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Victor Hanson on recasting oneself. Our reconstituted politicians are engaged in the demoniacal politically correct need to disassociate from the white male society.
Even Gillette has gotten into the act with their new ad.
Like all fads, this too will die/fade but before it does the upheaval caused and the hatred it will breed is something we will have to endure.
Why is it that the nut cases draw attention and dictate the direction? (See 1 below.)
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My fall speaker, Salena Zito, diagnoses why Florida's Rick Scott. was able to win a Senate seat. Scott understands everyone, regardless of skin color, wants a job, wants education for their kids and a secure and safe place to live. DUH!
Furthermore, Republican politicians cannot come around at voting time to show their face. They must be there consistently.
Politicians pay huge sums to consultants to learn the obvious. Any politicians who is that stupid and does not understand basics does not deserve to be elected.
This is the one flaw in Trump's strategy, in my opinion. Yes, he has increased employment for the Latino and black community but he needs to do more than tell them from The White House. He should go into their communities and appear with them.(See 2 below.)
I am getting to know Salena and have invited her to come speak for me and she has agreed. I wanted to have her be the guest speaker at a SIRC, TP program but was unable to arrange it so I am working on a venue and when I have everything nailed down I will alert readers of my memo because she will be a fascinating presenter.
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The crisis Trump relates to is taking place far from The Southern Border. More Americans are now dying from opiods than in car accidents. Illegal drugs have penetrated New Hampshire, West Virginia and those living far from Mexico.
I have never engaged in drugs and being old and conservative I am not hip but I believe the drug culture can destroy our society and is in the process of doing so.
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Sent to me by a dear friend, fellow memo reader and dyed in the wool liberal:
"On Security From Stratfor World View
Why Walls and Sensors Aren't the Answer to the U.S.-Mexico Border Dilemma — Until America's demand for cheap labor and drugs wanes, its southern boundary will remain permeable – regardless of the walls or sensors in place. Link
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration created quite a stir when it attempted to frame the border issue as a crisis, citing the apprehension of many "terrorist suspects" at the border. But the numbers, quite simply, do not support the claim; indeed, no one who has illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border has ever gone on to perpetrate, much less even attempt, a terrorist attack in the United States." (See 3 below.)
This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader. (See 4 below.)+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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When this happened all my liberal friends who also were fellow memo readers said it was not true. If it was not true a lot of tax payer money is changing hands. (See 5 below.)
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I recently began posting Ross Rants and a dear friend and fellow memo reader sent me his biography . (See 6 below.)
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A former CIA officer offers his suggestion about what to carry when engaged in a walk it is very cold outside. (See 7 below.)
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I caught some of the Barr testimony and if you contrast it with The Kavanaugh hearings you have to come to two conclusions:
a) Barr was civil unlike Kavanaugh's
And:
b) Because Republicans have the Senate votes that had something to do with it becoming a slam dunk.
Even though Barr was the Attorney General serving in Bush 41's administration and was approved by a voice vote this time the political scene is more contentious. That said and probably the Democrats on the Committee may all vote against him a more rational display of comity prevailed.
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Dick
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1) The Game of Pseudo-Authenticity By Victor Davis Hanson
By Ruth King
Americans always have been prone to reinventing themselves.
We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American notion of becoming anyone one pleases.
One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a careerist effort to separate oneself from the assumed dominate and victimizing majority of white heterosexual and often Christian males.
Ironically, the quest for a superficial separation from the majority comes at a time when the majority has never been so committed to the promise of the Declaration of Independence and when equal opportunity has become a reality rather than an abstract ideal.
Yet in our new binary society, we all have a choice to be seen either as victims or victimizers. And thus we make the necessary adjustments for the often more lucrative and careerist choice.
Victim Chic
At the most buffoonish, sometimes activists simply construct identities out of whole cloth. Ward Churchill did that pretty well, when he fabricated a Native American persona and parlayed it into a faculty billet at the University of Colorado that was otherwise unattainable for such a mediocrity with pseudo-credentials.
Rachel Dolezal, recently charged with welfare fraud, became Spokane chapter president of the NAACP by falsely claiming she was African-American.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years leveraged old family yarns about a high-cheekbone, Native American heritage into Harvard’s first authentically Native American law professor. Her self-invention was much more likely a route to advancement than more dreary publication, better teaching, or just being Elizabeth Warren, middle-aged white female scholar.
