America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Wednesday, April 7, 2021
JOE BIDEN - TRAINED IN LAW SCHOOL TO BE A LIAR AND CONTEMPTUOUS GAMER OF THE LAW - Biden adds stupidity to his lies about Georgia's voting laws
If Biden were merely senile, I'd fear for America but perhaps summon up some sympathy for him. But he's not merely senile. He's a vicious, creepy, stupid man, and his nonstop attacks on Georgia are Exhibit A in the case against him.
Biden adds stupidity to his lies about Georgia's voting laws
If Biden were merely senile, I'd fear for America but perhaps summon up some sympathy for him. But he's not merely senile. He's a vicious, creepy, stupid man, and his nonstop attacks on Georgia are Exhibit A in the case against him. In his latest pronouncements, not only did Biden continue to lie about the Georgia law, but he implied that the Masters Tournament should move from Augusta, Georgia, where it's been held since 1934, as if golf courses were fungible, not unique.
As you all know by now, the Georgia Legislature looked at the inefficiencies of its elections and decided that the state could do better. Therefore, it passed a bill expanding voting hours, increasing the number of pre-election days on which people can vote, and creating more drop box locations. It also did away with signature analysis as a means for verifying absentee ballot requests, a method that can be arbitrary and capricious, and, instead, asked for requesters to submit some common form of identification.
It was this last request that drove leftists insane. If voters have to submit identification, that lessens the opportunities for election fraud. Clearly, the ability to commit fraud is an important part of the Democrat strategy for winning elections.
Starting with Joe Biden's first, and only, press conference on March 25, Democrats have hammered relentlessly at the law. Joe is especially invested in the narrative, which he clearly understands. (That is, he's obviously not so demented that he has no idea what his words mean.) To Joe, the law is so evil that it's not even "Jim Crow." It's Jim Crow's big brother, "Jim Eagle."
Jim Crow was about demanding that black people take complicated tests that were impossible to pass as a prerequisite to voting. Jim Crow was also about lynchings, cross-burnings, sitting in the back of the bus, separate entrances and drinking fountains, redlining loans, restrictive housing practices, and all the other indignities American Blacks suffered in Democrat-controlled regions for 100 years.
Jim Eagle is worse, though, much worse. Forget about lynchings. Those are small potatoes. Under Jim Eagle, partisan people or agencies cannot hand out food or drink to people in line to vote. Also, under Jim Eagle, as noted, people must have identification to get absentee ballots (just as they do if they vote in person).
If you step back from the hysteria and look at what Democrats are actually saying, it's this: Blacks are too stupid to get an ID.
Thanks to Democrat hysteria, Atlanta-based corporations are now attacking the act, too. To do so, Delta Air Lines ignored that it requires ID for people to buy tickets and board planes, and Coca-Cola conveniently forgot its friendly relations with Nazis (for which it never apologized).
The most hypocritical is Major League Baseball, which pulled its All-Star Game from Atlanta, even as it remained unconcerned that it requires ID to pick up tickets at will-call. MLB also moved the game to Denver, a lily-white city in a state with even more restrictive voting laws — except that Colorado automatically mails those easy-to-defraud absentee ballots to every registered voter.
But back to Biden, stupid, vicious Biden. He spoke briefly to the press, one of whose members asked him if the Masters Tournament, golf's most prestigious competition, should leave Georgia. Biden pressured the Masters to do so by again reciting his Big Lie:
President Biden is asked if he supports moving the Masters out of Georgia:
"That's up to the Masters... It is reassuring to see for profit operations and businesses are speaking up about how these new Jim Crow laws are just antithetical to who we are." pic.twitter.com/mB8tDRnwFe
The thing is that golf courses, unlike baseball fields, are not fungible. For 87 years, the Masters has taken place at a single iconic location: the Augusta National Golf Club. Bobby Jones, one of the greatest golfers ever, was a club co-founder, and he helped design the course. He also started the Masters Tournament. To hold the tournament anywhere else means that it's not the Masters. It's just another golf competition.
So far, the people in charge of the tournament are holding firm. Let's hope they continue to do so. Any other stance would destroy the tournament and allow the Democrats to get away with the Big Lie — that is, a lie they tell so often and with such fervor that credulous people begin to believe it's true.
In December, Joe Biden claimed nobody in his family would be involved in any business that even appears in conflict with the presidency and the government. As Miranda Devine of the New York Post reports, it turns out that Hunter Biden still holds a 10 percent share of the Chinese firm BHR partners and is thus “still in business with the Chinese Communist Party.”
Big Dirty Money: “White-collar crime” and the nature of capitalism
Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White-collar Crime , by Jennifer Taub, Viking, New York, 2020
The term “white-collar crime,” which appears in the subtitle of a new book, Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, was apparently first coined during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The phenomenon is as old as capitalism itself. In Jennifer Taub’s work the focus is on the United States, but the reality she describes, though nowhere more explosive than in the US, is a global one.
