasion). She did not state if or how financial advisors avoid criminal liability for their help in tax evasion. She did not state if she participated in tax evasion. Presumably, some financial advisors show the client how to evade taxes and then turns a blind eye to the client when he (it is usually men) commits the crime.

The rule of law

At 13:20 of the interview, Harrington comments that one of the beliefs that very wealthy people tend to share is that the laws do not apply to them: “National boundaries and laws are all optional. Taxes are optional. All forms of law are essentially optional at that level of wealth.”

Government and society

At 14:05-15:50, she elaborated on attitudes toward paying taxes: “Some of them actually do sound a lot like Donald Trump. When I heard Donald Trump say that not paying taxes made him smart and if he had paid his taxes, they would have been wasted anyway. That was like, ‘Yup, he’s the voice of a lot of very wealthy people around the world.’ .... [Other financial advisors that Harrington spoke to said their clients] are very committed to neoliberal ideology and very committed to the idea that these elite clients are doing the world a favor as wealth creators and their initiatives should be protected against governments and what they regard as theft by taxation by incompetent governments that would just waste any money they collected anyways. They also by the way, regard redistribution of collected tax as immoral because it creates dependency on the part of the poor. .... There is a strong component of ideology here. You see it in the wealth management training program. ..... About a quarter of the people I interviewed really seemed to believe quite unironically in the justice of protecting the wealth of their clients from taxation. They literally view taxation as theft, and they view government as incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. They are deeply suspicious of any sort of welfare state programs because they see it as destroying initiative.”

How the humans deal with the sleazeball

It is somewhat reassuring that only about a quarter of financial advisors feel that way. What do the others feel? At 16:25-18:00, Harrington commented about financial advisors who work for clients who cheat on taxes, wives and employees, i.e., sleazeballs: “Well, some of them don't [sleep well at night]. And I think that is one of the reasons we’re seeing a wave of leaks recently. Some people are so troubled by what they are seeing that they just can’t stomach it any longer and they blow the whistle, often with dire personal consequences. About a quarter of the people I interviewed I would characterize as being conscience-stricken about the larger impacts of their work.” She went on to comment that some advisors try to assuage their moral concerns by gently raising the problem with depriving the state of revenues by tax cheating, Those people risk losing clients who do not want to hear such things. Sleazeballs really do not care about people living in poverty.

Harrington is not the only one saying these things

A previous discussion based on the work of historian Nancy MacLean and her 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America, focused on the anti-government ideology that drives the modern republican party and populism. That mindset is in accord with how Harrington describes some of the very wealthy: “In the radical right vision, power would flow from the central federal government to authoritarian, oligarchic state governments that are captured by wealthy, powerful capitalists and like-minded individuals. The goal of that form of government is to weaken and then destroy the ability of average citizens, especially minorities to work together to defend their interests using equal protection and due process as their main tool to exert influence. The ultimate goal is to elevate property rights above all other rights, including the rights of people to tax property or otherwise burden it in any way.”

Another discussion based on journalist Jane Mayer and her 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, sees the same thing: “Essentially no one on the right will accept Mayer's version of events or the authoritarian goal of the radical right to neuter the federal government, gut regulations, quash civil rights and install an oligarchy of billionaires with proclivities to kleptocracy and brass knuckles laissez-faire capitalism. The radical right sees very little room for government spending on social safety nets. Those things just increase their tax burden and they vehemently reject it. Whatever social good may come from that safety net spending, just like contrary public opinion, is of no concern whatever to the radical right. This is crowd has no compassion for anything except the oligarchs at the top.”

Obviously, not all wealthy people or corporations feel the same way about the rule of law, government and taxes. The question is, what portion do feel that way? The entire GOP has fallen to this radical anti-government ideology. The GOP is redistributing wealth from the bottom to the top, e.g., the 2017 tax cut law, where some wealthy people and corporations believe it belongs. Harrington’s comments about financial advisors suggest that at most, about 25% of them feel conscience-stricken, leaving the remaining 75% to be in full or partial accord with neoliberal anti-government ideology. Those people are helping to cheat governments worldwide out of trillions of tax dollars. And, where governments are corrupt, it is usually or always the same wealthy anti-government people and companies who are fully participating in and fomenting the corruption. That includes fomenting corruption in the US government.

Our Besieged Rule of Law

The New York Times reports that the president's legal team is arguing in legal briefs that all criminal inquiries into a sitting president are unconstitutional. The NYT writes:

“Lawyers for President Trump argued in a lawsuit filed on Thursday that he could not be criminally investigated while in office, as they sought to block a subpoena from state prosecutors in Manhattan demanding eight years of his tax returns. 

Taking a broad position that the lawyers acknowledged had not been tested, the president’s legal team argued in the complaint that the Constitution effectively makes sitting presidents immune from all criminal inquiries until they leave the White House.

The lawsuit filed on Thursday was the latest effort by the president and his legal team to stymie multiple attempts to obtain copies of his tax returns, which Mr. Trump said during the 2016 campaign that he would make public but has since refused to disclose.”

The president is arguing that both criminal charges and investigations against a president are unconstitutional. That makes a sitting president above the law. This is another step toward tyranny and corruption.

The president has declared his admiration for Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Kim Jong Un, Mohamad bin Salman, and Xi Jinping all and and expressed his jealousy at their dictatorial power. All are murderers and brutal dictators who demand respect, obedience, loyalty. They all want their followers and citizens to believe and do anything they are told. The president admires all of these dictators, once commenting:

“He’s [Kim Jong Un] the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”