Fiscal Injustice On Display

In the follow-up to the guilty verdicts dropped on donald trump's corporation about a month ago, today we see the justice imposed for trump's fraudulent tax schemes. The judge imposed the largest possible fine allowed under the law... and yet the fine was honestly not enough. Via Ilya Marritz, Andrea Bernstein, and Brian Mann at NPR:

A state court in New York has ordered two companies owned by former President Donald Trump to pay $1.61 million in fines and penalties for tax fraud.

The amount, the maximum allowed under state sentencing guidelines, is due within 14 days of Friday's sentencing.

"This conviction was consequential, the first time ever for a criminal conviction of former President Trump's companies," said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Bragg said he thinks the financial penalty for decades of fraudulent behavior wasn't severe enough.

"Our laws in this state need to change in order to capture this type of decade-plus systemic and egregious fraud," he said...

In context, the level of fraud trump and his corporation committed was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Business listings - via AtoZ Databases, which is behind paywalls - put the Trump Organization's yearly revenue around $1.6 billion . Forbes magazine estimated in 2022 the value of trump's personal holdings around $3.2 billion. trump may not be the richest duck in Duckberg, but he's still rolling in enough cash that $1.61 million is literally pocket change to him. It is roughly a tenth of a percent to trump.

This is where we run into the problem with the American legal system: The limitation - nay, inability - to effectively punish wrong-doers proportional to the crimes they've committed.

In terms of massive fines or penalties to discourage would-be reckless never-do-wells from committing those crimes, there will never be a fine large enough to do so. Greed is too much a motivation for those who think they will never get caught.

Punishment itself is not an effective deterrent to stop crime. Poor people who commit crimes do it because they have to. Rich people who commit crimes do it because they want to get richer. The sad thing is, we can't walk away entirely from the penalty system we have to uphold the laws. We still need some form of a penalty for law-breakers, so those of us who are law-abiding can keep faith in the legal system.

The injustice comes into play when we look at the burden of punishment we inflict on the guilty (and sadly on the falsely accused). Poor criminals are often hit with fines in the thousands of dollars that they can't afford to pay, forcing them deeper into poverty (SEE the unjust fine system that decimated the Ferguson MO community) and more likely to commit more crimes to escape the trap. Rich criminals are often hit with fines in the thousands of dollars, which barely puts a dint in their wallets as they head out to another part of the financial industry to run another fraudulent scam.

Fine a petty thief who tried to sneak off with a flatscreen TV worth $500 with a $10,000 fine and watch that thief lose his bank account, lose any legal means of employment to pay it off, lose any property his family owned (because they'll get sucked into the debt), and never get out of that spiral. Fine a white collar criminal who set up a scam fundraiser for $10 million with a $1 million fine, and watch that rich crook walk away with $9 million that his victims can't even sue to get back except for pennies on every dollar. There are thousands more victims of white collar crime than there are grocery stores bemoaning the loss of $3 bread loaves to shoplifting.

The income inequality adds onto the injustice of a legal system that punishes the poor too much and fails to punish the rich at all.

If there were any justice in this system, the criminal trial involving the Trump Organization should have included felony charges on donald trump (and the rest of the upper management like his elder kids who were part of the scams) instead of just the company itself. The fines shouldn't be capped to an arbitrary number - which is set at a level decades ago no longer reflecting the insane wealth of the few today - but scaled to the level of revenue/income the guilty actually have, so that the rich pay a greater burden for their sins compared to the poor struggling to get food on their tables. Any criminal act that defrauded people directly should require all money stolen from them recouped and given back, supplanting any civil court attempt to recover those funds.

One of the greatest open scandals of our legal system is how law enforcement fails to take financial fraud seriously as a problem. It comes up every time there's a stock market crash or bank run or "too big to fail" failures. The damage caused by white collar crimes are far greater and far reaching than anything a poor crook can pull off, and yet we punish the poor crook with a jail cell while the rich crook goes sailing to the Caribbean on whichever yacht the IRS didn't impound.

When you look back on the terrible history of going after white collar crime in this country: We jailed Martha Stewart because she was a bitch, not a criminal mastermind. And we jailed Martha Stewart for less than what the investment firms did to our housing market in 2007, for less than what donald trump and his corporate lackeys did with their tax dodging schemes.

Any legal reforms need to start with the reality that we must hold the wealthy criminals accountable, no more walking away, no more slaps on the wrist. Send the rich to jail like they were pot dealers (and free all those who are only guilty of pot dealing or other misdemeanor petty-ante shit). 

The Taxman Cometh for trump

Along with all the other bad news donald trump's been getting this month, this week revealed the US House Ways and Means Committee voted on making trump's federal income tax filings available to the public.

You might remember a while back, trump lost his fight to keep his tax returns private when the Supreme Court - even stacked with Far Right Republicans - said "Haha, no." As I noted at the time:

Although Reuters didn't go into the reason(s) why the Ways and Means were looking at trump's taxes, if I recall from other sources it was because the Committee was digging into trump's many violations of the Emoluments Clause. trump had been using his properties to entice and squeeze as much money out of the government (forcing the Secret Service to reside at his hotels at double-billing!) and foreign lobbyists since Day One. It had been this long going after trump on this open grift - delayed either by Republican control of Congress or trump's control of the Justice Department - that only now have the courts cleared this matter.

Problem is, the current Democratic control of Ways and Means is going to end in a month: Republicans won a narrow victory to control the House, and there is no way the MAGA wingnuts running the GOP caucus is going to expose their God-Emperor trump to public scrutiny. If there's anything the current committee can use the tax returns info they now have, they better make it quick before Christmas...

Ah, yes. They did. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh, that felt goooooood.

It turns out I was wrong on the reasons why the Ways and Means wanted to examine trump's tax returns. The House committee wasn't so much looking at if trump was violating the Emoluments Clause, but if the Internal Revenue Service was doing their job in automatically auditing trump as sitting President Loser of the Popular Vote.

Turns out there's an Executive standing order - due to Richard Nixon's brush with tax dodging back in 1973 - that mandates the IRS audit the President every year he's in office. And it turns out the Ways and Means' worries were legit: Turns out the audits were not happening to trump (via Dustin Jones at NPR):

The House Ways and Means Committee in its own report said it found that only one audit was started while Trump was in office and no audits were completed.

This is in violation of standing IRS policy.

"The Committee expected that these mandatory audits were being conducted promptly and in accordance with IRS policies," Committee Chairman Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said in a statement. "However, our review found that under the prior administration, the program was dormant. We know now, the first mandatory audit was opened two years into his presidency. On the same day this Committee requested his returns."

This raises a few questions. Above all, the question "Who gave the order to stop auditing trump?" This is something either the IRS head (who was originally an Obama appointee up until 2018) or the Treasury Secretary (trump ally - and corrupt SOB - Mnuchin) interfered.

There's a bit of irony here in that - of all the Presidents and candidates for that office - trump is the only one since the Nixon era who both refused to publicly reveal his tax returns and then refused to let the IRS audit them. All the while excusing his refusal by claiming he was being audited (oops, he really wasn't) as though that would have stopped him (it wouldn't have. Presidents released their tax returns every year even as they were being audited by the rules).

Even as the tax experts start poring over the actual numbers in trump's filings, these failures of accountability are troubling signs that serious reforms towards transparency and Congressional oversight are needed. As Steve Benen notes over at Rachel Maddow's Blog on MSNBC: 

In the wake of Nixon’s resignation, a series of ethics reforms were created, including an automatic audit of every sitting president’s taxes, every year, regardless of circumstances. A president need not be suspected of any wrongdoing; the reform was simply created to help bolster public confidence.

Most modern presidents, eager to appear forthcoming, released their tax returns to the public anyway. Trump — the only modern major-party presidential nominee to refuse to disclose his tax returns — used the post-Watergate reform as an excuse to justify secrecy.

Indeed, even after taking office in 2017, the Republican refused to release the materials, insisting that he couldn’t because he was under audit. Even at the time, the argument didn’t make sense: Trump was free to release the documents anyway, as other modern presidents from both parties had done.

But we now know that the underlying assumption was also wrong: The automatic, mandatory audit didn’t happen.

This is important for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Trump lied. For another, there was an apparent breakdown in the system that warrants additional scrutiny: If the IRS was required to audit the then-president as a matter of course, there should be some kind of explanation as to why this didn’t happen.

But let’s also not miss the forest for the trees: The whole point of the congressional exercise, the foundational basis for Neal’s initial outreach to the Treasury Department nearly four years ago, was a Ways and Means Committee investigation into the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program.

The former president, his lawyers, and his GOP allies insisted that there was no “legislative purpose” to the inquiry, and the committee’s work on the issue was little more than a political fishing expedition.

Those complaints have now collapsed. The committee set out to scrutinize the IRS’s presidential audit program and it found a problem with the IRS’s presidential audit program...

The political conversation about Trump’s secrecy has been going on for years. The policy conversation about the IRS and presidential tax returns is just getting started.

