Nevertheless, he added, “the judge gave him a max sentence, claiming it was ‘a moral imperative’ to punish him as harshly as possible.”
This guy gets fried on ‘mOrAL iMpeRaTivE’ — but Trump and Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh continue to party on— while making a complete mockery of the ever apparent 2-tiered US justice system.
It annoys me to no end that real-life whistleblowers end up in jail, have to emmigrate or die under mysterious circumstances, but fictional whistleblowers are cheered on in theatres and novels.
It's like America has a severe case of cognitive dissonance that the world sees, but is happy to stay that way no matter the cost.
Fictional whistleblowers are cheered on because the public likes whistleblowers and the people making the fiction know that but real whistleblowers are persecuted because the people in power do not represent the public
As has been said here before, not many cheered for Chelsea, Snowden, Reality or even Assange.
We can't keep blaming the elite who rule us if we're not willing to put boots on the ground and shut the nation down until politicians do the right thing.
And it's not impossible ... just look at France to see how it should be done.
Real life whistleblowers don't have a full team of Hollywood PR professionals boosting their image.
The closest we came to a real whistleblower celebrity was Edward Snowden. And when he left Hong Kong for Russia, all the liberals who thought he was a based freedom fighting chad decided oops nah, Big Russia Foreign Agent disregard everything about that PRISM shit.
If anything, the jester solidifies the king’s power by working for the king as a sort of pressure valve. The king wants some of the discontent of the people to be expressed openly, releasing built-up tension and ensuring that said discontent will not burst in actions that could really undermine his position. The jester is his means of doing that.
When we, the public, laugh at the king, our laughter is also an expression of his power. He wants us to laugh so as not to act. It is, then, his laughter grafted onto our faces. When we laugh at the king, it is actually the king laughing at us.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with killing two people and wounding a third during racial justice unrest in Wisconsin last year, is continuing to rack up massive amounts of donations ahead of his November trial, according to a legal defense fund associated with his family which said Monday it has raised nearly $500,000 in the past three months. Forbes
Support for Charles Littlejohn $48,685 USD raised of $250,000 goal GoFundMe
To be fair though, Kyle Rittenhouse gets indirect funding from all the weapon manufacturers and conservative groups. Charles Littlejohn managed to piss off everybody who matters/makes decisions.
"We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes." - Leona Helmsley. (~ 1989)
(Convicted of extortion; sentenced to 16 years; released after months.) Her husband's death left her with the Helmsley hotels, the Helmsley Palace and the Empire State Building. (Yes, that one.)
Biden if you were looking for a chance to prove you're about reform and equality for working classes, now is your chance to pardon this guy and give him a position in department of treasurey.
It will never happen. Biden is owned by the same people as Trump. There's only one party, the party of the Oligarchs. All of the petty shit about abortion, trans rights, gay rights, racial equality, gender equality, religion, second amendment, etcetera are all distractions to keep us all at each others throats while the rich cocksuckers figure out more insidious ways to fuck us all over.
This sounds a lot like the one party "they're all the same" bullshit that right wingers like to propogate.
Because make no mistake, one party is at least trying to push laws through that help (democrats), versus the other which just openly fucks people and doesn't give a shit about helping out.
Fuck this bullshit. There is a difference here, and what you're spouting here is pure Propaganda.
I agree the wealthy on both sides IS treated differently from all of the rest of us, but that doesn't mean there's no difference between fascism and the failure of progress.
Another thing. If that were going to happen, why hasn't he pardoned Julian Assange yet, hmm? Assange embarassed the elites and exposed their bullshit. Trump was his fan for a minute until his bullshit got exposed too. Turns out that Hillary has more ties with Russia than Trump. It's the Machiavellian strategy: accuse your opponent of the thing you're guilty of.
His name is Littlejohn, and he's fighting against rich people? It was his destiny! If that judge didn't let him off he must be in bed with the aristocrats!
There's only so many times you can guillotine the same corpse before it gets old. After all it's "eat the rich", not "slice the rich like toast". So a few days will be sufficient.
I think the biggest problem is how it's such a complicated issue, it's really hard to just 'rally the masses around'. Especially when there's plenty of other runaway complicated issues we also need to rail against.
