BeckyDem
BeckyDem's JournalLONG-CONCEALED RECORDS SHOW TRUMP'S CHRONIC LOSSES AND YEARS OF TAX AVOIDANCE
( Trump and his entire family have been exclusively about grifting and fraud. )
The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire
Sept. 27, 2020
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html?referringSource=articleShare
TRUMP TAPS AMY CONEY BARRETT -- MEMO LAYS OUT TACTICS FOR OPPOSITION
A new memo spells out the myriad options available to Sen. Chuck Schumer to delay confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice.
Ryan Grim
September 24 2020, 10:24 p.m.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, setting up a ferocious confirmation battle as votes are already being cast for the November 3 election.
Barrett, who was previously named to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals by Trump, is an outspoken social conservative, broadly hostile to abortion rights, and a strong supporter of corporate rights. Her confirmation would give conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Court, making Justice Brett Kavanaugh the swing vote, and would be the culmination of a decades-long strategy on the right to marry the pro-corporate, anti-worker, and anti-consumer movement with social conservatism.
https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1309606675326795776
( excerpt) A memo circulating on Capitol Hill, put together by several people with knowledge of congressional procedure and obtained by The Intercept, lays out some of the options that could be available to Schumer even in the face of a determined Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Senators looking to obstruct in the Senate have a dizzying array of opportunities, but a majority leader with 50 votes, plus a tie-breaking vice president, also has an extraordinary amount of power in the upper chamber. Elements of the memo were first published earlier Thursday by the Daily Poster.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/24/memo-laying-out-delay-tactics-circulates-among-senate-democrats/
The Democrats' Supreme Court Hail Mary
( I'm pleased Biden will not answer the question on this issue. Don't reveal your hand now.)
This is the progressive case for court packing in a nutshell: “If your wallet is stolen, you don’t forgo efforts to recover it just because it might be stolen again.”
ELAINE GODFREY
5:00 AM ET
It was only a matter of time, really. Ever since Senate Republicans refused to hold a vote on Merrick Garland four years ago, progressives have argued that Democrats need to wrest back control of the Supreme Court by packing it full of liberal justices. By the Democratic primary last year, the idea had gone relatively mainstream, and half of the presidential candidates expressed openness to it. Now, in the five days since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, calls from the left to pack the court have reached a volume that will be difficult for party leaders to ignore. Democrats have few options to try to prevent President Donald Trump from confirming his nominee, whom he plans to announce on Saturday. So they’re already gaming out how to get revenge.
If Trump confirms a new justice this year, “when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court,” Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts tweeted over the weekend. Democrats at various levels of seniority followed suit, including House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seemed receptive: “Nothing is off the table next year” if the GOP tries to fill Ginsburg’s seat, he said.
Aaron Belkin, a political-science professor at San Francisco State University and the executive director of the think tank the Palm Center, is grateful to see prominent Democrats finally coming around to the plan he’s spent the past year trying to advance. In 2019, Belkin co-founded the advocacy group Take Back the Court in response to Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
The trouble for Belkin and other Democrats is their goal’s political feasibility—and not just because the party has to win the Senate and the White House first. Joe Biden has shown reluctance to eliminate the filibuster, which Democrats would need to do to pass a court-expansion law, and he is outright opposed to increasing the justices’ numbers, disinclined to take any radical action that would further exacerbate partisan tensions. “We need to de-escalate, not escalate,” he said during a speech in Philadelphia over the weekend. In a local-news interview last summer, he warned that Democrats would “rue” the day they packed the Court because Republicans would simply do the same the next time they were in power.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/democrats-case-court-packing/616446/
RepBarbaraLee: It's been 66 years since the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education
https://twitter.com/RepBarbaraLee/status/1306020304041451521
ACLU @ACLU VICTORY: Fulton County, Georgia will increase the number of drop boxes this election.