It seems unlikely that with the Republicans less than a month away from controlling the House will follow through on any reforms to fix the IRS on this matter. To Republicans, their only idea to reform the IRS is to abolish it before it holds the rich accountable for what they haven't paid in back taxes. You would think that with a Democrat currently in office - hi, Joe! - the Republicans would be eager to make it hurt by forcing Biden to humble himself before the Taxman. But the GOP knows full well that Biden - who has released his tax returns, just like Obama and Dubya and Clinton and so on - won't be bothered or embarrassed by that. Only trump - who wants to hide the reality of his business failings - would be hurt by such reforms.

It's doubtful any reforms are forthcoming, not until there's sensible (Democratic) leadership in both houses again.

What is forthcoming is the likely exposure of trump's "creative accounting" showing up in his federal tax returns. As the recent criminal trial revealed, trump's own company has been caught "cooking the books" as it were at the state level. And trump is facing a New York state civil trial that's revealing even more questionable tax behavior regarding his property values and sources of income.

It's now a question if trump tried pulling the same stunts with the IRS. Given his arrogance, the odds favor trump being that reckless.

Dude. Even the Joker didn't try to fuck with the IRS.

This is how they got Al Capone.

trump is toast.

Let the Guilty Verdicts Be Read: trump Is Toast December 2022 edition

Let the Schadenfreude be served. Let the people celebrate. Send some to the common pulpits, and cry out "Liberty, Freedom, and an End to trump franchises!"

I want to hug the army of the Potomac investigators into trump's tax schemes. I want to get the whole of the army of Vicksburg Manhattan District Attorney's office drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small trump and thrash him.
-- paraphrasing/updating the celebratory words of Henry Adams

Ah, just in case you didn't hear the joyous cheers this afternoon, that New York City criminal trial on the Trump Organization's tax mischief had the jury verdict returned, and the jury found trump's corporate empire guilty on ALL counts (via Andrea Bernstein, Ilya Marritz, and Brian Mann at NPR):

A jury in Manhattan has found former President Donald Trump's company guilty of a long-running criminal tax fraud scheme that lasted into his presidency.

Though Trump and his company have repeatedly faced criminal investigations, this case marks the first time his company has been charged, tried, and convicted on criminal charges.

Trump built his political brand, in large part, on his claim that he was an aggressive and successful businessman...

Considering the number of bankruptcies trump filed over the decades, he was gaslighting about the "successful businessman" bit, and this court verdict confirms it. I digress, let's return to the report:

In all, the jury found two entities controlled by Trump guilty on 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. The maximum penalty is $1.6 million.

"This was a case about lying and cheating, false documents to the aid of evading taxes for the benefit of individuals and the corporation," Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg said, speaking with reporters after the verdict was delivered.

In a statement, the Trump Organization criticized the verdict and promised to appeal, arguing that blame should fall on the company's executives and not on the firm itself.

"The notion that a company could be held responsible for an employees' actions, to benefit themselves, on their own personal tax returns is simply preposterous," the statement read...

This is trump trying to shift the blame on his handlers, on the people who answered to him when it came to running his corporation. If that was true, then it undercuts any claim trump makes about being the guy who makes all the tough decisions, of being in control of anything. trump can't run from being held accountable here: the company getting convicted has his name on it.

At issue in this trial was whether Weisselberg and another top executive, Trump Organization comptroller Jeffrey McConney acted "in behalf of" the corporate entities when they compensated Weisselberg and other top executives by paying for the apartments and luxury benefits that did not get reported to the tax authorities.

Well, issue resolved. The jury believed that Weisselberg and McConney acted in behalf of and on orders from the company executives... which is pretty much trump and half his family.

If there's any damper on the festivities happening tonight, it's the reality that donald trump himself - nor his eldest sons and daughter who were part of these schemes - will not face direct punishment for these crimes. For reasons I still don't fathom, the Manhattan DA's office decided not to pursue trump himself, focusing on the corporate entity itself as though the evidence they had was sufficient only for that.

Thing is, the swiftness of this jury decision, and the fact the jurors convicted on ALL counts, underscores the possibility that even one criminal charge - say, the First Degree charge on Scheme to Defraud - could have been proven in court today. It seems a shame that the DA refused to risk that.

The good news: With the wrap-up on this case - even before the jury verdict was read - DA Bragg had decided to reconsider a criminal matter that should directly imperil trump. Remember the Stormy Daniels Hush Money payoff that sent trump's bagman lawyer Michael Cohen to the slammer? Bragg reportedly is looking into using the information revealed in the tax fraud convictions to reopen the Daniels affair. If you'll recall, trump squeaked out of that matter as "Unindicted Co-Conspirator Individual One." All things being equal, with Cohen and Daniels likely to testify against him, trump won't stay unindicted for long.

A more direct impact from this verdict is that trump's business empire faces dire financial disruptions from here on. Not just the fines - which honestly aren't that severe for even a middling operation like trump's - but the reality that banks, lenders, and other corporations may be restricted in doing any business with the Trump Organization at all. trump's ability to keep grifting is going to take a huge hit.

And this criminal trial has ties to an even bigger headache for trump: The New York State's civil case against trump and his corporation for tax fraud and other financial shenanigans on a grander scale than what the City Attorney could pursue. Not only facing $250 million in fines, the civil case headed by State AG Letitia James could impose harsh sanctions that could pretty much shut the Trump Org completely down. James had a strong case going before this verdict, she has a stronger case going forward.

The best possible thing we can see now is how this jury conviction hurts trump's political chances heading into 2024. Before all this, trump could brazenly strut about claiming he was a great businessman, the best, successful at everything, untouchable. This conviction is the first real dent into trump's illusory gaslighting. All his "success" came from cheating, from evading taxes. trump is not really a success at all.

trump may not be directly convicted, but his empire, the one with his name on it, is convicted. This becomes an albatross around trump's neck he cannot remove. Every political rival he'll face will be able to kick him on these jury rulings and he won't be able to bluff and lie his way out of it.

We can say it truthfully: trump is a tax fraud.

trump is vulnerable now.

trump is toast.

Revel in the Schadenfreude, America.

Current Status on New York's Case vs. trump (w/Update)

Just so you know: It looks like trump can no longer delay his fate in New York. Via Ryan Lucas at NPR:

 The U.S. Supreme Court, in a one-sentence unsigned order, declined former President Donald Trump's request to further delay the enforcement of a subpoena from the Manhattan district attorney for Trump's financial records. Monday's order paves the way for a New York grand jury to obtain the records and review them.

The high court's decision marks a major setback for Trump, who for years has fought to shield his finances and business practices from scrutiny. It all but clears the way for District Attorney Cyrus Vance to enforce his subpoena for the former president's financial documents.

Vance issued a grand jury subpoena to Trump's personal accounting firm, Mazars USA, in August 2019 for his tax filings and other financial records. Vance's office says it wants the materials as part of a criminal investigation.

The exact parameters of Vance's investigation are not clear, but from court filings it appears that his office is investigating possible insurance or financial fraud by the former president or his businesses...

What are the implications here? 

First, that trump and his lawyers are running out of any other delaying tactics he's used to pulling to avoid any level of accountability for his crimes.

Second, that any stunt he DOES try will likely get him hammered by any judges overseeing his case(s) because even the highest Court in the land won't give trump any more room to do so.

Third, that the likelihood of trump getting caught on tax fraud - that he gave one set of numbers to the IRS and New York revenue offices, and his banks and business partners another - is close to 100 percent, but not an absolute given. While trump has been spending far too much effort to hide his tax numbers in a way suggesting prolonged years of committing that tax fraud, there may be a simpler personal reason trump has been hiding them: Those returns - based on what the media had already uncovered - will prove trump is nowhere near the successful billionaire he sells himself and is likely in debt to the tune of billions. "Clown living on credit" is trump's likely epitaph here.

These legal matters still take time: Once the prosecutor's office gets ahold of the papers they have to be thorough with the evidence, and see what matches up to the evidence they already have (likely from Michael Cohen, trump's former bagman). This could take anywhere from a week to a couple of months. 

In the meantime, trump's not going anywhere except further into acts of sedition against the United States. It would be nice, New York DAs, to get this done quick and charge him before things get worse.

Update 2/25: It's official, the tax returns are in the possession of the New York City DA's office. Via Rachel Triesman at NPR:

A spokesperson for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. confirmed to NPR over email that his office obtained the records on Monday. That same day, the U.S. Supreme Court declined Trump's request to further delay the enforcement of a subpoena, paving the way for a New York grand jury to obtain and review the sought-after financial documents.

"As we have maintained throughout this process, Mazars will comply with all of its legal and professional obligations," Trump's personal accounting firm, Mazars USA, told NPR in a statement.

I got out of the habit of eating popcorn when I had braces in the eighth grade, but for this I'm making an exception.

Digging Into trump's Tax Dirt

There's a debate tonight but I don't give a rat's ass because unless trump goes batshit crazy and vomits on everybody this will not change a lot of voters' minds.

