The First Minutes of the Debate

So far in the first few minutes (~55 minutes so far), the president and pro-Trump "moderator" Wallace are crushing Biden to dust. Biden is failing. Wallace lets Trump talk over Biden and Biden is unable to fight back.

Maybe this debate will play out the same way for the rest of it. Or, maybe it won't. 

So far, Biden is a shitty, weak debater, while Trump remains a constant liar and an overbearing presence that Fox News Wallace allows. Fox and Wallace are clearly on Trump's side.

Trump is wiping Biden into oblivion.

Well, one can only hope that what appears to me to be Biden's failure tonight does not translate to a failure for most Americans.

I sure hope what I see is not what most Americans see. Maybe I am too critical or out of touch with average Americans. I sure hope so.

Advantage: Trump, his lies and his ability to talk over Biden

Biden: Wuss, unprepared, trampled and weak

I repeat, democrats do not know how to message. I've said that before and I say it again. Or debate. If Biden loses, it is his fault, unless Russians and the FBI intervenes for Trump again.

Well, maybe we're looking at another four years of Trump and the demise of democracy and the rule of law. 

This shows how heavily tilted to liars and deceivers the playing field is and how hard it is for people who stick to facts and reason to fight back. The democrats are clueless. That is on them.

I want a third party -- right now. 

Or, do I overreact as of ~55 minutes into this farce debate? Maybe the rest of this will be different. Maybe 

The President’s Tax Returns Have Leaked Out

Tax avoidance - it’s a family affair for people who are 

not losers and suckers

The New York Times reports that it has obtained and analyzed over 20 years of the president’s tax returns. The bottom line is that he aggressively avoids taxes, but with one possible $72.9 million dollar exception has not committed felony tax evasion. Tax avoidance is legal, but tax evasion is illegal. He paid $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017. He paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the last 15 years. The $72.9 million exception is in a 10 year long audit dispute with the IRS. If he loses that audit battle, he will owe the IRS up to $100 million. The returns the NYT obtained do not include his 2018 or 2019 tax documents.

The American people finally get to know that, based on this information, (1) the president is not a criminal tax cheat, (2) there really is an audit of one of his tax returns, (3) the president is under severe financial stress with $300 million in personally guaranteed loans coming due over the next four years, and (4) the president always reports losses for business operations despite taking in hundreds of millions per year. The losses are used to avoid paying taxes, which is legal tax avoidance. 

What appears to be happening now is that the president is under intense pressure to make money to pay his debts coming due. The massive conflicts of interest this poses are blatant. Such conflicts would have sunk any other politician by now. Given his record of successfully ignoring ethics norms, it is reasonable to believe that this will not have much impact on the president’s re-election or his political power or support. It is also reasonable to think that the president will intervene to make the IRS audit go away.

What we still do not know

This information does not tell the full story of the president’s financial affairs. The NYT writes:

“By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.”

What se still do not know is whether the president has undisclosed offshore accounts, which is routine for some wealthy tax cheats. The Panama Papers scandal of glimpse of the size and scope of global tax evasion, which the president may or may not be a part of. We also do not know what undisclosed financial entanglements and debts the president has with Russians. Significant hidden Russian debt would make the president subject to blackmail. 

Continued stonewalling

The NYT also comments on a reaction from a Trump Organization attorney.

“In response to a letter summarizing The Times’s findings, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate” and requested the documents on which they were based. After The Times declined to provide the records, in order to protect its sources, Mr. Garten took direct issue only with the amount of taxes Mr. Trump had paid.

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.

With the term “personal taxes,” however, Mr. Garten appears to be conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Mr. Trump has paid — Social Security, Medicare and taxes for his household employees. Mr. Garten also asserted that some of what the president owed was “paid with tax credits,” a misleading characterization of credits, which reduce a business owner’s income-tax bill as a reward for various activities, like historic preservation.”