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1305944424069967872
Noam Chomsky And Robert Pollin Have A Blueprint To Overcome Climate Change
By KATHLEEN CREEDON & KIM JOHNSON • SEP 12, 2020
In the past three months, the U.S. has experienced a spate of extreme weather and experts say there's no doubt that human-induced climate change is to blame.
From wildfires, record-setting heat and widespread drought conditions to turbo-charged hurricanes and flooding, extreme weather events are increasing both in intensity and frequency.
The anxiety-provoking idea of an eventually uninhabitable world is compounded by fear and uncertainty caused by the country's pandemic-related fallout.
Scientists warn time is running out to take significant action -- a daunting task made more so by the ongoing economic crisis.
In their new book "Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal," Noam Chomsky and economist Robert Pollin assert that the transition to a green economy is necessary but will not bring on further economic disaster, as many assume.
That fear is misplaced, they write, and encourages climate denialism. In fact, climate change is an economic threat in and of itself.
https://www.tpr.org/post/noam-chomsky-and-robert-pollin-have-blueprint-overcome-climate-change
ACLU @ACLU If you're voting to:
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1305857150737154048Pass it on.
Biden/Harris 2020
@RepBarbaraLee: 19 years of endless war and trillions of dollars later, we are not any safer.
https://twitter.com/RepBarbaraLee/status/1305632501642268672Oregon Police Beg Public to Stop Calling In False Reports Blaming Antifa for Wildfires
Robert Mackey
September 10 2020, 10:30 p.m.
False claims that antifascists are starting forest fires have been spread by supporters of President Donald Trump.
Robert Mackey
September 10 2020, 10:30 p.m.
FOUR POLICE DEPARTMENTS in parts of Oregon ravaged by wildfires — propelled by high winds across parched land during hot, dry weather in a changing climate — are pleading with the public to stop calling 911 to pass on unfounded rumors that antifascist political activists have intentionally set the blazes.
The false claims have been spread on social networks by supporters of President Donald Trump, who has spent months pretending that antifascists in the Pacific Northwest dedicated to confronting white supremacists are members of an imaginary army of domestic terrorists called Antifa.
Primed by that fear-mongering, the president’s supporters have fallen hard for internet rumors and hoaxes falsely claiming that antifascist arsonists have been caught in the act.
“Rumors spread just like wildfire and now our 9-1-1 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires,” the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Roseburg, Oregon wrote on Facebook on Thursday. “THIS IS NOT TRUE! Unfortunately, people are spreading this rumor and it is causing problems.”
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/10/oregon-police-beg-public-stop-calling-false-reports-blaming-antifa-wildfires/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter
THE MYTH OF THE "BAD" IMMIGRANT
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
Immigrant communities are often asked to “get right with the law,” but is the law right in the first place? That’s what our guest Alina Das asks in her new book No Justice in the Shadows. She taps her experience as the daughter of immigrants and as an immigration attorney to ask whether immigrants who violate the law should be detained or deported.
Too often, she argues, our immigration system is used as a tool of discrimination and oppression, rather than as a tool of justice, and the consequences are dire. Our current immigration system is breaking up families, forcing people to face persecution – even death – in their home countries, and it’s all based on a false premise of ensuring public safety and national security.
Das is a professor of clinical law and supervising attorney at NYU School of Law. She is also the Co-Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic.
We’ve got some exciting news here at At Liberty. Starting on September 15th, we’re launching a special 2020 voting series called At the Polls. This will be in addition to our normal At Liberty episodes. Each week, we’re answering a new question about voting rights in the lead up to the presidential election. If you have a question you’d like us to answer, call us and leave a message at 212-549-2558. Or, email podcast@aclu.org. We so look forward to hearing from you. And until next time, stay strong.
https://www.aclu.org/podcast/myth-bad-immigrant-ep-118?initms_aff=nat&initms_chan=soc&utm_medium=soc&initms=200910_podcast_podcast_tw&utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=200910_immigration_podcast&ms_aff=nat&ms_chan=soc&ms=200910_podcast_podcast_tw
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