In the meanwhile, following up on trump's tax troubles, I spotted a Tweet from John Rogers about reading a tax expert's - Daniel Shaviro a professor on tax law out of NYU - evaluation of the Times' revelations to get a better idea how much trouble trump is in:

2) Trump appears to be an absolutely terrible businessman. This is a man who netted $606 million over nineteen years (from 2000 to 2018) through The Apprentice, licensing and endorsements, and investments and businesses run by others, and yet has created enormous financial peril for himself by buying prestige business properties for high prices, and then pouring cash into them without thereby generating positive net returns. Even with the cash infusions, his personally run businesses have continued to lose a great deal of money (even leaving aside depreciation deductions that might or might not be accompanied by actual declines in economic value). One therefore suspects that he is simply funding the negative cash flow, not creating new value that might pay off in the future...

3) As a matter of net worth, Trump appears not to be rich (despite his having inherited a large fortune). The impending financial liabilities, and selling off of assets (plus taking out of loans) to keep the cash flowing is only one reason for concluding that, as a matter of net worth (as distinct, from say, lifestyle), Trump does not appear to be rich. Consider that, from 2000 to 2018, his net profit from assets – his own businesses, plus investments in businesses run by others – is only $4.2 million (the excess of his investment gains over his business losses).

This is about $220,000 per year. Just as a very general ballpark comparison, if you were earning $220,000 per year from assets that offered, say, a regular 4 percent annual return, that would imply that you were worth only $5.5 million...

While 5.5 million isn't something to sneeze at for middle-class folk, trump has been selling himself as a BILLIONAIRE, of which 5.5 million is metaphorically pocket change (think about the $2000 you got in your checking account compared to the three quarters, two dimes, and five nickels in your change dish).

What trump is doing, from what I can tell, is create the illusion of wealth in order to convince others of it: Spending lavishly and indulgently on luxury items as though that's all there is to it. Thing is, that kind of wasteful spending helps explain why trump also appears to be massively in debt. Back to Shaviro:

4) There is nothing wrong in principle with using true economic losses to offset the tax that would otherwise be due on gains – but it also isn’t clever tax planning. The late, great Martin Ginsburg – a famous tax lawyer and the spouse of the recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – once jokingly described what he called the “Herman tax shelter.” The idea was that, if you need, say, a $1 million tax deduction, your fictional accountant Herman could say: “Give me $1 million, I’ll steal it from you and go to a country where you can’t reach me, and voila, you have a $1 million theft loss.”

The gist is: Planning to get a deduction is useless if the plan involves you losing too much money in the first place. If that's all that trump is doing here with reporting losses to the IRS every year, it would still be reckless behavior because it's all focused on the now (short-term) and doesn't allow to invest or plan long-term, which cuts into profits down the road. In short: trump's an idiot.

We therefore should distinguish between (a) Trump’s losing so much money over the years – be it from bad luck, bad judgment, or incompetence – and (b) his also taking a number of tax positions that, as I discuss next, appear to be questionable or even fraudulent. The real losses rightfully offset tax on the gains, insofar as using them in the way he did was legally permissible, and the adverse inferences to be drawn from them lie outside the tax system (although again, as per the fallacy in the “Herman tax shelter,” they do not reflect clever tax planning).

The fifth point on Shaviro's list answers a long-standing argument about trump's refusal to go public with his tax returns. A lot of his critics believed his excuse of getting "audited" by the IRS was asinine, but it turns out the IRS *is* investigating him for a questionable refund filing from 2007-09. So Shaviro looks at that and I want to quote him in full:

5) The ongoing IRS audit dispute regarding a $72.5 million loss deduction looks very bad for Trump. The Times article suggests that the key issue, for most or all of this claimed loss, is a “worthless stock deduction” from abandoning his interest in the disastrous Atlantic City casino venture. Many years ago, when I was in tax practice, I actually worked on this precise legal issue (for a corporate client of my law firm), so I am quite familiar with it. When you own equity (such as Trump’s partnership interests in the Atlantic City activity) that has lost enormous value, typically the equity constitutes a “capital asset.” If you sell it for an enormous loss, that is only a capital loss, and deduction of the loss is limited to the sum of (a) net capital gains for the year, and (b) $3,000. Disallowed losses are carried forward, but at $3,000 per year they may be worth very little, unless your income in future years includes large capital gains. But if the investment is utterly worthless and you abandon it for zero consideration, it becomes an “ordinary” loss (i.e., one that is not subject to the limits on deducting capital losses).

Trump apparently did this with his Atlantic City partnership interests, and claimed an ordinary loss that seems to have made up much or all of the $72.5 million. But he received back a 5 percent interest in the stock of the new entity. As the Times article rightly notes, this could establish that the entire abandonment loss claim was legally invalid. He would merely have sold his once-valuable asset for a large capital loss, the use of which would be sharply restricted as described above. The Times notes that losing on this issue – as it appears he should, if the stated facts are accurate and relevantly complete – would cause him to owe the IRS about $100 million, given interest on the prior refund. This leaves aside the possibility of civil or criminal tax penalties for claiming an abandonment loss despite receiving consideration back.

We're now getting into the criminal stuff in trump's tax returns, and also why trump is so desperate to cheat his way into a second term to avoid prosecution. Rather than take the capital loss which was limited, trump filed for the ordinary loss to get unlimited return... even though the stocks he received from the transaction did not make the loss worthless. This is tax fraud, and unless his lawyers beat the IRS into submission (or he bullies them directly, which would be an abuse of office) trump is going to pay one way or another.

It gets more serious from here:

6) The consulting fees that Trump’s various foreign businesses paid to Ivanka Trump and others look potentially fraudulent. The Times article cites 20 percent consulting fees that foreign Trump businesses regularly deducted by reason of paying them to unnamed consultants. Some of these fees pertained to activities in which Trump’s role as an investor was ostensibly entirely passive, meaning that he wasn’t engaged in making any of the business decisions. Consulting fees also appear to have been paid to family members such as Ivanka Trump. She got consulting fees with respect to businesses for which she simultaneously worked as an executive, and thus as an employee.

Based on what the article says, several different types of fraud may have been involved here. Fees paid to family members who did not provide services in return would be improper deductions. Fees paid to “consultants” who were employees might be properly deductible by the business – as salary – but would potentially trigger 3.8 percent payroll tax liability by the recipient under the so-called Medicare payroll tax. Fees that were actually gifts to family members were not properly deductible, and also may have generated gift tax liability on Trump’s part that the mislabeling helped to conceal.

From what I can tell, the trump family was double-dipping, getting paid twice for the same job (with the second "job" a no-show consulting excuse). Violations of payroll tax and Medicare tax codes. This is where it's not just trump on the line, it's the whole fcking family.

7) Other improper deductions that may have been claimed fraudulently. The Times article notes several different types of improper deductions for business expenses that appear to have been personal, and hence not allowable under the federal income tax...

In short: This is where the jokes about $70,000 haircuts come in. Seriously though:

Similarly, the Times article raises serious questions about deductions for a residential property, described by Eric Trump as the family “compound,” on the ground that it was an investment property being held for profit. The very year after the investment designation was made, Trump claimed a deduction for a charitable easement that precluded development of much of the property. Happening just a year later (and possibly foreseen), this would only add to the difficulty of establishing the requisite profit motive.

A further instance of potential fraud relates to deducting legal fees that may have related to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, rather than to his business activities. This may even include the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, if it was improperly amalgamated with actual legal fees...

And this is where the state attorney's investigations into trump kick in. Where the IRS is one level of trouble, the state of New York is a level trump can't bully or hinder (thank you, Separation of Powers between State and Federal). This has been where the tax returns fight had been at its harshest, with trump fighting tooth and nail to prevent the local DA from getting into his financials. Well, it looks like that's a little too late...

Much like the debate happening about... oh RIGHT NOW... these revelations won't change a single mind among the 40 percent that makes up trump's rabid fanbase.

But these revelations expose just how weak trump's position truly is: facing likely criminal charges and civil lawsuits (he can delay the former but facing too many of the latter), trump is relying far too much on foreign creditors and foreign dirty money to survive even day-to-day.

This unfortunately makes him dangerous in an election cycle: trump has every reason to cheat to stay one step ahead of the law he's supposed to uphold.

This thankfully also makes it easier for the rest of us to understand what's at stake and vote the thieving con artist out of office.

We need to do this, America. We cannot survive with a tax fraud and financial disaster running the White House.

Only Two Things Certain with trump: Schadenfreude and Taxes

Note: I just realized a day later that I wrote an earlier report about trump's tax-dodging back in 2016(!!!) that used a similar title to this blog article I wrote yesterday. Dammit. I've been screaming for so long about trump being a tax cheat and con artist that I'm starting to repeat myself!

Anyway, on to the article...

