The fact that Trump avoided paying taxes using every means legal should surprise no one; it’s a tactic available to everyone, and the wealthier one is, the more latitude one has to play these tricks.
To most observers, however, there is criminality here, in the form of placing a corrupt IRS commissioner who agreed not to perform his duty re: auditing each tax return of a sitting president.
If, on top of this, you add corporate control of the media that Americans are force-fed, you have 98+% of the U.S. electorate that are truly powerless to control their financial condition, let alone reproductive rights, etc.
We have the illusion of choice, but beneath that, there is no real substance whatsoever.
This from British scientist and conservationist Charlie Gardner. It really is astonishing how little humankind is doing to prevent environmental collapse and other forms of societal decay.
An important factor at play here is that the vast majority of the world’s people live under great financial duress. Whether that means the poor or the working-class, stressed-out people don’t have resources to become activists, and organize against a societal structure that is in the process of driving us into extinction, or at best, a hellish existence.
As 20th Century American author Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The response to all this from the top 1% is truly appalling: We have no interest whatsoever in making changes to a system that is making us even richer by the day, regardless of the irreparable damage that our current life modalities are having on this planet.
Every once in a while I write a short post extolling the virtue of planting trees as a tool in climate change mitigation.
Normally, these are inspired by the works of an artist I follow, Italy’s Maurizio Rega. I simply adore his piece here.
Perhaps the single most telling aspect of the moral demise of the Republican Party is its failure to criticize its congresspeople for things like entertaining racists at the White House and running election campaigns based on pure lies.
Can’t someone stand up and say, “Er, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this?”
If I were a PR guy advising them on their desperate need to regain the trust of the American voters, I’d say, “Boys, you can’t openly embrace some of the most unethical behavior imaginable. Your voters are stupid but there is (I believe at least) a limit.”
Re: the words at left, a reader notes: New Year’s Resolution: “I can not tell a lie… Neither can you!”
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, as the Big Lie continues to lose its grip on the Republican party, and Trumpism, we hope, gradually is replaced with a slightly less hateful and insane version of what we’ve experienced since the former president came to power.
The separation of church and state is one of many social and political breakthroughs that resulted from the Enlightenment, aka the Age of Reason, in the 17th and 18th Centuries. It forms the cornerstone Americans cherish;; it’s the essential difference between life in the developed world versus countries that are racked by ISIS, the Taliban, and other oppressive regimes.
Until very recently, with the advent of fanatical Christianity and the intrusion of the evangelicals into the American political scene, the separation of church and state was not only enshrined into the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but it stood at the core of what it meant to be a citizen of our nation.
At left are the words of a 19th Century president, one who was perhaps not gifted with the intellectual horsepower of some of his predecessors, e.g., Thomas Jefferson, but a man who still hold onto this fundamental truth that almost everyone, until the last few years, held quite dear to our hearts.
Now, evangelical Christians are doing everything in their power to ensure that our schoolchildren are taught to worship Jesus, a concept that would have made our Founding Fathers turn over in their graves.
The United States finds itself up to its hips with some of the most disgusting people imaginable, and the governor of Texas is one of the most revolting.
Fortunately, the Washington DC attorney general is investigating this with an eye towards bringing charges of human trafficking.
The content of the meme here is, of course, completely correct. The right-wing “news” media label the various aspects of a functioning society that are enjoyed by the rest of the developed world as “radical.”
And they largely get away with it, because most of their audience is too ignorant to understand what life is like in places like the EU, Israel, Japan, Australia, etc.
Re: the meme at left, seriously? How many Americans understand that the middle class has largely evaporated? That we have a massive chasm between rich and poor? That more than half of Americans can’t afford an emergency cost, e.g., getting injured or ill?
Of the few who get this, how many believe that government has any legitimate right to take actions aimed at correcting the situation?