Sometimes the self-transformation is subtler, and made through inference, not the wholesale construction of a new identity. Robert Francis O’Rourke, from a wealthy and well-connected Texas family of Irish descent, was a more or less a nondescript Democrat, three-term congressman backbencher—at least until he ran for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat. But in the midst of the national anti-Trump “Resistance,” “Beto” (Robert = Roberto = “Beto”) became a sort of veritable Latino identity politics and hard-left progressive sensation. O’Rourke’s Latinate emphasis too was a wise move, in that most longtime obscure congressional white male representatives do not become national figures and would-be presidential candidates in less than a year.
The oddity of Beto’s efforts at social construction was that Senator Rafael Cruz ran as “Ted.” In other words, he campaigned as what he really was: an assimilated Latino of half-Cuban heritage. In contrast, an Irishman without any Latino ancestry reinvented himself as a veritable Latino. And note that while most so-called white Texans voted for the authentic “Latino” Ted, most Latinos voted for the fake Latino Beto.
Barack Obama grew up as a middle to upper-middle-class student in prep school in Honolulu, the child of a visiting Kenyan student and a white middle-class mother. His sometimes privileged childhood was due largely to the talent and hard-work of his white grandmother from the Midwest who rose through the ranks to become a successful banking executive.
At various times in school Obama was known as Barry Obama or Barry Soetoro before returning to his given name as Barack Obama as a college student. Part of the reason why the later so-called unhinged “birther” conspiracy theory took hold (i.e., that yarn that Barack Obama allegedly was not born in the United States) was that Barack Obama’s own literary agency Acton & Dystel, in one of its own promotional pamphlets produced in 1991, identified Obama as “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”
His publicist likely created that myth—and Obama himself either did not correct the mistake or was not consulted about the attribution—not because Obama was a native of Kenya but because such a false claim was seen as useful in offering greater authenticity of the author’s “otherness.” The editor later confessed error on her part.
Recent California senate candidate and former state legislator, Kevin Alexander Leon was born to Guatemalan immigrants. He later changed his name to Kevin de León by adding the de and an acute accent mark apparently to emphasize his authentic generic Latino and perhaps pseudo-Mexican-American fides, in a manner his Irish first name apparently did not sufficiently convey. “Kevin” apparently sounded too suburban in the manner that Barry lacked the ethnic gravitas of Barack. And Leon, without the de, perhaps was prone to be mistaken as too generically European (in fact, it derives from Greek “leôn,” lion).
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest congressional representative in history, grew up in a mostly upper middle-class family in Yorktown Heights, an affluent suburb in Westchester County, New York. Her parents were Puerto Rican immigrants, her father an architect. Alexandria herself graduated from the upscale Yorktown Heights High School. The suburb was 90 percent white and the average median household income was nearly $110,000, placing it among the most affluent communities in the nation. Ocasio-Cortez graduated from the private Boston University.
In other words, Ocasio-Cortez’s family’s story is one of higher education, upward mobility, and integration into the majority population (somewhat similar to Kamala Harris’s upbringing in Berkeley and Montreal, the daughter of a cancer research scientist, and a Stanford economics professor).
While Ocasio-Cortez described herself as working-class and brought up in the Bronx, her family in fact moved to Yorktown when she was 5 years old. In her meteoric political career, she has presented herself as a Bronx barista (where she moved after graduation), and an often impoverished activist, who seeks social justice on behalf of the poor. While her message is certainly mainstream socialist (abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, ban internal combustion engines by 2030, Medicare for all, etc.), it gains credence by the working-class patina that Ocasio-Cortez wears.
Affirming American Identity in Denying It
There are logical inconsistencies in all these quests for greater authenticity, ranging from the outright fabrications to the more nuanced efforts of largely middle class and upper middle-class individuals seeking greater minority authenticity and by association claims on marginalization. But at the same time, a number of familiar explanations account for our epidemic of constructed identities.
First, racial, ethnic, or class appropriation seems to work, at least if the perpetrators do not push the envelope and earn too much scrutiny.Ward Churchill attracted too much attention in the aftermath of 9/11 with his unhinged rhetoric. Elizabeth Warren did the same by running for Senate and earlier allowing Harvard to advertise her ancestry as the law school’s first Native American professor, or testing fate with her misguided attempt to silence critics with a DNA test.
Second, what exactly is a 21st-century American identity? After all, if Churchill, Dolezal, and Warren for years were able to convince their employers that they were not part of the white oppressive majority, how did they pull off such bold “cultural appropriation”?