So the big bombshell on Sunday was Buffalo winning its third straight game this NFL season was the New York Times reporting on what they had on donald trump's tax returns. Apparently, they have received verifiable copies of the returns that trump had been keeping out of sight for the last 5 years, and they gave their first - promising more to follow - report on what they found. The rest of what they have is behind a firewall, so I'll go to Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice to help with the schadenfreude:

Also, he wrote off $70K in taxes for hair styling. He wrote off more than $700K in “consulting fees” that suspiciously matched an amount collected by a Ivanka-owned consulting company. I am not a lawyer, but that sounds legally dubious. It may be perfectly legal since our tax code seems designed to allow rich people to perpetuate outrageous scams.

Anyhoo, I’ve long since stopped waiting for any revelation about Trump, no matter how repulsive or ridiculous or outrageous, to make the bottom fall out of his base of support. If 200K-plus dead Americans on his watch — with recorded evidence that he lied to us about the danger — won’t budge the needle, nothing will. Somewhere around 40% of our fellow citizens are dumb and/or malevolent chumps, and they’ll never admit they’ve been conned. Still, being exposed as a fraud has got to be a personal hell for a narcissist like Trump.

Let's go to Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo for some thoughts:

The Times has obtained what Trump has long sought to keep from investigators: “tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization.”

Trump is deeply in debt. If he loses his dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over the validity of a $72.9 million tax refund, he could owe the government more than $100 million after including interest. He has hundreds of millions in loans coming due in the next few years with no way to repay them. Some he personally guaranteed.

Sunday’s lengthy report is just the overview. There is nothing more on Trump’s financial dealings with Russian oligarchs, but enough to whet the appetite for more. Not to worry. The Times reassures that “additional articles will be published in the coming weeks...” 

(Editor's Note: As I post this blog article, the Times released Part II of their reporting, it seems to involve how NBC's "The Apprentice" kept trump afloat...)

Digby's coverage at Hullabaloo goes into better detail, and I would encourage you to hop over there and read each of the 13 points she makes about how this is a really big fcking deal that trump is in debt up to his bad $70,000.00 haircuts.

To be honest, these revelations aren't shocking to those of us - myself included - who knew for a long time that trump was never honest about his wealth and showed far too many signs of living off massive loans he can't pay off.

What this means to the 2020 election cycle depends entirely on those voters who were still undecided - not that many - and on Republican voters who can't pretend trump is a financial genius anymore - also not that many - and on Democratic voters who have to step up and get the damn vote out - this needs to be as many Dems as possible - to throw this crooked bankrupted fraud out of OUR house.

This almost underscores just how dangerous trump is going to get as he openly plots to subvert the election this November. This is it for him, this performance he has ripping off the federal government from INSIDE the government. There are no other con jobs waiting for him after this. He has no other escape plan from this con he's got going, and once he's outside of the Oval Office he has nowhere to run and hide. This is why he's threatening to pull every authoritarian trick in the books to cheat and stay in office, this is why he's always talking about stealing a third term when the Constitution clearly says Hell No.

There's a couple other things to point out - that our tax code unfairly skews in favor of the so-called wealthy (as well as the real wealthy), and that our legal system unfairly refuses to treat financial fraud as serious as it ought to - but I will leave those rants for another day.

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT AGAINST THIS BANKRUPT FRAUD, AMERICA.

trump is literally in debt to other people, and those chit-holders are bound to call in their IOUs that will end up hurting us.

As We Get Closer to 2020, the Democrats Get Closer to Having Rich White Men Panic

You might remember me all the way back in January of this year railing against the foolishness of a rich white man with no political experience trying to pull that stunt with Democrats the way trump did with Republicans.

A lot of that had to do with party ideologies. Republicans are thrilled to have amateur CEOs run for office because they believe those CEOs are their betters. Democrats tend to root for candidates who, you know, actually know what they're doing in office. Dems want politicians who speak to the actual majority of Americans who are NOT rich greedy white assholes. Just sayin.

It still hasn't stopped Rich White Men(tm) try to insert themselves into a Democratic primary stage in obvious desperate attempts to control the debates and stop such dangerous talk about raising wealth taxes or revoking the GOP 2017 Tax Cut from Hell. Just look at Thomas Steyer who jumped in back in July and has gotten nowhere even with 47 million already spent on his campaign.

Just look at Michael Bloomberg: he's not ready to run and yet there he is. And he's making poor decisions that ought to drive him to shut down already (via Bill Scher at RealClearPolitics):

Bloomberg’s late-entry strategy is more ludicrous than what Clark, Thompson and Perry cooked up. Bloomberg plans to completely skip the first four contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, and begin competing on “Super Tuesday,” March 3, when 15 states will hold primaries.

There is superficial logic to this plan. The billionaire former Republican isn’t a great fit for the college-educated liberals of Iowa and New Hampshire, nor for the union workers of Nevada, nor for the African Americans of South Carolina. Winning any of those four small-state contests involves much retail campaigning, and Bloomberg is very late in assembling high-quality, locally sourced, get-out-the-vote operations. So, he might as well pass on the ground game and go straight to the air war — dumping millions into a Super Tuesday TV and online ad blitz.

But red flags are everywhere. The last person who tried to circumvent multiple demographically unfriendly early states was Rudy Giuliani in 2008. After he performed poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, he declared he would skip the next three contests and focus solely on Florida. But having already been weakened by defeat, he never found his footing in the Sunshine State and fizzled out.

Bloomberg wants to avoid this problem by never giving the first four states a chance to weaken him. But the fact that Bloomberg can’t easily compete is, in and of itself, a sign of weakness. If his natural constituency isn’t liberal college grads, working-class laborers or African Americans, then just who is it...?

Bloomberg's already had to apologize for his obsession to defend a flawed Stop-And-Frisk police policy that was overtly racist as well as ineffective in stopping drugs or other lawbreaking. Bloomberg's still arguing against marijuana legalization (which is insanely popular with Dem primary voters). As Scher points out and as others have added, Bloomberg has terrible optics when dealing with a voting bloc - Black voters - that's key to winning the primaries in battleground states.

And yet Bloomberg is throwing himself into the inferno, as though he alone can save the Democratic Party from itself.

That's because as the primaries move onto the first true stages of voter choices, Bloomberg (along with other billionaires) is convinced the Dems are moving in the wrong direction when it comes to things like Medicare-for-All (which would mean massive tax increases), a serious Wealth Tax on the One-Percenters, and the likelihood of forcing corporations to - gasp - pay workers by boosting a $15 federal minimum wage.

This isn't because these Rich White Men(tm) are honestly opposed to trump and to his destructive policies (although these RWM do loathe trump as a pretender con artist).

This is because these Rich White Men(tm) are terrified that a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren Presidency means an end to their cushy wonderful super-big tax cuts that let them be triple-digit-billionaires instead of single-digit-billionaires.

The good news is that Steyer (who oddly has offered a wealth tax plan... it's just weak compared to Sanders and Warren's plans) and Bloomberg and (and latecomer Deval Patrick who has ties to Wall Street that would make Hillary seem an outsider) are polling in single digits nowhere near to winning any primary votes.

If Bloomberg and Steyer, either or both, were legitimately serious about helping the Democratic Party stop trump, they wouldn't campaign: They should be setting up SuperPACs and funding every Congressional, Senate, and State-level Dem campaign across the board. If they do THAT, then we might see victory against Republican corruption and stupidity this election cycle.

Just focus on that, rich guys. Fight the fight that NEEDS winning, and worry about your godless tax breaks later.

A Billionaires Ballot, An Electoral Nightmare (w/ Update)

Given how the Beltway media loves covering elections - the horse race nature of campaigning always involves personality clashes and plot twists galore - we're already into the nightmare of 2020 coverage not only with the usual suspects putting in their expected nominations but also a surprising opening appearance.

It seems the former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz is thinking about putting his hat in the 2020 ring to run as an independent.

Naturally, this requires a reasoned and well-thought response from Twitter (just read this article from Balloon Juice for a nice refresher). Which, if I can summarize for you, was this:

OH FUCK NO.

There's already been calls to boycott Starbucks (I originally argued that it might not work since he retired the CEO gig, but it turns out he still owns a hefty share so yeah go ahead nuke the company).

Schultz's reasoning for running is he posits the "Both Sides are wrong" argument popular with the "No Labels Third Party Will Save Us" wing of mainstream media.

But he's made his real reason pretty clear after his first couple of interviews: He's already attacked the likes of Kamala Harris (who announced this week) and Elizabeth Warren (who's announced earlier) and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez (who is too young to announce but can dance circles around him) for their open calls for higher tax rates and expanded healthcare / social aid programs that will likely involve taxing the rich.

He's terrified by Democratic Party calls for a high marginal tax rate on billionaires, and he wants to do everything in his power - such as Spoiling the Democrats as a "Centrist" - to ensure trump wins a second term to keep that from happening.

Let's refer to Eugene Robinson at RealClearPolitics on this:

At present, the specter of a second Trump term looks comfortably remote. The blue wave in the midterm election and Trump's cellar-dwelling approval numbers show what the country thinks of him and his corrupt, chaotic, kooky administration. A recent poll shows him trailing any of his likely Democratic opponents. If the election were held next week, I'm pretty confident that Trump would lose to a ham sandwich.

