Tomorrow we celebrate the 245th birthday of our once proud nation.
We are currently presided over by a mentally and physically challenged pitiful president named Biden.
The Speaker of The House is a pusillanimous female named Pelosi whose party has been taken over by radicals.
A renegade Democrat, in possession of an arsenal, tried to eliminate members of the opposition party who were engaged in playing baseball, a sport once deemed our national pastime
Much more has changed in our nation., not always for the good.
We no longer tolerate different opinions on campuses if they offend snowflakes. Errant acts by a few police become an excuse to attack the public square, to disrupt domestic tranquility, to cause irreparable destruction, to intimidate and cause law abiding citizens to remain silent in the face of acts of sedition, domestic terror and personal threats.
Terrified and weak mayors and governors, along with an assortment of radicals and inspired Communists, call for defunding entire police departments. Laws and ordinances are passed which handcuff police enforcement and criminals are given free run.
Anti-Semitism has re-appeared and wanton attacks on Asians and Jews has returned to our streets which have been taken over by armed gangs.
Our nation’s borders are no longer secure. Lawlessness and the spread of drugs is the tragic consequence accompanied by unbelievable abuse to children.
Our elections have become challenged by charges they are restrictive because identification is demanded for those engaged in one of our most scared acts as citizens. The constitutional rights of all citizens are being challenged and the mass media, which once served as ombudsman, has become the handmaiden of a single party.
Our military is being used as a social experiment and it’s personnel are being retrained accordingly. Our entire education system is being used to indoctrinate rather than educate and the very foundation of our nation is being challenged as systemically biased and racially insensitive. Public trust in faithful and honest reporting has become a thing of the past.
Various racially constituted organizations have imposed their will on our society for the purpose of spreading guilt and enhancing their own status as they seek reparations for past sins which have been addressed and largely corrected a matter which has not occurred in any other nation.
Even our government has turned against its citizens through the use of technology and armed force. Until recently our Capitol was walled unlike our borders.
While are nation has declined commercially and competively our primary adversary has risen both in military stature and technological capability. A few days ago the CCP celebrated its centennial birthday and its leader threw down a chilling gauntlet that China would not tolerate impediments to their own growth and stature.
Nothing I have stated is factually incorrect. One may challenge the degree of my concerns but facts speak for themselves and cannot be denied. Lamentably, there is much more I could enumerate that has engulfed America regarding the protection of our rights, our person, our public institutions even our public statuary but by now you either have gotten the message's point or, are yourselves, the problem.
I may be cynical, I may be a pessimist but neither am I a dreamer nor blind to reality.
History reveals few societies last beyond 250 years. They fade due to external as well as internal event’s. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” I would add the words: indifference, indecision, illogic, intimidation and inattention, among others, to the mix.
Capitalism and democracy were made for each other because both encompass freedom of the individual to succeed to the best of their ability. All economic systems and government forms allegedly profess betterment. Empirically nothing man has devised tops capitalism. Wherever they have been tried socialism and Communism end in human misery.
So happy 4th of July or whatever apologist phrase radicals, and even our own president, have chosen to embrace. They took and/or are taking advantage of COVID to hasten/accelerate the day of America’s demise.
Be safe, stay well and give some thought to what I have written and the attached op ed.
America’s future should, at least, compel that, considering what is involved and what we have been experiencing.
+++
This op ed should be of interest because, if Jenkins is correct, it implies what I have suggested time and again when it comes to the bashing received by those who want to serve in government and often pay a very heavy price and thus, may no longer want to engage. As one who tried, was run through the political hate ringer and posited ' how do I get my reputation back?"
The Trump Organization’s Political Prosecution
When settlement talks begin, you can expect Mr. Trump’s political pull to be on the table too.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Donald Trump looked crestfallen amid his victory on election night 2016. As I duly related some weeks later, sociologist Anne Nassauer, applying well-established metrics, told me: “We can only speculate as to why President-elect Trump showed facial expressions of sadness. It is surprising that he showed these expressions directly after his victory in the election.”
Speculating wasn’t hard. This week is why. Mr. Trump, who is not the fool some imagine, knew winning the presidency was a dangerous mishap from a personal legal standpoint. Mr. Trump, until then, mainly tussled with sharpies who wanted only some of his money, not his destruction. He also knew that in our overgrown regulatory state, prosecutors can find something on anybody, even those who conduct their affairs with a scrupulousness foreign to Mr. Trump.
It’s “political,” Mr. Trump says of this week’s charges. Yes, inevitably and partly. That’s why people with Mr. Trump’s deep pockets and checkered history are unwise to go into politics, however much it might benefit the nation to have a broadly welcoming presidential talent pool.
The charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James are over the top for what amount to tax violations related to employee compensation. Larceny? Who stole what from whom? Mr. Trump’s company and its major-domo, Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg —though not Mr. Trump himself so far—are accused of doling out perks as normal business expenses, thereby avoiding personal income and payroll taxes.