Taub, a professor at the University of Western New England School of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts, brings together much valuable data and information on white-collar crime and on the connection between its recent prominence and that of extreme wealth inequality. Her book is noteworthy for correctly focusing on the role of class in shaping the lives and futures of humanity.
The author indicates that white-collar crime must be defined far more broadly than embezzlement or what might be termed low-level forms of corruption. She gives some recent examples of white-collar criminals, all extensively reported by the WSWS: the Sackler family, worth some $14 billion (as of the book’s printing), responsible for the marketing of oxycontin, which led to 232,000 overdose deaths between 1999-2018; Pacific Gas and Electric, to blame for the deadly Camp Fire of 2018 in California, which left 85 dead and the town of Paradise completely destroyed; and General Motors, whose faulty ignition switches led to sudden engine shutdowns and at least 124 deaths between 2002 and 2014, when the cars were finally recalled.
All of the above criminals escaped serious punishment, paying for the lives lost through fines that amounted, even where sizable, to the mere cost of doing business.
Taub makes a number of useful points in the course of discussing these issues. As she notes, the US has a prison population of 2.3 million, but even the very few white-collar criminal convictions (as opposed to civil cases) rarely lead to jail time. The few who have been jailed— Michael Milken is one prominent example—have served their time in “country club” prisons, facilities whose very existence illustrates the fact that incarceration is a weapon principally designed for and used against the working class.
Taub is hardly the first to note the huge gulf between the treatment of the poor and the wealthy by the so-called justice system. Petty offenses get harsh punishment while big criminals get off scot free. Eric Garner lost his life for selling untaxed loose cigarettes, Taub points out, while the executives of companies responsible for death and misery on a vast scale have paid no price. Indeed, as Taub was putting the finishing touches on this volume last May, this class reality was brought home, to the horror of vast numbers of people all over the world, in the murder of George Floyd after he was accused of passing a small counterfeit bill at a neighborhood convenience store.
The magnitude of the class gulf today is one that could barely have been imagined by famed French novelist Anatole France when he famously ironized, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
The last 40 years have seen an uninterrupted growth of white-collar crime and of all the abuses associated with it. Government has done much to facilitate this growth, and the political representatives of the corporate elite have often shared in the spoils. Furthermore, this has been a thoroughly bipartisan operation. As Taub explains, “in the Carter and Clinton administrations, legislation was enacted that allowed the credit default swap and private mortgage securities markets to flourish, enabling the toxic mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew up the banking system in 2008.”
This history serves to illustrate, as Taub does not point out, that the dividing line between the legal and the criminal, to put it mildly, is a porous one in the capitalist economy.
After the 2008 crash, the greatest since the Great Depression, the get out of jail card really came into its own during the two terms of Democratic President Barack Obama. “The Justice Department led by Attorney General Eric Holder from 2009 to 2015 let every bank executive engaged in accounting or securities fraud get away without prosecution,” writes Taub. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., another Democrat, brought no charges, except against a tiny bank that no one had ever heard of.
Taub’s polemical zeal in exposing glaring injustice can only be welcomed. Her outlook, however, could perhaps be summed up in a paraphrase of the Biblical reference to the poor—we will always have white-collar criminals with us. Or to put it somewhat differently, capitalism is here to stay.
She reviews the history, over most of the last century, of what she terms “corporate crime waves and crackdowns.” This is a cyclical conception, in which capitalist “excesses” are followed by regulation and reform, until the pendulum swings back toward corruption once again. The Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era, whose birth is associated with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Later, after the speculative boom of the 1920s, came the reforms associated with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Big business steadily attempted to evade or circumvent regulation, and the decades from the 1940s through the 1960s are dubbed a period of “invisible industrial violations,” as Taub puts it, leading to scandals such as Love Canal and the thalidomide birth defects. This was followed by yet another decade of regulation, this time under the improbable reformer Richard Nixon. The Environmental Protection Agency was established, along with the Consumer Product Safety Commission. After Watergate, other legislation established the Federal Election Commission.
American capitalism unquestionably did undertake major regulatory efforts in the last century. What Taub does not discuss, however, is the connection between the last 40 years, a period of uninterrupted deregulation and social counterrevolution, and the crisis and decline of US capitalism. There is little or no mention of globalization in this book, and no discussion of the financialization of the economy. We are left with the supposed problem of human nature, and of what is seen as an endless struggle against greed. Behind white-collar crime, however, is not simply greed, but a system of production and distribution that produces and requires it.
A cyclical theory of inequality and corruption followed by regulation and reform does not explain the last several decades. The Biden administration and its backers, who it is safe to presume include Professor Taub—even if she recognizes, quoting New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, that Donald Trump “did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it”—claim that a new era of reform is beginning. The conditions confronting US and world capitalism, however, are entirely different from those of the post-World War Two era.