The easiest answer is that in a multiracial society like ours no one is usually quite sure of any ancestry that he claims (ancestry companies run TV ads precisely on the notion that we will all be surprised by our DNA results). And when superficial appearance is no guarantee either of minority status (given that we have not yet established DNA badges or quite reestablished Old Confederate racial purity standards), almost anyone can say he is anyone he pleases. Nor is class much help, since thankfully it has become more or less divorced from race and ethnicity. (Most white deplorables and irredeemables did not grow up in upscale neighborhoods nor did they have educated parents like those of Harris and Ocasio-Cortez.)
Is race then becoming a mere construct that we put on and take off as though it were a suit of clothes? In our collective effort to create difference where it does not always exists, we would have to invent an Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill if they did not exist—given the perceived advantages of white suburbanites in gaining a part time minority cachet deemed advantageous in terms of career and psychological well-being.
How odd that our establishment insists that being “white” is synonymous with unearned “white privilege,” while millions of whites in job and college applications for decades have been trying to con fake minority-identities and while upscale minorities have no desire—even when intermarried, assimilated, and integrated into the majority culture—of emphasizing the partial white ancestry that is so frequently part of their heritage. The old idea of “passing” now means hoping to be tagged as non-white, not white. The effort is certainly similar to the lunatic racial obsessions of the past, but the conditions under which advantage is measured have flipped completely.
Third, the process of appropriation nonetheless is constructed within the safety net of a comfortable and bourgeoisie middle and upper middle class. Warren was not so foolish as to emulate Ward Churchill and dress up in beads and buckskin (it would amuse but not impress Harvard Law School). Instead, she found authenticity far more subtly by submitting a bogus Native American recipe (lifted from the New York Times) to a cookbook anthology (Pow Wow Chow) of minority recipes, in which she signed off as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.”
Barack Obama’s epicurean, sartorial and culture tastes were decidedly upper-middle class (e.g., “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately? See what they charge for arugula?”). Ocasio-Cortez may be a hard core socialist representative of the masses, but she still had no objections to appearing in a $3,000 designer suit and posing for a tony photo-shoot.
Minority identity has become a brand for the upper middle class in the manner of a luxury car. One strives to drive a Mercedes or Jaguar not because it is more reliable or even all that much more drivable than a Toyota or Honda, but because it signals a particular cachet. And so too wealthy suburbanites often find emphasizing non-white identities useful even if it means occasionally constructing them.
Progressive Posers
Most of the constructed identity movement is deeply embedded within progressive and identity politics of the Left. In our strange society, a Shaun King, who appears to be as white as his birth certificate seems to suggest, is considered a more authentic African-American than a conservative and quite darker Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas, who grew up in poverty and discrimination in the Jim Crow South and yet is often despised by progressives as inauthentic. Is there some unspoken rule that the more one is of an authentically poor and of an unquestioned minority background, the more he wishes to assimilate, while the more one is upper-middle class and of dubious minority bona fides, the more likely one is to exaggerate them?
In other words, in almost every case of cultural or racial appropriation, the effort is largely one of a progressive seeking to be more even authentically progressive by identifying more genuinely with perceived victims of majority biases and discrimination. (In defense of the aging white liberal constructionist like Warren, if your race-obsessed party operates on principles of a perceived appearances, and grows obsessed with rooting out “white privilege,” and so often boasts that a new demography is at last replacing a spent and tired white majority, then it is perhaps logical to reinvent yourself, to identify with the rising rather than the perceived to be setting sun.)
In contrast, in a past multiracial rather than multicultural society, the common norm was radical assimilation into the purported American middle class to square choices and tastes with identities. That’s why arriving Juan Garcias became “Johnnies,” African-Americans were christened Eloise rather than Lashawndra, and Haruki Yamatos became “Harrys,” on the premise that Americanism was desirable—and anyone could become anyone he wished, which so often was an unhyphenated American.
We still can shed our ethnic and racial identities to become simple Americans, but the point now is not to appear part of the great American middle class with its whiff of the country’s Waspish founding, but rather to construct an identity in opposition to it—even if the construction is merely convenient and partial.
By “partial” I mean in court-jester fashion to deprecate more than appreciate, but most certainly participate in and benefit from, a rare democratic, free, and prosperous society as envisioned by the Founders. If there exists an alternate non-Western, non-American superior tradition (Chinese? Latin American? Nigerian? Russian?), then America should be the least desirable, not the most sought out home, of non-Western emigrants.