The NYT also comments on the reality vs. the appearance of the president as a businessman that hios tax returns show:

“They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base. Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.”

The NYT points out that the tax records show that his program, “The Apprentice” and associated licensing and endorsement deals brought in a total of $427.4 million. He invested most of that in various businesses but mostly golf courses, that have consumed the cash over the years. This pattern is much like the money he secretly received from his father, at least $413 million. That financed spending leading to his financial collapse in the early 1990s. The president has publicly asserted that he received only a $1 million loan form his father, which he claims he repaid. The truth is that he received at least $413 million from his father and that he never repaid any of.

The NYT comments on the disconnect between the president’s false assertions of business success and actual reality: “But the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen, showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out.” The tax documents show that most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises, mainly his golf courses and his hotel in Washington, report losing millions of dollars, maybe tens of millions, each year. 

The NYT article is long and loaded with details, mostly unpleasant. For example he claims paying a consultant fee of $747,622. It turns out that amount is precisely what Ivanka Trump disclosed in payments from a consulting company she co-owned. It is hard to believe that the exactly matching amounts were a coincidence. In essence the president avoids paying taxes by laundering alleged business expenses through his adult children.

Moving to Canada just got a lot easier for Americans who hate Trump

 

Better act fast, before the wall goes up.

When Torontonian Sofi Papamarko noted the tragic, meteoric rise of Donald Trump and the Americans who vowed to make their escape to Canada if he becomes president of the United States, she knew she had to do something to make their journey a little easier.

The professional matchmaker, who runs Friend of a Friend Matchmaking, figured that the ones venturing north would have many things in common with her fellow Canadians (e.g. their dislike for Trump and assumed left-leaning ideologies). So, she decided why not help ’em make lemonade out of lemons by launching a matchmaking site that aims to hook up Americans with some fine Canadians.

“We can import eligible bachelors here, and they can benefit from our bounty of smart and cool women, socialized medicine and ketchup chips.”

“I kept seeing stories about Americans Googling ‘How to move to Canada.’ I thoroughly considered their problem…” Papamarko said. “We can import eligible bachelors here, and they can benefit from our bounty of smart and cool women, socialized medicine and ketchup chips.”

And thus, on May 9, “Canadian Girlfriend” was born. Although the site’s primarily aim is to match American men with Canadian women (since Papamarko says this is where there’s the most demand), Americans and Canadians of all sexual orientations are welcome to sign-up.

Here’s how it works. It costs $50 ($39 USD) and you fill out a super simple application form, just like you would for any other dating website. Papamarko says if people want results, they need to be very specific about their likes and dislikes. Next she works her matchmaking magic and, although she can’t guarantee anyone love (who can?), she’ll do her best to link like-minded people up with someone awesome across the border.

You’d think that Papamarko would secretly be rooting for a President Trump since it would clearly be fantastic for business, but she says a Trump win would simply be terrifying.

“I really love the United States and the people in it. I really hope they can avoid President Trump,” she said. “That’s some terrifying Back to the Future-style stuff right there. Please let me know if I can climb any clock towers during lightning storms to help out.”

See, her heart is definitely in the right place. So, eligible Canadians and Americas…what are you waiting for? Let the maple syrup oversized-burger sharing begin.

https://www.theloop.ca/americans-who-want-to-escape-trump-now-have-a-real-canadian-matchmaking-site/

In Remembrance: Ruth Bader Ginsberg

 

This kind of topic is not my usual cup of tea.

An NPR broadcast this afternoon described one of  RBG's major influences on American law and society. NPR's Radiolab program this afternoon described her push against the all male supreme court that led them to reconsider how they treated laws that affected the sexes differently. Her argument in the supreme court led to the court's development of the intermediate scrutiny test for laws that treat the sexes unequal.

This story describes how the young ACLU lawyer Ginsburg convinced an all-male Supreme Court to take discrimination against women seriously. Before this case, the constitution was silent about discrimination against women and it allowed and justified in prior supreme court cases. She shrewdly chose a case about discrimination against men to argue that discrimination against men was no better than discrimination against women. 