I think this is why the "Occupy Wall St." protests ultimately fizzled. People were pissed, many knew exactly why, many had a vague idea, and many others just wanted to blow off steam.
One "advanatage" the rich have with their ideology is insidious simplicity. Does it serve money? Do that. Does it keep you rich and punish others? Do that. Terribly predictable, but they all unite under solidarity of acquiring currency. They're not bothered with how it affects the planet or any other human beings that don't threaten their accounts.
A majority of these injustices are essentially us being very unhappy with all the complicated, multifaceted, complex ways in which these weaponized simpletons pursue cash and the power to acquire more cash. We know something is VERY wrong, but untangling it enough to unite under a common demand is a much heavier burden.
A lot of the problems boil down to FPTP-voting and the current way political campaigns are financed. They result in this polarized deadwater where money and power practically become synonymous words wielded to keep anything from changing via journalism and the courts on this matter. It's exactly as intended by the old roman aristocrats that designed it over 2 millenia ago to maintain influence regardless of voter outcomes.
And the Judge was furious they couldn't give him a harsher sentence. That five years was quite literally throwing the book at him. It's a felony, though, so even after he gets out he'll be stripped of his rights to vote or purchase a firearm. His job prospects will dwindle to the point of non-existence. And I think he'll be prevented from owning a computer or accessing the Net, given the nature of his crime.
Computer restrictions can be part of probation, but after that, he should be okay to own one. Voting right is a state-by-state thing, I think. Firearms are 100% everywhere for him, though.
I wonder what would have been revealed if he had published tax information on all of Congress.
I feel like them calling for such harsh treatment isnl a defense mechanism for knowing they either use the same tactics,.or they don't like when someone mentions all the legal insider trading/conflict of interest they all do?
I'm pretty sure every senator and rep has more money then everyone I know.
Tax avoidance is the real problem, while tax evasion is largely a misdirection at people who begin to get a fraction of their wealth without the experience to properly manage it. They've even penalized people who essentially have nothing to do with the US, accidental Americans (those who've lived their entire life in another country), as tax evaders because of the slimmest thread of association to the US.
Imagine being growing up in a country for decades, working there and having everything there, and having the US show up and tell you that your day-to-day bank account down the street is really a foreign bank account, using their economic weight to have the bank freeze it and throw you out. It isn't a case of the theoretical, it has happened, and those people have been forced to "renounce" (heckled) to fork out over $4k to get them off their back - and even the EU has been ok with this, largely because it also answers to the lobbyists of wealthy billionaires.
Meanwhile rich assholes use what are essentially shell corporations (they don't even have to be because of the size of their wealth) to move their wealth to whatever fiscal paradise they want. They don't even need to change their citizenship because they can just create a corporation with headquarters wherever they please for whatever tax benefits it gives them. This is the problem: https://time.com/6326583/tax-shelters-multinational-corporations/
I just learned: In ancient times the government paid money to their citizens to get their fellowship. Only conquered countries had to pay taxes.
And in ancient times in Mesopotamia, there have been quite regular debt reset events. All private debts got null. Commercial debts still were valid.
I‘m currently reading „Debt“ by David Graeber. Interesting to read how religion, money, guilt and debt are intertwined. How we are forced into the rat race by burden us with debts - with both, moral and financial debts.
"Debt: The First 5000 Years" is such a good book because it really exposes the dynamics of conquest.
Conquered countries had to pay taxes in the coin of the realm. Coin was paid to the soldiers occupying the country. So in order to pay taxes, you were obligated to do business with the occupying soldiery. This system very quickly sorted the folks willing to accept conquest from the folks intent on rebellion, and it had a secondary benefit of enriching the defectors.
The conception of currency as a means of delimiting who is and is not a part of your society is really a genius bit of social engineering.
This guy obviously shouldn’t be in jail, can someone expand on the guy who the article says was forced into psychiatric care?
Anyways this one legal loophole has been around for awhile—rich people can acquire really low interest loans against their assets so they do, and they use that to pay their expenses, and when it comes tax time they write down that they made some money but they also took out a massive loan so actually they’re in the red. If you own a house you could probably leverage this to some extent yourself. Maybe if everyone who could did it they’d close the loophole? Obviously you couldn’t get rates as low as a politician who chills with the Schwab CEO.