In the past, immigrants of all classes and backgrounds sought to identify as Americans and did so authentically, on the premise that one left one’s old country for a reason and had no wish to replicate its failures in a new and preferred homeland.
Now many immigrants and natives often wish to distance themselves from the perception of belonging to American majority culture—but many do so as inauthentically as their less well off forefathers once authentically sought to join it.
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2) Rick Scott Chased the Hispanic Vote and Got It
By Salena Vito
Nine years ago Rick Scott, then a Florida businessman, sat down with a group of self-described jaded Republican strategists to discuss what it would take for him to run for governor.
"You are not going to get anywhere with Hispanic voters, but we'll try," said Wes Anderson, founding partner and pollster for OnMessage Inc. (where my co-author, Brad Todd, works).
"Rick Scott looked at us and just shook his head. He said, 'I reject your dismissal of Hispanic voters. We are going to pursue them, and we're gonna pursue them hard,'" explained Anderson. "He flat-out rejected that there was this big chunk voters that you can just write off and you're never gonna get."
It is a rejection every Republican candidate running for office should emulate.
Scott, who won by two-tenths of a percentage point over incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, did so despite suffering the same poor performance among suburban voters all Republicans did. He made up for that shortfall with healthy support among Hispanic voters. He won 48 percent of the Hispanic vote, just about the same portion he won in his two gubernatorial victories.
Anderson said OnMessage conducted a post-election survey of 1,014 Hispanic Florida Senate election voters for contemplation: "Every time we win in a state we do a post-elect so that we can figure out what we did right, and what we did wrong, and what we need to do for the future." In an exclusive to the Examiner, OnMessage released the findings of the survey, which was stratified to reflect turnout.
The bilingual telephone interviews were conducted Dec. 10-15 of last year with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The Hispanic voter breakdown was 35 percent Cuban, 21 percent Puerto Rican and 44 percent other, which includes Colombian, Venezuelan and other South American countries.
The partisan breakdown was 44 percent Democrat, 42 percent Republican and 11 percent independent, with 2 percent refusing to answer.
The first question was "Who is the most popular statewide elected official, Gov. Rick Scott, Sen. Bill Nelson, Sen. Marco Rubio, or President Trump?"
"This is the image test," Anderson said. "The most popular person of the four we tested without question was Rick Scott." Scott topped out at 56 percent, with Nelson and Rubio both at 53 percent and Trump at 45 percent.
On job approval, Scott scored at 61 percent, with 47 percent strongly approving and 14 percent somewhat approving.
"Hispanics, including a chunk who said, 'I'm not sure if I like him personally,' said, 'Yeah, he's doing a good job as governor,'" explained Anderson.
Then the survey asked a series of agree/disagree statements, where surveyors read the voters a question and they answered whether they agree or disagree. On whether Scott cares about the concerns of Hispanic communities in Florida, 58 percent agreed, and 37 percent disagreed.
"Scott blows it out with Cubans, but we had majorities of all Hispanic voters agreeing that yes, Gov. Rick Scott, in fact, cares about the concerns," Anderson said.
The next agree/disagree question on Scott's time as governor of Florida was whether he made it a better place for Hispanics to prosper. Fifty-eight percent agreed, and 35 percent disagreed.
Jan. 8, talked to the Examiner exclusively about this survey and his early refusal to give up on Hispanic voters.
In his first sit-down interview since becoming senator, Scott said he's never believed people vote just based on the color of their skin.
"I think that their vote is tied to what's in their best interest, as a general rule. And so as governor, what I found is most issues come down to one of three things: They want a job; everybody does. They want their kids to get a good education. And they want to live in a safe community," he said. "And so what I did was I showed up, and I showed up and I talked to everybody."
What is his message for his fellow Republicans who often struggle with Hispanic voters, especially as the debate in Washington heats up over border security and what to do with illegal immigrants, especially given the sentiments expressed at the end of the survey?He said: "I think what we have to talk about is what people care about. They care about security. I don't meet people that don't want border security. And I'll talk to anybody, right?"
He added: "People want a secure border, and they want everybody to have the same chance. And we want it to be fair. And I agree with them. And so what we've got to talk about is the dream of this country, which I lived. From public housing, getting to go build companies, being governor now senator. You've gotta talk about, 'I want that for you. And I want that for your children, and I want that for your grandchildren.' And it's gotta be sincere."