He does have a chance in 2020, however, if the anti-Trump vote is split between two or more candidates. Imagine Schultz, a lifelong Democrat, siphoning off even 5 percent of the Democratic candidate's vote in, say, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The horror of 2016 threatens to become a recurring nightmare.

Here is the sad truth of American Presidential Elections that I have noted before: The Electoral College system as currently rigged favors a Winner-Take-All by state meaning the top two major party candidates - Democratic and Republican - are the ONLY possible candidates to win the Electors.

No third party or independent candidate stands a chance. Anderson in 1980 barely won 6 percent of the overall popular vote and NOTHING in the Electoral College. Perot ran his vanity campaigns in 1992 and 1996 and achieved the same Electoral College results (Nada). Libertarians and Green candidates have yet to garner even ONE Elector over multiple campaigns. The last time we had a successful third party candidate was Wallace in 1968 with 46 EV, and that was because of the cultural and political shift over the Civil Rights Acts that sent the racist Southern voters to the polls in revolt.

But that's the thing, as Robinson notes, the third party candidate can perform the role of Spoiler to knock the possible winner down a peg and force the Electoral College - by having key battleground states flip the wrong way by just a handful of votes - to elect the losing Second-Place finisher.

We've seen it within our own lifetimes. The Perot races in 1992 and 1996 arguably pulled away enough votes from the Republican candidates, and there's still bitterness among Democrats towards the role Ralph Nader played in the 2000 elections. You could argue about Jill Stein affecting Hillary's chances in key states, but Libertarian Gary Johnson had a bigger popular vote impact and it did little damage to trump's chances (there's still the specter of Putin sabotaging the whole 2016 scene so that's kind of a wash). Outside of our times, the biggest Spoiler election was 1912's when Teddy Roosevelt - angry at his Republican protege Taft's soft business policies - decided to run his Bull Moose campaign... letting the Democratic candidate Wilson win due to the split Republican voter base.

Robinson notes in his article how even trump understood that in 2015-16:

Remember how coy Trump was early in the Republican primary campaign, reserving the option of an independent candidacy if the GOP did not treat him fairly? Trump used the threat as leverage to get his way on debate logistics and ballot access. But then he suddenly reversed course, signing a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee.

A person familiar with Trump's thinking told me why. Trump understood that the most likely outcome, if he ran on his own, would be to guarantee Hillary Clinton's election by taking votes away from the GOP candidate. In his wildest dreams, he might hope to win enough electoral votes to keep either major-party candidate from reaching a majority. But in that case, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives -- which would surely choose the Republican or the Democrat, not Trump.

That's the real purpose - and threat - of a strong third party candidate in our current Presidential system: shake up enough votes to make the likely winning party actually lose.

Schultz is not actually strong - at least not yet, because he's a relatively unknown figure just re-entering the spotlight - but he is RICH. As a confirmed billionaire, he can throw about 500 million dollars at a vanity campaign and still use it as a tax write-off somehow because he can STILL spend enough money on accountants to cheat the IRS.

Referring back to my earlier argument against Schultz: the sonofabitch is running scared because the ascendant Democratic Party - with its new lineup of Progressive and left-leaning Congresspersons - shows little sign of slipping back for the upcoming 2020 cycle. The Dems are likely to retain control of the House, can arguably retain enough state governments (and maybe win a few Purple ones if the turnout's high enough) to keep progressive efforts going, may threaten Republican control of the Senate (more GOP Senators are up for re-election than Democrats this next cycle), and are poised to win against an unpopular and inept incumbent in trump (barring further Russian intervention).

Running for Governor or Senator as an "Independent" (or even as a business-friendly Democrat - he is apparently a registered D) won't stop that momentum. Running for President - even with the unlikelihood of winning without a popular base of support - to ensure trump retains veto power over everything is the best achievable goal.

Schultz making this a suicide mission is the only thing that makes sense. He has to know he's already getting hit on social media by outraged Democrats, and he's making a terrible impression with the media talking heads he's interviewed with. He's just another amateur at politics. It'd be like... me, making an announcement from my blog that "HEY, I'm throwing my hat in the ring for 2020 as an Independent!"

The only difference between Schultz and myself is I cannot afford to even download the paperwork I'd have to file to start a campaign, and he can afford to hire 10,000 people to do all that for him.

But we're running into the OTHER big problem with modern American politics (actually it's several): terrible, horrifying myths about business and politics.

• The myth that Government ought to be run like a Business;
• The myth that Business Leaders - CEOs for example - are capable of managing Public Sector powers;
• The myth that our partisan landscape can be healed/fixed by a calming Centrist figure that can create bipartisan support just by standing there oh so pretty.

As we've seen from bad performances from other Presidents with business backgrounds - Hoover and Dubya and the current Loser of the Popular Vote trump (the con artist's not even a successful businessman in the first place!!!) - we should know by now that being a CEO is different from being a President. Decision making in a business is top-down, has to be, and there's nothing wrong with that. But a President has to lead by consensus and awareness of the public will, and CEOs can never think like that (everything has to be HIS WAY or the highway, or in Dubya's case he deferred authority out to handlers like Cheney - also having corporate experience - who DID think like that).

The myth of Government being run like a Business should be taking hits as well. Where a business operates in order to earn profits, a government has to operate to provide services as a public good. Those are opposing objectives. Every time the Republicans pull their "run it like a business" stunt - tax cuts and deregulations - everything falls apart with deficits and collapsing infrastructure.

The final myth is the belief - the hope - of the mainstream media and high-ranking punditry that all we need is a Uniter figure outside of "Party" corruption to rise up and save us from our weak political overlords. They look to figures like Washington who seemed to rise above party (only because he existed before they formed, and when they did he leaned conservative/Federalist). They look to calming, fatherly patriarchs like Eisenhower or amiable, cheerful types like Reagan (his spell on the current punditry remains horrifyingly intact).

THAT is the biggest pipe dream of all. There is no outisde Uniter figure waiting to save us, no one with a level of public popularity - outside of entertainers with universal appeal - that can sweep in and guide us to sane policy. And if there is, it sure as hell isn't yet another billionaire - especially one whom nobody could pick out of a police lineup two weeks ago - thinking he can buy his way onto the national ballot.

But we're stuck with Schultz, just like we were stuck with other vanity candidates like Perot, or the likes of Steve Forbes or Herman Cain trying their luck in Republican primaries.

Because the final biggest problem we have with our electoral system: It favors the rich.

It's been a thing since our nation's founding: Every political player from the Founders at the Declaration of Independence through the first few decades of forming the Constitution were all wealthy men. Lawyers, merchants, landowners, slaveowners. Not a one of them were what we'd call poor or middle class. They could afford to play the game of politics and then hand it off to the next rich newcomer to come along and keep the game going.

As our nation grew, we'd get the occasional poor person - someone from a struggling background - but we'd still get overwhelmed by the business leaders and the profit makers, all of them keeping control of government to ensure their needs - staying rich - were met first before taking care of the general welfare (reforms when they happened only happen in waves, like the Progressive Era of the early 20th Century in response to the corruption of the late 19th Century).

This is where we're stuck today. Only the rich can run for office. Entry fees alone to get on a ballot can get expensive. You have to take time to campaign, make speeches, get on airwaves, kiss babies, etc. and only the self-employed and indolent wealthy can afford that. You have to raise campaign funds, which means getting other wealthy people to chip in, and who else can do that but someone from those same social circles?

And the current electoral system favoring dark money and deep-pocket SuperPACs - thanks Citizens United! - guarantees that the wealthy can buy their candidates and make sure they stay bought.

We may live in a republic democracy, and we in theory should have open elections where any person could put their name in to run for office. But in practice we're stuck in a system where the billionaires hire the millionaires to run the government across the board as much as possible. And whenever that gets threatened - when a political party gains power like the Democrats that are willing to disrupt the rich people's attempts to get even richer by avoiding their civic duty of paying taxes or answering to the law - they break out fellow billionaires to run themselves and do their hardest to convince enough suckers voters into thinking they are the MODERATE CENTRIST NON-PARTY SAVIOR of their dreams.

This shouldn't be a hard decision to make, America. Billionaires are ironically not worth it as Presidential candidates. They are more disaster than savior.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN uh DON'T VOTE BILLIONAIRES.

Update: So far, Schultz's campaign rollout has been getting negative reviews. If he's trying to appeal to Democrats, accusing the party's more popular figures as "unAmerican" isn't going to cut it... (via Paul Blest at Splinter):

Schultz has just been getting pummeled from all sides over the past few days for everything from his inability to provide a vision for the country that doesn’t sound like it was left on the cutting floor during West Wing writers’ meetings to his repeated insistence that taxes, a robust safety net, and essentially everything that he doesn’t like are “un-American.” But while a lot of the attacks have come from the left, even Schultz’s presumed natural constituency—ideological centrists who think Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump pose a remotely similar level of danger to the country—are already tired of his shit.