If you own a house you could probably leverage this to some extent yourself.
That's a mortgage. Most people use it to pay for the house itself, but you are free to use the money in other ways if you already own the house. It's probably the only leveraged asset many people own, and the interest rate isn't particularly low at the moment, but it's the same thing as getting, say, a line of credit against your yacht.
It's called a secured loan. And a house secured loan (aka mortgage) isn't as good as a stock secured loan.
Stock secured loans rates were basically zero for quite a few years. I think this is why all the venture capital suddenly dried up. Both owning a stock AND taking out a loan based on that stock at 0.25% APR is an insane deal. A year of interest on a million dollars is $2,500. And the stock you're holding will outperform that. After a few years you just sell a bit of the stock to continue paying the interest of the loan.
Now that the interest rates are 6-7% things are different. Suddenly your yearly payment on that million dollar loan is $65,000 instead of $2,500. And your stock may not make 6% this year to pay for it.
It's kind of a miracle this return to reality didn't cause more of a collapse.
There are also equity based life insurance policies I think you can do similar things. My guy explained it to me as the justification for the policy and of course because I'm a stupid simpleton, I've never looked at actually trying to do something with it.
America built on the backs of the poor, with the rich with whips whipping at their backs. But we all knew this. We know that the rich are evading axes, and we poor are all paying for the criminey! government funding that we hate. (there are some good things the government funds, but nothing compared to what they put in crazy wars and overseas spending. But that's another gripe.) I kind of feel bad this guy got 5 years for telling us all what we already know. Now if he would have given us all a way to fix this problem, that would be something for the rich and government to be in an uproar about.
And five years is quick, compared to the life sentence exile that Edward Snowden got. We all knew all that stuff too.
Everyone has well covered my frustration with both the tax ideas here and some miscarriage justice, so I have this question:
Question:
What countries do you think are really good examples of what right looks like for taxation?
Any countries that rise above the rest for proper proportion of personal tax, corporate tax, etc?
Why: The older I get, the more I feel like Americans are tought that capitalism good, else bad; rich are the reason the rest of us have it as good as we do, and we should thank them for it.
I'd like to compare to other countries, that's why I'm curious,.just trying to Google is a broad starting place.
I'd start with a braoder picture first that will have the best chance of naturally funneling you to the information you seek.
I'd start with looking up what merits are used to consider a government ran program successful.
From there use those merits but look for examples of programs and the governments responsible for the programs that have been used as models for what happens when a program FAILS to meet each of those merits.
Then look at what each of the failed programs cost to the taxpayers and what percentage of that goverment's total the failed program accounts for.
Divide those costs by the population of tax payering citizens and you will have what earch failed program cost each person.
Do the same process for successful programs to form a picture of what efficient tax funded programs vs inefficient/failed programs look like.
Ive done similar analysis cant remember what the reson specifically was for but the added bonus of doing the search yourself is eventually you'll start finding similar researchers doing similar analysis and discovering methods, questions, variables you didnt even know you were missing.
What I do remember from my similar search was finding several really good articles on the systematic failures plagueing government ran programs that exist accross many different government models and why they cant be fixed without a complete overhaul of how a governing body is structured.
One of the things they broje down is how any government ran program is the same entity assessing the cost efficiency of a program is almost always the same entity making its budget proposals. Which is the same entity that usually advocated and proposed the program. Which is the same entity whose tenure is dependent on the success of the program.
Its been a really long time since I read the article and did my best from memory but without finding the articles, ill admit I may have butchered explaining that example lol.
Basically for a governing power to have longevity it needs to have redundancies to prevent burning out and those redundancies make gorernment ran programs incapable of having many of the natural variables of business to affect any government ran program.
Again, full disclaimer I'm shooting from the hip and the take away should be the method that works for me to find answers for either really obscure topics or really specific topics.
Some of what you mentioned reminds me of the use it or loose is spending model of appropriated funds, and the automatic renewal of some funding year and year.
How much privacy is expected of the POTUS? Precedent is established and in the case of the Presidency strictly adhered to until as of recently. Nah, the public was given what was owed to it.
Because there are very few rules that should be universal. "Keeping tax returns secret so they don't expose the benefits rich people get" isn't one of them.