Anderson said his biggest takeaway from the survey is that it's a result of eight years of showing up. "That is not six months of showing up. That's eight years of showing up and speaking Spanish the best you can," he said. "You don't get to that level where a Republican sitting governor has 58 percent of Hispanic voters saying that he cares about them without doing that."
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3)The Left, the Wall, the Truth
ByDennis Prager
3)The Left, the Wall, the Truth
ByDennis Prager
Democrats and others on the left offer three reasons for their opposition to
building a wall on America's southern border.
1. A wall is ineffective.
2. A wall is too expensive.
3. A wall is immoral.
Each one is false, so false as to constitute lies. So, the only question is:
Do Democrats and others on the left believe these lies?
This question has plagued me all my life. Leftism is built on lies - and has
been since Lenin. That's why he named the Communist Party's lying newspaper
"Pravda" ("truth").
Did my left-wing professors at Columbia University really believe the United
States and the Soviet Union were equally responsible for the Cold War? Did
they really believe one of the most genocidal regimes in history - which
butchered tens of millions its own people, starved as many as 4 million
Ukrainians, enslaved seven Eastern European countries under totalitarian
rule and created the monstrous North Korean communist regime - was no more
responsible for the Cold War than the United States, the freest country in
human history?
Did my left-wing professors really believe men and women are the same except
for body parts? And do today's leftists really believe human beings with
double X chromosomes, a vagina, a uterus, ovaries, menstrual periods and
lactating breasts are not necessarily female?
Do leftists really believe American universities constitute "rape cultures"?
If so, why does any left-wing parent send his or her child to college? Would
you send your daughter to a place you believe is permeated by rape?
Do leftists really believe that the statement "There is only one race: the
human race" is a racist statement? That is the official position of the
University of California.
Do leftists really believe that virtually every criticism of former
President Barack Obama emanated from racism, that all opposition to lowering
college admission standards for blacks is racist, that all attacks on George
Soros are anti-Semitic?
If leftists believe any of the above, let alone all of it, they are deluded
people. And the existence of tens of millions of deluded people in a society
can only portend catastrophe. If leftists do not believe those claims, they
are not deluded; they lie for effect and, therefore, engage in evil. The
existence of tens of millions of people consciously committed to lying means
society has little hope.
Now to the wall.
Do leftists believe the country cannot afford $5.7 billion? As the Democrats
have approved $1.3 billion for border security, the difference is about
one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. federal spending ($4.5 trillion). Democrats
and the rest of the left make this argument. Yet they are the very people
who, for more than half a century, have successfully pushed for
unprecedented expansion of government spending; the very people who are
overwhelmingly responsible for local, state and federal government debts of
such magnitude that they cannot be paid without massive decreases in
spending and the likely social disruption they entail. It is not possible
these people believe America cannot afford to pay for a wall. They are,
therefore, lying when they claim the price tag is too high.
California Democrats have allocated some $77 billion to pay for a high-speed
train between San Francisco and Los Angeles that will be ready in 2033 at
the earliest. It will undoubtedly rise to more than a hundred billion
dollars. And, thanks to the left and the Democrats, California is spending
this money despite being an estimated $2 trillion in debt (between debt and
pensions).
The left says a wall (or steel barrier) would be "ineffective" at preventing
illegal immigration. We know it doesn't believe this, because just five
years ago, Speaker Nancy Pelosi supported a bill that required the
construction of 700 miles of border fencing. And Sen. Chuck Schumer was one
among the "Gang of Eight" Republicans and Democrats who also supported 700
miles of fencing at the border. Every Senate Democrat voted for the Gang of
Eight Bill, including 36 Democrats who serve in the Senate today.
Do Schumer and Pelosi and all these other Democrats regard fencing as
effective but a wall as ineffective? Do Democrats deny that Israel's barrier
has virtually ended Palestinian terrorism? Do they believe Turkey's
just-built 500-mile wall across nearly its entire border with Syria will be
ineffective? Do they know about the effective walls/barriers between the
Turkish- and Greek-controlled areas in Cyprus; between Hungary and Serbia
and Croatia; Morocco and Algeria; India and Pakistan; and elsewhere?
As for the Democrats and others on the left declaring a wall "immoral," it
is difficult to know which is preferable: that they are living in delusion
or lying. On what grounds is it "immoral"? They never say.