Axios’ Mike Allen, who’s never afraid to ask the tough questions, has a blog out in Axios today which serves to allow Democratic Party “insiders”—i.e., the people whose main responsibility for the last couple of decades has been making sure it never does anything too popular—the opportunity to verbally whale on Schultz and his insipid candidacy... One of Washington’s best-wired party operatives told me: “I’ve talked to six dozen Democrats, and the overwhelming sentiment is that he will be pushed out by this incredible wave of disgust and disdain rolling his way...”

Schultz is going to have a problem appealing to the "Centrists" among the Democratic ranks if Schultz keeps talking like he's further to the Right on economic issues than most Republicans.

Like I tweeted:

it's at the point where Schultz is essentially just trump without the MAGA Hat Racism, which shouldn't make Schultz a draw to anyone in this electoral market. Except the damn media will pretend he's a fcking moderate to try and draw centrist voters away from the Dems. >:(

This election cycle requires total focus, America. Don't vote for billionaire assholes, thank you.

A Statement On Core Principles

So, when it comes down to it, what are the issues I care about the most? On what hills will I stand and fight to ensure those beliefs remain core components of the United States I believe in?

My core principles on key political issues:

1. The rich, and large corporate entities, should be taxed at a higher rate than middle-income and low-income Americans to ensure fairness in the tax burden. This includes rigorous enforcement of upper incomes and large corporations to stop tax evasion.
2. Businesses must be regulated to ensure workplace safety, clean environments, fair access to products and services, high pay and benefits equal to the work performed, and consumer / community protection from any form of fraud.
3. All Americans 18 and older have the right to vote and shall not be blocked, suppressed, or denied their right to vote. Registration must be free and universal to all citizens. If imprisoned, Americans shall immediately regain their right to vote once their sentences are served or are on parole.
4. All Americans provided affordable healthcare across the board as a human right.
5. All Americans provided free public education for children, and affordable public education for all those of college age, as a human right
6. All Americans given personal control of their bodies and health with regards to reproductive rights, meaning affordable and unhindered access to birth control, women’s healthcare services, and abortion as a medical right.
7. All Americans have the right to know that the federal, state, and local governments that represent them are not committing crimes and human rights abuses, and that any agent, official or elected representative committing such crimes be punished (meaning no statute of limitations on those persons).
8. Americans have the right to be protected from active, violent, and spiteful racism / sexism, where haters do NOT have the right to attack someone because of their skin color, their ethnic origin, their gender, their gender preference, or their religion. As much as this means everyone SHOULD be protected, in practice this means protecting the rights and safety of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, Jews, Hindi, Sikhs, Women, Gays, Trans, and other minorities from the hate groups that are predominately White Protestant (mostly Male) Assholes.
9. No radio personality or disk jockey shall speak over the opening, middle, or ending of a song. The next SOB who talks just as Pat Benatar starts whistling towards the end of “Love Is a Battlefield” will be executed with extreme prejudice. I don’t care if there’s just 30 seconds of the song left, I WANNA HEAR THE SONG NOT YOU.
10. No more lying in politics. All elected officials, candidates for office, and personnel hired to work for them or our government agencies shall be held to an ethical standard that will punish them for false, hypocritical, and misleading public statements. If you can’t speak truthfully and factually on a matter you can always say “No comment.”

This is what I want to see. This is what I hope for.

Does this make me liberal? Perhaps. But I look at Europe where liberalism and conservatism both agree roughly on public welfare matters like healthcare and education, so I don't think that is what's at issue here. I've seen some self-declared conservatives speak in favor of public schools and affordable healthcare, as well as speak for protecting the rights of minorities. It's not the issues themselves requiring extremism to defend or oppose.

What does matter is HOW such plans are enacted. To what degree can we support the public welfare? What's most sensible about regulating businesses for safe practices? THIS is where the ideological fights SHOULD be, where being a Big Letter Liberal and Big Letter Conservative and Big Letter Moderate would matter. This is where being the Liberal would seek massive support and broad freedoms, where the Conservative would be the skeptic honestly concerned about the costs, where the Moderate would find a pragmatic middle ground that would make the thing work as well and as long as possible. This is where I find myself as a Moderate: I want solutions that work and work well for the long term.

But this is where I split hard against Republicans. Where the Democrats - actively engaged among their own ranks between Centrist and Progressive stances - are amenable and solutions-oriented about the issues that matter to me (and hopefully most of you), the Republicans have gone Full Metal Dogmatic. 

The modern GOP -  reflecting not Conservative values but Reactionary values - does not want debate on ANY of those issues. The modern GOP is absolutely opposed to reasonable tax hikes on upper incomes, they want to slash-and-burn. They WANT to cut the social safety net to nothing. In practice at the state level I've seen Republicans gut funding for schools and teachers, and blocked improved funding for healthcare out of sheer spite. The Far Right wants to eliminate abortion (AND women's healthcare) as a safe practice, and oppose sensible affordable access to birth control not because they're pro-Life (they're not even that) but because they're pro-Judgment (they want to demean/control/depower women).

And dear GOD: The way the Republican Party acts towards Blacks and Latinos (and Muslims) should make any honest citizen sick to their stomachs.

The modern Republican Party wants to deny the rights - the right to vote, the right to learn, the right to LIVE - of every person who's NOT White, or Rich, or Male, or over the age of 50. That's all I see of that party anymore.

That's why I keep screaming FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

Because I have principles. And the Republican Party does not.

The Return On Investment With Public Libraries (AKA Professor Mourdoukoutas Does Not Care To Invest In Us)

Usually I write about my librarian profession at my other blog, but right now I gotta slap the taste out of some entitled upper-class libertarian's mouth who went and wrote a shitty op-ed in Forbes about turning public libraries into Amazon stores. I won't link directly to the SOB (actually, as I was writing this article I find out Forbes removed the op-ed for reasons I can't yet confirm, but I'm willing to guess has something to do with the op-ed being a pile of dingo droppings), so here's a link to Gizmodo reflecting my mood:

This weekend in ratios we have a jaw-droppingly bad op-ed in Forbes explaining that the age of the crusty old library is dead, and instead of them, we should all get Amazon. Not some kind of Amazon-like digital public library, or even Amazon Prime itself, mind you, but physical Amazon Books retail locations. Titled “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” it is written by Long Island University Post economics professor and seemingly prolific Forbes contributor section writer Panos Mourdoukoutas.

Mourdoukoutas writes that the government should stop funding libraries in part to save taxpayers a vague (and within the article, never quantified) amount of money and also to jack up Amazon’s stock price for some reason...

Lemme guess, Mordorsukoulot owns stock in Amazon, why else fcking care about a company already worth billions on the market.

The professor also argued that because Amazon had online ebooks that it could be a lending library already (and in reality it is, using services like Overdrive to provide ebooks for Kindle readers), so all the brick-and-mortar places can just double as coffee shops.

Essentially, the article reads like it was written by an asswipe who hasn't stepped inside a public library in ten-twenty years, completely overlooking the growing trends towards Makerspaces - crafts, 3D printing, quilting projects for the homeless, art classes for teenagers, what have you - and ignoring the reality that a lot of children, adults, and retirees still read print books in this day and age.

The article doesn't consider the library as a community information resource hub, not just with public computers for access, research, and emailing but also a place where local groups can use rooms and equipment to work on projects, classrooms and presentations. I doubt an Amazon bookstore would create such resources for sharing (and from personal experience almost no bookstore does because it takes floorspace away from SELLING SHIT).

This article WAS written by someone complaining that he was paying 400 bucks or so in yearly property taxes, which points to the libertarian/Far Right ideology of "why do I have to pay for the poor to use community resources and places to do things like read, use computers, write resumes, and job hunt?"

Dear Professor Mourdoukoutas: You wanna know what your Return On Investment is with libraries? It's very simple to find - you can even GOOGLE SEARCH IT using "Return On Investment" and the words "public libraries" and not bother a reference librarian like myself - and you'll get a 2011 report from the state of Minnesota's Department of Education. In that report, on the front page so you won't miss it, you'll find you get a ROI of $4.62 per tax dollar spent. That's a pretty good return on investment, seeing your community get the kind of financial support that EVERYONE can benefit from.

There's a reason why, in nearly every tax hike or bond issue that comes up in local elections regarding library spending, a vast majority of residents heartily APPROVE of tax hikes to pay for their public libraries. I still feel enormous civic pride from the days I worked in Broward County and the county residents voted FOR a bond issue to build and upgrade library buildings back in 1995 (or 1996, I'm trying to find the citations now, sorry)

I guess the problem is, professor, you don't want any of that investment in our communities. You just want it in your goddamn stock portfolio.

It's a good thing Forbes dropped your op-ed, considering how poorly researched and lacking in citations it had. I seriously argue your university should investigate your failure to do the one thing I'm sure you tell your college students to do, which is to use peer-reviewed citations in your work.

In the meantime, to every American citizen out there: Library cards are FREE to apply for in most public libraries, we've got the latest popular hot titles in books and DVDs you can check out, and when you stop by take a look at the Activities Calendar to see what you can do with your families at your local library. We've got Paws To Read, we've got Story Times for Three-Year-Olds, we've got Lego Builders, we've got Gaming clubs, we've got Drone Flyers, we've got things to do that Amazon can never plan for you.