That led the court to conclude that discrimination on the basis of gender, a term she intentionally chose instead of the loaded term "sex" to defuse emotions. Her tactic led to a new test of constitutionality the court created and named "intermediate scrutiny." Her tactic was brilliant, rational and convincing to the 1970s all male court. It still generally applies today.

For context, there are three tests for the constitutionality of any law. The rational basis test, the intermediate scrutiny test that Ginsberg provoked, and the strict scrutiny test. Two questions are embedded in each test, what is the purpose of the law, and how closely is the law related to that purpose?

Rational scrutiny is basically no scrutiny

The rational basis test is basically no test at all. All a law needs to do is be somehow, even trivially, rationally related to what the law is intended to do. When the authority that creates a law cannot think of any rational reason for a constitutionally challenged law, the court steps in and make a reason up to find the law rational. Very, very few laws are found unconstitutional on the basis of the rational basis test. Blithering idiots can make laws that pass this level of court scrutiny.

Strict scrutiny is almost impossibly difficult

On the other hand, when the supreme court examines a federal, state or local law that impinges on one of the live wires, e.g., race or national origin, the court applies strict scrutiny. Under that test, most laws are declared unconstitutional and invalidated. Such laws deal with affirmative action and related issues. To meet this test of constitutionality, a legislature must have passed the law to further a "compelling governmental interest," and it must be "narrowly tailored" to achieve that interest.

Courts usually can and do easily think of ways to make a law narrower and thus blow it to bits. This reflects the usual incompetence of local, state and federal legislatures to write coherent laws.

Despite its ostensible strict rationality, strict scrutiny has lead to some utterly irrational decisions. The most commonly cited disaster is the infamous Korematsu v. United States decision (1944), where the court upheld the forced relocation of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

The Ginsberg-inspired intermediate scrutiny test

Intermediate scrutiny applies a different test for the government. Here the government must prove that the law serves an important purpose and there is a "substantial relationship" between the law and the purpose the law is intended to deal with. The "narrowly tailored" requirement is relaxed a bit and that allows generally more laws to be found constitutional.

Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976) was the first case where the United States Supreme Court held that statutory or administrative sex-based classifications were subject to an intermediate standard of judicial review. That was directly due to Ginsberg's influence on the court. Before Ginsberg, blatant and irrational discrimination against women was legal because the constitution was mostly silent about women's rights. That was because the Founders believed that women were fundamentally different from men and needed to be "protected." That protection translated into two centuries of rationally unjustified and unwarranted discrimination.

Since the Equal Rights Amendment has failed since the 1970s, Ginsberg's influence is what mostly fills the legal void in protection for women in the US.

Since the intermediate scrutiny test, like rational basis and strict scrutiny, are judge-made laws, the Supreme Court can get rid of one, two or all of them when a five judge majority wants to do that.

Conclusion: Ginsberg was brilliant. She served the real (not partisan) public interest as best she could. She will be sorely missed.

Why do you hate/love him so much?

Hate him or love him, approve of him or disapprove of him, Donald Trump knows how to get to us to emotionally react to him.  So, I have two sets of questions, depending on what love/hate category you fall under.

 

Set one:

Trump Lovers (approvers): Why do you love him so much?

Trump Haters (disapprovers): Why do you hate him so much?

 

Set two:

Trump Lovers (approvers): Why do YOU THINK Trump haters hate him so much?

Trump Haters (disapprovers): Why do YOU THINK Trump lovers love him so much?

 

I realize “hate” is a loaded word, but I mean it in a very generic sense.  I’m not talking about violence here.  Having said that, identify your category, and then tell us how you see yourself, and then how you see your counterpart.

Thanks for posting and recommending.

 

Galloway:
Why do you hate them so much?