Is there a Democrat or leftist who regards walls or other physical barriers
surrounding homes or communities as immoral? One doubts it. For one thing,
many of them live behind a physical barrier. So, then, why isn't a physical
barrier that protects America equally moral? The only possible answers are
that these people don't really regard America as their home or they are
lying about a wall being immoral.
So why all the lies?
Because lies are effective in achieving left-wing goals. There are people in
every political, social and religious group who lie. And there are people
within every one of those groups who are truth tellers. But - and this is a
"but" whose significance cannot be overstated - while truth is a liberal
value and truth is a conservative value, truth has never been a leftist
value. For the left, there is always something more important. In this case,
it is the humiliation of the president of the United States.
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4) The MAJORITY of Americans don't realize just how much POWER & MONEY the Democrats make off Illegal Aliens being in their districts.THIS is why they create 'Sanctuary' cities and states.
Simply by including Illegal Aliens as part of the population in the US Census, they get Millions of dollars from federal government assistance programs ( YOUR tax dollars) AND for every 770,000 illegal aliens in their Democrat-controlled area, they get a seat in the US House of Representatives apportioned to their area following the census.
YES! READ IT AGAIN !!!
After the US Census (performed once every 10 years), the 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are divided up by state populations and the last one resulted in one seat for roughly every 770,000 people...
So, let's say California has about 4 MILLION non-citizens living there right now...
That means that FIVE of their seats in the US Congress are due to people being counted in the Census who are not Americans !!!
NOW, imagine if by 2020, when they do the next census, they had 10 MILLION non-citizens living in California..
That would mean California would get 10 SEATS in the US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES due to non-citizens...
NOW, do you see why Democrats want Open Borders and Sanctuary Cities ???
The Democrats have found a way to get money and seats in Congress.
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE POWER & MONEY!!!
A wise person once said, ?Any government can prosper until the citizens learn how to vote themselves access to the public treasury, then it?s a descent into anarchy.
We appear to be on our way into the abyss, while our esteemed leaders are either clueless or are too busy looking after their own obscene benefits, designed by themselves, to give a rat?s butt about the nation.
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5)
Conservative Groups Targeted in Lois Lerner’s IRS Scandal Receive Settlement Checks
By M.D. Kittle
MADISON, Wis.—Dozens of conservative organizations are receiving late Christmas presents years after the IRS handed them a lump of coal.
The federal government in recent days has been issuing settlement checks to 100 right-of-center groups wrongfully targeted for their political beliefs under the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service, according to an attorney for the firm that represented plaintiffs in NorCal v. United States.
Three of the claimants in the $3.5 million national class-action suit are based in the Badger State.
“This is really a groundbreaking case. Hopefully it sets a precedent and will serve as a warning to government officials who further feel tempted to discriminate against U.S. citizens based on their viewpoints,” Edward Greim, attorney for Kansas City, Missouri-based Graves Garrett LLC told MacIver News Service.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>
Most of the claimants will each receive a check for approximately $14,000, Greim said. Five conservative groups that were integrally involved in the lawsuit get a bonus payment of $10,000 each, the attorney said.
About $2 million of the settlement goes to cover the legal costs of five long years of litigation. IRS attorneys attempted delay after delay, objection after objection, trying to use the very taxpayer protection statutes the plaintiffs were suing under to suppress documents.
The agency has admitted no wrongdoing in what a federal report found to be incidents of intrusive inspections of organizations seeking nonprofit status. Greim has said the seven-figure settlement suggests otherwise.
An IRS spokesman declined to comment.
Brandon Scholz, managing director of Wisconsin Small Businesses United, one of the groups receiving a settlement check, said the IRS’ conduct had a “chilling effect” on free speech.
“Shame on those people at the IRS who engaged in putting their foot down on the throats of people who were simply trying to advocate for an issue or express an opinion,” he said. “That stain on the IRS should remain there as a reminder that this should never take place again.”
Consumer Rights Wisconsin is the other conservative organization receiving a settlement check, according to Greim.
Disgraced former bureaucrat Lois Lerner led the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt groups. A 2013 inspector general’s report found the IRS had singled out conservative and tea party organizations for intense scrutiny, oftentimes simply based on their conservative-sounding or tea party names. The IRS delayed for months, even years, the applications, and some groups were improperly questioned about their donors and their religious affiliations and practices.