Public Libraries serve the public trust. Libraries are one of the few service points in a city/county government where people WANT to be there, and are happy using it.

That should be something certain professors need to study up on.

The Two Certain Things In Life: Trump Being a Con Artist and Taxes.

So the New York Times received an envelope mailed from Barad-dur Trump Tower itself, and they apparently took the time to get the papers inside that envelope vetted, and last night they released what their Sunday paper was going with on the front page:

Trump Tax Records Obtained by The Times Reveal He Could Have Avoided Paying Taxes for Nearly Two Decades

Remember the constant drum beats from Democrats, critics, certain media pundits, and pretty much most Americans that Trump should publicly release his tax records the way most candidates have done since 1968?

Remember how Trump kept throwing up excuse after excuse after lie?

"Oh, I'm being audited, rules say I can't release while I'm audited." IRS says nuh-uh, nothing stopped him from that obligation.

"It's meaningless, I'm rich, believe me." Reagan taught us to Trust But Verify, Ferret-hair.

"Oh, you won't like what you see so I just won't release them." ...Well, that turned out to be right.

Just the brief taste of revelation we're getting here - a set of state-level returns documenting the fallout of Trump's disasters in the early 1990s - is enough to raise more red flags than a mailbox vendor convention:

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period...

I don't who this is worse for: Trump, or the state and federal governments whose tax laws allow a massive black hole like $916 MILLION IN LOSSES turn into a decades-long benefit for uber-rich people. I doubt that kind of loss for a middle-income small-business owner would turn into 18 years of write-offs.

Just remember: The NYTimes reportedly has more tax returns in their possession. They just needed to release this one first because all the following tax papers require this context.

Aside from the schadenfreude of guessing just who within Trump Tower itself has betrayed their master,* this brings up a set of troubling facts:

1) This revelation demonstrates once again that the current tax code benefits the wealthy over the rest of us. The tax breaks Trump is qualifying for - even with his massive financial disasters - are simply unavailable to lesser incomes,

2) This one tax return is showing massive losses close to A BILLION DOLLARS. Given Trump's obvious habits of bankruptcies, failures, sinkholes, money pits, shell games, and additional screw-ups, how bad are the other years' returns?

3) We've had Trump running around this Presidential campaign cycle claiming he's worth $10 Billion. Yet this one tax return suggests he's lost hundreds of millions before with little evidence he's been able to reclaim any of that back (the reports of him living entirely off credit and Other's People Money become more obvious by the minute). Either he's really not worth billions of dollars - in which case he's clearly lying to EVERYBODY from the Beltway pundits to the American voters - or he's falsely reporting lost earnings to the tax collection agencies in order to scam them on the benefits of reporting these "losses". Either way, he's committing FRAUD.

This is Trump, aiming for the hat trick of stupidity, scamming, and self-aggrandizement.

Never one to apologize or admit a mistake of this scale, Trump's response to this has been to accuse the leak of being illegal and then argue via Tweet that "I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them."

Of course he knows those complex tax laws, he's been playing them like the con artist he is turning billion-dollar losses into fool's gold. But there's no way this con artist is going to fix a rigged game that benefits himself. His own tax cut proposals - killing the estate tax entirely, dropping the upper income rates to their lowest at 33 percent, and reducing corporation tax rates to an insane 15 percent - are proof of that.

I wouldn't trust Trump on taxes simply because he doesn't value them at all. He's clearly gaming the system to avoid paying as much of it as possible, and when confronted on his avoidance he smugly claims "that makes me smart."

No, Donald, that makes you a tax-dodging tiny-fingered Cheeto-faced ferret-wearing shitgibbon. And Americans DO NOT TAKE KINDLY TO TAX DODGERS.

* Personally, I got money on an elite team of high-tech accountants who performed the Heist of the Century (well, until the Wu Tang Clan and Bill Murray team up to steal their album back from PharmaBro).

Personal Reaction to Obama's Speech

1) Obama did seem to go out of his way to shred Paul Ryan's tax-cut, social-service-cut budget proposal for 2012.  Which in my mind was the right thing to do.  Ryan's budget is not brave: it panders HARD to the Far Right's need to destroy Medicare and Medicaid, and it attempts to add even MORE tax breaks to corporations already swimming in massive profit margins (just how much a burden are the taxes on them anymore?).

2) Obama still played the game being played in the Beltway (and owned by the Far Right): the idea that cutting the deficit is paramount, and not the need to focus on job creation (which could add to the deficits in the short term, but should reduce said deficits in the long term).  So as a result, the possibility of more austerity measures (which ARE NOT WORKING in the European countries already playing this game) are there.

What the hell happened to discredit Keynesian economic policies at this time?  There's no way the Austrian or Chicago schools of thought should remain this dominant, and you'd think after the massive catastrophes of the 2000s that the libertarians would be even more discredited than Keynesians.

3) I was not at all surprised that the Republicans and their media enablers and brown-nosers dismissed Obama's speech, or accused him of making "personal attacks" (which in Ryan's case could be truth).  Outside of admitting he was born on Krypton and then resigning the Presidency to return to complete his Jedi training on Dagobah with Master Yoda, there is nothing Obama can do to convince the teabagger Far Right wingnuts (I know, redundancies) of anything.

4) The speech reads well, and Obama did a decent job presenting it.  Most important, Obama seems to be drawing a line in the sand here: that he will not accept any further extensions of the Bush tax cuts for the extremely wealthy (the top two percent, the ones earning millions of dollars), for example.  For the most part, this is Obama's opening salvo for his re-election campaign.  But it's also a promise he made on camera and one he's going to have to stick to for the far left base - and the Democratic Party in general - to hang their hat on.  It's kind of his Bush the Elder "Read My Lips" moment: if he fails to live up to the promise, if the Republican House gets him to back down again on what Obama promised this week, then Obama's support (which is decent but not overwhelming) fades.

And there's already two major battles just this year alone: the debt ceiling vote due in May/June and the Paul Ryan budget showdown.  The budget issue is the easier of the two: The Democratic-led Senate is in decent position to insist on stopping the more harsh elements of the Ryan plan from passing the whole Congress.  But the debt ceiling vote is different altogether: it can fail in the House if enough Republicans (and even some psycho Democrats) vote against raising the ceiling, and the whole system collapses.  There's more at stake with the debt ceiling, more possibility that the House GOP will hold it hostage to negotiate for everything they want (including pony rides at the circus!).  And even though Obama is calling on Democrats to insist on a "Clean" bill for the debt ceiling (meaning no deals with Republicans who will try to add their pet projects to it), this is too scary a situation to be playing chicken with the global economy.

The trick is making damn sure the Republicans swerve first.  It's doable, especially since the latest vote on the overdue 2011 budget still couldn't pass with enough Republican votes (meaning Boehner is facing a sizable faction revolt... the same faction that's eager to vote against that debt ceiling...)

Obama's given his speech.  He's made a good number of promises.  But now he's got to live up to them...

Things I Want To Hear From Obama During This Afternoon's Speech

I originally posted this at Ta-Nehisi's house.  Hope he doesn't mind.

"If we want to be serious about reducing the deficits and reducing our debt, we NEED to look at how our government gets its revenues."

"We need to raise the taxes on those who can afford it: the millionaires and billionaires who still profited during these last three years of hardship while the middle class struggled to stay out of poverty. Not to raise such taxes as a putative measure, but to ensure that every American is paying their fair share into fixing our financial problems."

"We need to begin closing tax loopholes for corporations. Especially any tax loophole that benefits too few companies at the expense of the nation. And especially any loophole that does not hamper or prevent corporations from generating honest profit."

"Also, you all should really buy a copy of Paul Wartenberg's ebook. He needs the moneys. And some of the stories in that collection are pretty funny. Word."

"Also, I strongly suggest that every American hugs a puppy or kitten today. If you're allergic, perhaps a Pokemon action figure."

"One last thing. I wasn't born in Hawaii. I was born on the planet Krypton, sent here by my true father Marlon Brando to... wait, I already did this joke, didn't I?"

To dream the impossible dream...

From Balloon Juice, All You Need To Know About Our Corporate Overlords

This is from a comment posted on a thread at Balloon Juice.  The bold text was my addition:

The last election cycle demonstrated that even if you allow Wall Street and the corporations dictate a large portion of the policy, they will still fund campaigns to destroy you because they don’t want their share or ten times their share, they want it all, all the time.They are never going to stop going after social security. They want every single dollar of the education budgets. They do not want to pay any taxes for anything. They do not want any regulation that ties their hands with respect to their workers, the environment, or any other external costs imposed upon the public by their business activities. Oh yeah, and if they screw up and take the economy down, they want the government to bail them out.

I concur.

Until the Greedheads responsible for all the disasters we've suffered over the last three eight thirty years are held accountable and shipped to jail... until all the goddamn Supply-siders get sued for Fraud and selling snake oil to the nation... we are well and truly fucked as a country.