The capitalist media dwell incessantly on misleading catchphrases like “systemic racism,” but the conditions described by the author demonstrate that what is truly systemic to capitalism is class inequality and all of its consequences. The solution to the misery that Taub details—the lives lost to poverty, illness and police violence—must also be systemic. It is not the pipe dream of a new era of reform, but rather the overthrow of the capitalist system and the building of a socialist society.
This is not Taub’s program. The final chapter of her book is entitled, “The Six Fixes,” and what she proposes is not much more serious than this somewhat glib heading. She calls for a new Department of Justice division devoted to white-collar crime; the amendment of the bribery laws to make it easier to convict politicians like Virginia’s former governor Robert McDonnell, who beat a bribery rap because of a legal loophole; legislation to protect journalists and whistleblowers; the restoration of Internal Revenue Service funding, after years and years of cuts that have been designed to cripple any effort to go after massive tax fraud; a nationwide registry for white-collar convictions; and improved data collection on white-collar crime.
To call these reforms would be a genuine stretch of the definition. Some of them amount to little more than improved methods of keeping track of the crime taking place, not doing anything about the conditions themselves. Even New York Times columnist James B. Stewart, in his review of Big Dirty Money, observes about these “fixes,” “These are earnest and well-intentioned, but small bore given the scope of the problem [Taub] so vividly illustrates.” It should also be pointed out that the fact that Taub, discussing whistleblowers, mentions Daniel Ellsberg and Karen Silkwood, but not Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, reflects her allegiance to what passes for bourgeois liberalism today.
Despite its serious faults, and although Big Dirty Money does not go much beyond a description of important aspects of 21st century capitalism, the exposures in this volume are vivid and at times gripping, and the book is therefore recommended, with the above caveats.
In the March 25 letter, Banks asked Biden whether he would address the “legally dubious tax strategy” he said the president and his wife used to skirt roughly $500,000 in payroll taxes. Banks pointed out “S-corporations” used on Biden’s 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns, in which “[Biden] and the First Lady sheltered over $13 million” from taxes designed to support Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
Rep. Jim Banks Accuses Biden of Tax Avoidance ‘Hypocrisy’
In a March 25 letter to the president, Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks called out Joe Biden’s tax avoidance “hypocrisy.”
Republican Study Committee Chairman Representative Jim Banks asked President Joe Biden whether he would put his proverbial money where his mouth is in regard to the tax avoidance Biden himself publicly criticized.
During remarks on Biden’s infrastructure plan, the president complained “millions of Americans lost their jobs last year while the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their net worth increase by $4 trillion,” saying “it just goes to show you how distorted and unfair our economy has become.”
In the March 25 letter, Banks asked Biden whether he would address the “legally dubious tax strategy” he said the president and his wife used to skirt roughly $500,000 in payroll taxes. Banks pointed out “S-corporations” used on Biden’s 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns, in which “[Biden] and the First Lady sheltered over $13 million” from taxes designed to support Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Banks wrote:
Press reports indicate that you both directed revenue from book royalties and speaking appearance fees into these two corporations avoiding self-employment payroll tax liabilities that would have flowed to America’s Medicare program that provides care to over 60 million seniors.
He then referenced a July 2019 article in the Wall Street Journal in which a Tax Policy Center analyst observed claimed: “there’s no reason for these [earnings] to be in an S-Corp — none, other than to save on self-employment tax.”
Breitbart News previously reported “on much of the income Joe and Jill Biden generated through the corporations they established to pay themselves—CelticCapri and Giacoppa are the names of the two so-called S-Corporations—they did not have to pay payroll taxes collected to fund Social Security and Medicare.”
Speaking to Fox News, Banks said “House Democrats used their oversight power to subpoena Trump for his tax returns, but they’ve completely ignored Joe Biden’s abuse of our tax code,” promising changes next year.
“When we take back the House in 2022,” Banks said, “Oversight [Committee] Republicans won’t forget about Biden’s legally dubious tax avoidance schemes.”
Banks said the issue shows that “Democrat hypocrisy is limitless” and their widely-publicized rhetoric on closing tax loopholes might not apply to everyone. “The ACA imposed higher taxes on millions of Americans, but not Joe Biden. He paid $121,000 less in ObamaCare taxes thanks to an obscure tax loophole. Talk about inside baseball,” Banks told the outlet.
“Joe Biden advocated for expanding Medicare, and is pushing to close tax loopholes and for a $3 trillion tax hike,” Banks continued. “At the same time, ‘Amtrak Joe’ made $13 million through speaking fees in just three years, then skimped over $500,000 from Medicare recipients through tax loopholes.”
In his letter, Banks closed with a pointed question for the president: “Do you intend to undo your hypocrisy and pay these taxes back to the American people?”
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