Lerner claims she did nothing wrong. In clearing her of wrongdoing, an Obama administration Department of Justice review described Lerner as a hero. But she invoked her Fifth Amendment right in refusing to answer questions before a congressional committee. The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit took the first and only deposition of Lerner, a document that the former IRS official and her attorneys have fought to keep sealed.
“At one level, it’s hard to even assess a dollar amount to what they did, it’s so contrary to what we think our bureaucrats in Washington should be doing. It boggles the mind,” Greim said.
In signing off on the agreement in August, federal Judge Michael R. Barrett said the settlement was “fair, reasonable, and adequate.”
Greim said the money recovered in the settlement approximates the number of IRS violations involved.
“That’s about what the evidence showed,” the attorney said. “We felt like we got about everything we could.”
Originally the class-action included some 400 potential claimants.
Conservative activists are skeptical of the IRS’ public apologies and its pledge to end such targeting practices.
“The message is do not let up on the gas pedal. Do not be intimidated,” Scholz said.
This story has been updated to include the following account:
Autonomous Solidarity Organization Inc., a Madison-based grassroots organization, is among a handful of liberal organizations receiving a settlement check. The vast majority of groups targeted were conservative, but the IRS began adding liberal organizations to its intense-scrutiny initiative after the agency got caught.
“In the spirit of democracy, we would have of course preferred that our organization, as well as all of the others in the class, had been treated fairly and equitably in the first place,” Sara Gilbertson, Autonomous Solidarity treasurer, wrote in an email to MacIver News Service. “As generous as the settlement is, there are fundamental differences in the work we were doing and planning in 2013 and 2014 and what is needed today, and money cannot change the past.”
Gilbertson said it took nearly two years for the organization’s 501(c)(3) status to be granted.
“Today, we are pleased that this class action lawsuit has been settled favorably and hope that going forward, no organization will face such unlawful and arbitrary heightened scrutiny,” she added. “We also find it delightfully ironic that the efforts of the NorCal Tea Party and their attorneys have benefited organizations like ours that are working to uphold human rights, social justice, and worker justice, since we would not have had the resources to pursue legal action on our own.”
Bill Osmulski contributed.
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JOEL ROSS
PRINCIPAL
CITADEL REALTY ADVISORS
Mr. Ross began his career in Wall St as an investment banker in 1965, where he handled public offerings, mergers & acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, and other corporate advisory matters for a variety of clients. During the seventies he was CEO of North American operations for a UK based conglomerate where he acquired and oversaw six companies. He also sat on the parent company board. In 1981, he began his own firm handling leveraged buyouts and investment banking, as well as financing real estate syndications. In 1984 Mr. Ross began providing investment banking services and arranging financing for real estate transactions with his own firm, Ross Properties, Inc.
In 1993 Mr. Ross and a partner, Lexington Mortgage, created the first Wall St hotel CMBS program in conjunction with Nomura. They went on to develop a similar CMBS program for another major Wall St investment bank and for five leading hotel companies. Lexington, in partnership with Mr. Ross established a hotel mortgage bank table funded by an investment bank, and making all CMBS hotel loans on their behalf. These were the first capital markets financing programs for hotels to be created since 1989, and it reopened Wall St to the hotel industry.
In 1999 he formed Citadel Realty Advisors as a successor to Ross Properties Corp., which focuses on all types of real estate investment banking. This includes raising equity, mezzanine capital and debt for individual properties as well as entities, and advising individuals on the formation of new entities for which he then raised the equity funding. In addition to the US, Citadel has arranged the financing for numerous office and industrial transactions in the UK and Paris. He has closed over $3.0 billion of financings for office, hotel, retail, land and multifamily projects.
Mr. Ross was co-master developer for a 240 acre brownfield mixed use development in Sacramento, CA., while continuing the investment banking practice in New York. He was also a founder of Market Street Investors, a brownfield land development company.
Mr Ross is also involved in the acquisition of notes on defaulted loans and various REO assets in conjunction with several major investors.
Mr. Ross has served as an expert witness in eight court cases testifying on debt structures, interest rates, markets and development. He was an adjunct professor in the graduate program at the NYU Hotel School. He is a member of Urban Land Institute and was a member of the leadership of his ULI council. In 1999, he conceived and co-authored with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Hotel Mortgage Performance Report, a major study of hotel mortgage default rates.
Mr. Ross is a graduate of the Wharton School and served two tours in Vietnam with the US Navy.
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7)It’s 28 degrees this morning…
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