When Conservatives Attack: Their Amendment Ideas and How They Can Destroy America

One of the advantages of writing a barely-read blog is I get to go all out and toss some crazy amendment ideas into the global blogging forum: Hey, here' an idea for an Amendment, No More Lying!  Let's pass an amendment stating the President Is NOT Above The Law!  Wheeee, so much fun to be had.

But then the "professional" political hacks decide to get into the Crazy Amendment Idea arena, and it doesn't seem so fun anymore.

The media is all atwitter at the moment about Sarah Palin eye-rolling at a teacher, sorry, the media is all atwitter at the moment about Robert Gibbs dissing tree-hugging hippie leftists, whoops, the media is all atwitter about more of the Republican Party leadership coming out in favor of amending or outright repealing the 14th Amendment of the United States.

In particular, the Far Right wing of the GOP wants to get rid of the definition of citizenship.  Their public reason for doing so?  Getting rid of "anchor babies," the children that are born in our borders to pregnant illegal immigrants who then get to stay in order to raise said anchor babies as a means of circumventing the legalization process.  (Even though there is little evidence that "anchor babies" work as a tactic for illegals, and there's little evidence of a health care crisis because of it.) The right wingnuts got to this solution as yet another step in their ongoing war against Illegals in the United States, a complex and anger-fueled debate that has gone a long way toward driving Hispanic voters (the ones most directly affected by the anti-Immigrant outrage) into the arms of the Democratic Party.

There are a ton of problems with the current wingnut thinking on doing away with the Citizenship provisions of the 14th.  First: amending anything in the Constitution is a huge, mind-boggling and near-impossible attempt.  It takes two-thirds votes in both Houses of Congress and then two-thirds of all states (current 38 states) to amend (the other process - using national conventions - is so fraught with peril that it's only been used once to pass the 21st Amendment to repeal Prohibition and overturn the 18th Amendment).  In some respects, it's rather harmless to have the Far Right latch onto the amendment process as a means of winning their argument as it's next to impossible to achieve: what it DOES do, however, is build up the frustration of the Far Right to where they can and will lash out in other ways...

The second problem?  If they actually do make a serious attempt at removing the Citizenship Clause...

See, one of the ongoing issues with the crazed Far Right Wingnut crowd is how... emphatic they are about going after those they oppose.  Anyone who makes the Republican Party looks bad gets personally demolished by the next FOX Not-News cycle.  Anyone questioning the efforts of Republicans to lower taxes for the super-rich and deregulate every industry to the point that nothing will be safe or reliable will get demonized as SOCIALIST ZOMG.  And above all, the best way they can dismiss, ignore or invalidate anyone that wants to debate them?  All they have to do is point a finger and accuse their opponents of being "Un-American."

What could happen then in a world where Citizenship is not an automatic given based on birth but instead vulnerable to the whims and interests of whichever political party is in charge of Congress, the White House, and the Courts?  Nowadays the Republicans can call you "Un-American" and that would be just another insult.  If the 14th Amendment were gone... A Republican With Authority can call you "Un-American" and mean it... which would also mean no rights under the law, no protection from immediate arrest, no Habeus, no home, no life...  This is the true danger of what the Republicans are proposing to do by getting rid of the 14th Amendment.  They claim it'll be to get rid of unwanted Illegals... but also consider that the Republicans have no love of Muslims right now, and not much love for Blacks, and very little love for Liberals... and so on, and more, and also...  Repeal the 14th Amendment and NO ONE would be safe from the charge of being "Un-American."

Like I mentioned earlier, there's actual little threat to what the Republicans are trying to do against the 14th Amendment: the rules are stacked too well against any amending purge.  And even if they do get far enough to make even a half-hearted attempt?  The reaction from EVERY conceivable minority group - Blacks, Hispanics (especially the legals, the ones born here even five or six generations worth of family ties to this country would be threatened by this), Chinese and Japanese and other Asians, Indians and Pakistanis and Afghans and Egyptians and Algerians and Muslims, even Jews and Catholics and Hindus and Buddhists - will rise up to stop it (Native American tribes are protected under other laws, but even they could be affected by this).  And that's not even including the Euro-descended Caucasian Moderates and Liberals who will rise up as they too could get purged from the citizenship rolls just for the way they vote and think.  The only real scary thought is that the Republicans in power now are willing to even consider this...

After nearly a week of the crazy talk over getting rid of the 14th, saner heads are getting their say on the matter, most eloquently done via this Washington Monthly article:

Several former Bush administration officials, who, for all of their faults, weren't necessarily wrong about immigration policy, believe their party is making a big mistake.

[I]n recent days, former aides to both Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush, who pushed for comprehensive immigration reform, have condemned the calls by top Republicans to end birthright citizenship.
Cesar Conda, who served as domestic policy adviser to Cheney, has called such proposals "offensive." Mark McKinnon, who served as media adviser in Bush's two presidential campaigns, said Republicans risk losing their "rightful claim" to the 14th Amendment if they continue to "demagogue" the issue.
"The 14th Amendment is a great legacy of the Republican party. It is a shame and an embarrassment that the GOP now wants to amend it for starkly political reasons," McKinnon told POLITICO. "Initially Republicans rallied around the amendment to welcome more citizens to this country. Now it is being used to drive people away."

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, Bush's former chief speechwriter, added on ABC over the weekend, "That is the wisdom of the authors of the 14th Amendment: They essentially wanted to take this very difficult issue -- citizenship -- outside of the political realm. They wanted to take an objective standard, birth, instead of a subjective standard, which is the majorities at the time. I think that's a much better way to deal with an issue like this."

And that, sad to say, is coming from former Republicans leaders who have little in the way of directly affecting internal and external party dynamics.  But here lies the real serious problem: The current Republican leadership - made up by the likes of Palin, Gingrich, the House and Senate leaderships, primary challengers across the nation- is crazy.  And their interpretation of what the Constitution should read has been ill-informed, poorly thought out, and doomed with unintended consequences that would make things worse.

The 14th Amendment isn't the only part of the Constitution under attack by the Republicans.  They've been after the 17th Amendment - the direct election of US Senators - as well.  The wingnuts, obsessed with the idea of States' Rights, got it into their collective head that repealing the 17th Amendment will give more power back to the states.  Biggest problem with that?  It completely takes away a right now given to the individual voters themselves, which violates the Far Right's tenet of "giving the people more freedoms".  Which pretty much highlights how little the Far Right truly values an individual's rights.  The next biggest problem is that there's a very good reason the 17th Amendment passed: by the turn of the 20th Century the state legislatures in charge of placing Senators had become so corrupted by the practice that charges of bribery were rife, and some states got bogged down in the selection process to where one or BOTH Senate seats were vacant for years at a time (Delaware had NO sitting Senators between 1903 to 1905).  The Far Right's belief that repealing the 17th Amendment is a good idea merely demonstrates their ignorance of American political history, and their disdain for the rights of voters...  (oh, and one other thing the Far Right Republicans might want to consider: Democrats currently control 28 state legislatures outright compared to 8 Republican-held.  And more states are leaning Democratic day by day.  Letting the Democratically-controlled states to choose their Senators could well give the Democrats a 68-seat majority.  Say good-bye to the filibuster and cloture tricks.  NOW do you think that's a good idea...?)

And that's not all.  After 8 years of ignoring the matter during the Bush Spend-For-All Tenure, the Republican Party is trotting out their old warhorse issue of The Balanced Budget Amendment!  ...which begs the question why didn't they push this Amendment idea more back in oh 2000 or 2003 or 2004 or 2006 when they had the chance, but noooooo guess we can't ask them that.

The problems with supporting a Balanced Budget?  None, if you're serious about it, and the Republicans ARE NOT.  Their Budget Amendment idea would require a two-third super-majority in both House and Senate to raise taxes without a similar requirement for lowering taxes.  Thing is, we've got a perfect example of that in California: and any sane observer of the budgeting mess that state has gone through the last 30 years will tell you that transplanting that to the FEDERAL level is a swell idea!  /sarcasm off

There are more sensible methods of balancing budgets, but they include raising taxes at some point to you know ACTUALLY PAY FOR THINGS.  By knee-capping the ability of Congress to adjust the tax rates (going up as well as going down!) all this Balanced Budget amendment would do is kill whatever is left of FDR's New Deal: the forcible cutting back or eliminating basically every social safety net and government oversight our nation NEEDED TO CREATE to compensate for the damage that GREED and corporate incompetence caused from the 1870s to the Great Depression.

These are the Amendments that the Far Right Wingnuts want to pass:

• Eliminate the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment (and get rid of everybody the wingnuts don't like)
• Eliminate the Voters' right to directly elect their US Senators (and have the state legislatures become even more corrupt than they are now)
• Eliminate the Federal Government's ability to raise taxes when there is no other way to maintain funding for things like oh the military, health care, social services, commerce and transportation, state funding for state-level services like roads, schools and child care (and basically end the United States as we know it)

And people want to vote these Republican psychopaths back into power?

(Slight Edit for grammar)