________________________________________
Mr. Trump’s lawyer said, probably accurately, that such complaints usually are settled as a civil matter with the Internal Revenue Service for the reasons alluded to above. The IRS cares mainly about getting maximum money at least cost for its enforcement efforts. Not so elected officials such as Mr. Vance and Ms. James. If the prosecution is a giant net loser financially for the state of New York, that’s fine with them.
If the charges are right, among the expenses Mr. Trump picked up for his employees to maximize the bang for his compensation buck were school tuition, a company Mercedes, and free apartments for employees and their family members.
Mr. Trump would have dispensed these goodies because in New York City, where the top cumulative income-tax rate is 52%, he could cut in half the cost of providing after-tax compensation to a high-level employee.
Tax systems, which both fund the government and shape the incentives that drive the private economy, are too important not to be regarded with extreme practicality. Every tax system operates on the margin between people’s desire to live within the law and their incentive to cheat, which smart tax designers keep in mind.
You will be right to ask: If Mr. Trump is now to be held to this standard of tax honesty, will others? When and if a grand jury gets around to indicting him for offenses reportedly related to how buildings were valued for tax and banking purposes, the same questions will simmer. As the New York Times reported in 2018 after digging through a decade of Trump family tax data, the Trumps use the same appraisers, tax lawyers and accountants that other New York real-estate families use, albeit the others are not so imprudent as to put their heads in the tiger’s mouth by contesting with the nation’s political class for its top prize.
It wouldn’t be right to leave this subject without a passing note. On the same behavior that is rightly treated as offensive if Mr. Trump does it, Congress built the distortion that many diagnose as a root cause of our healthcare-financing maladies: employers being allowed to hand out health coverage to employees as untaxed compensation, which ends up inflating the price of healthcare and disproportionately benefits wealthier taxpayers.
The likelihood that Mr. Trump, for all his incentive to signal otherwise, would run for president again always seemed to me low and seems lower now. His investment in the stolen-election lie struck me as the opportunism of the checkers player, without a plan. He realized if he backpedaled and ran up the white flag his audience would drift away. His ability to reward and punish by mobilizing his supporters would disappear. His way into the minds of 40% of voters would be a power officeholders and office-seekers would no longer have to fear (it’s eroding anyway thanks to the social media freeze-out). I expect when Mr. Trump enters settlement talks with his latest legal assailants, he intends this ability to make trouble or refrain from making trouble will be a bargaining chip on the table too.
And:
Trump served and certainly continues to receive such hate driven political over-reach, treatment and abuse:
Indicting the Trump Organization
Years of investigation and prosecutors come up with a small tax case.
By The Editorial Board
Democrats of all stripes have devoted years to investigating Donald Trump and finding very little. The latest example is Thursday’s indictment of the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer for classifying employee benefits as business expenses rather than compensation.
Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed millions of documents and years of tax returns, and that’s all they’ve come up with. The indictment lists 15 criminal counts, including second degree grand larceny. But the evidence in the indictment boils down to misreporting compensation to the Internal Revenue Service and New York tax authorities.
Prosecutors allege that Allen Weisselberg, the 73-year-old accountant and CFO, received as much as $1.76 million in compensation over a 16-year-period—for cars, an apartment rental, and tuition for Mr. Weisselberg’s grandchildren at a private school—in a way that kept them off the books for tax purposes. The indictment says he avoided paying $901,112 he owed in taxes and collected federal and state tax refunds of $133,124 he wasn’t entitled to.
If true and willful, this is rotten behavior. But it isn’t Teapot Dome, and disguising compensation as expenses is far from unusual in corporate America. It’s typically handled as a civil matter and settled with the payment of back taxes, interest and fines. It is rarely the basis for a criminal indictment.
The prosecutors are throwing the book at Mr. Weisselberg to get him to turn state’s evidence against the former President. The same goes for the highly unusual decision to indict the Trump Organization, which is presumably intended to squeeze its business prospects. Notably, neither Mr. Trump nor his children who run the business were charged.
The political motives at work are transparent. Mr. Vance has pursued Mr. Trump and his tax records for years, even as street and violent crime proliferates in New York City. Ms. James campaigned on a promise to shine “a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.” She all but promised a selective prosecution—that is, pick a target, then search for a crime to allege.
This is precisely the practice Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson famously warned against in his advice to prosecutors about abusing their vast powers, as our friends at the New York Sun remind us. That temptation is worse when it looks like political targeting.
In 2017 we criticized Mr. Trump for urging his Attorney General to charge Hillary Clinton, saying the push to “prosecute his defeated opponent is the kind of crude political retribution one expects in Erdogan’s Turkey or Duterte’s Philippines.” Mr. Trump’s AGs were wise enough to resist, but some state GOP prosecutors will eventually return Mr. Vance’s favor against a Democratic target.
The expectation among Democrats is that the charges will finally diminish Mr. Trump’s political appeal, but will they? Like impeachments one and two, the case gives Mr. Trump another chance to portray himself as the populist knight taking on the corrupt powers that be. If the charges fail in court, and prosecutors have nothing else, Mr. Trump will claim blanket vindication.
No comments:
Post a Comment