Lt. Weinberg:
They beat up on a weakling, and that's all they did. The rest is just smokefilled coffee-house crap. They tortured and tormented a weaker kid. They didn't like him. So, they killed him. And why? Because he couldn't run very fast.

Lt. Weinberg:
Why do you like them so much?

Galloway:
Because they stand upon a wall and say, "Nothing's going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch."

 

Regarding America’s Shaky Money Laundering Industry

Some of the crooks who launder dirty money 

through big banks

(source: ICIJ)

Corrupting corporate media ownership

In a rather disturbing article from Wall Street On Parade, Pam and Russ Martens report on two important aspects of the American situation, banking and news reporting. The first is that corporate-owned mainstream media, depends on financing from big banks. Presumably, most of that is in the form of advertising.   

The Martens comment that Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, keeps telling Congress and the press that the banks are a “source of strength” in this economic crisis. That false narrative completely omits the fact that the Fed has loaned banks trillions of dollars at less than 1 percent interest. Naturally, the banks prefer the Fed’s false version of reality that big American banks are in great shape. The real reality is that in fact most or all big US banks are in bad shape. The mainstream media keeps reporting this lie because the banks want Americans to believe it and the mainstream media is willing to go along with the lie, presumably due to profit lust. 

Laundering trillions in dirty money

The Martins write about the scope of the money laundering industry and how their work is kept quiet:

“Wall Street On Parade has repeatedly written about critical reports showing serial corruption at these banks that have been censored by those Pulitzer prize winning media outlets. Yesterday provided another example: the New York Times refused to cover the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) stunning report on how five of the biggest banks on Wall Street have continued to launder dirty money for fugitives and suspected criminals. The Wall Street Journal, whose name suggests that perhaps its focus should be Wall Street, failed to put the story on its front page, opting instead to bury it under an innocuous headline about HSBC’s stock hitting a new low.

The same news blackout occurred last year when the public interest group, Better Markets, published an in-depth report on “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” Three days after the report came out, major news outlets were still refusing to cover the report. We wrote this in a report three days after the study was released:

‘We checked the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Reuters, CNBC, and CNN. We could find no mention of the Better Markets report. (We checked again this morning. There is still a news blackout.)

We know that the Wall Street Journal was aware of the report because Lalita Clozel, a banking regulation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Tweeted on April 10 that Democrats in the House Financial Services Committee room were handing out the report to journalists while the Chair of the Committee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, was introducing the bank CEOs.’”

The ICIJ’s report includes this: 

“The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system.

Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world.

The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.

U.S. agencies responsible for enforcing money laundering laws rarely prosecute megabanks that break the law, and the actions authorities do take barely ripple the flood of plundered money that washes through the international financial system.

In some cases the banks kept moving illicit funds even after U.S. officials warned them they’d face criminal prosecutions if they didn’t stop doing business with mobsters, fraudsters or corrupt regimes.

JPMorgan, the largest bank based in the United States, moved money for people and companies tied to the massive looting of public funds in Malaysia, Venezuela and Ukraine, the leaked documents reveal.”

The FinCEN Files the ICIJ examined are leaked documents that include more than 2,100 suspicious activity reports filed by banks and other financial firms with the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). FinCEN is a US federal financial intelligence unit. It is at center of the global anti-money laundering system. Apparently, FinCEN has been corrupted and/or broken down for quite some time.

As usual, the banks respond to this with lies and propaganda intended to deceive. For example, JPMorgan claimed it has assumed a “leadership role” in pursuing “proactive intelligence-led investigations” and developing “innovative techniques to help combat financial crime.” If JPMorgan is the anti-corruption leader, one can only wonder how corrupt and inept the followers are.

One can also wonder who leaked those FinCEN documents, how they are hiding and how much more sleaze and corruption FinCEN is hiding. When the president makes comments about Americans who are suckers and losers, maybe it applies to all of us who are kept in the dark and fed bullshit. 

Sanctions evaders in the ICIJ database