Category: Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere, MLK jr

Stories of injustice and justice

For The First Time In History, U.S. Billionaires Paid A Lower Tax Rate Than The Working Class

Forbes

For The First Time In History, U.S. Billionaires Paid A Lower Tax Rate Than The Working Class: What Should We Do About It?

Jack Kelly, Senior Contributor      October 11, 2019

A new study, “The Triumph of Injustice,” conducted by University of California at Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, presents its claims that for the first time in history, U.S. billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class in 2018.

The economists assert that the average effective tax rate paid by America’s wealthiest 400 families was 23%, whereas the bottom half of households paid 24.2%. To offer historical perspective, the study reports that the 400 richest had an effective tax rate of 47% in 1980. In 1960, that rate was as high as 56%.

The study, coincidentally or not, has tapped into a rising zeitgeist in America. Rising inequality has become a big issue as we approach the 2020 election. Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential race, called for a 2% annual tax on the wealth of individuals that have assets in excess of  $50 million and a 3% tax on the wealth of people with over $1 billion.

Today In: Leadership

Senator Berrnie Sanders, a socialist-leaning, presidential contender (now in question due to his heart attack), previously offered his aggressive, antirich plan to ban billionaires.

According to Sanders, over the last 30 years, the top 1% of Americans have enjoyed a $21 trillion increase in their net worth. Meanwhile, the bottom half of families have lost $900 billion in wealth. To compensate, Sanders demands a wealth tax on those families with a net worth of over $32 million. Instead of plans to help the people, his agenda is to confiscate wealth from the rich and redistribute it to those with less money in the form of government programs. To enforce extricating capital from the wealthy, Sanders promises, if elected, to create a national wealth registry and significant additional third-party reporting requirements. Sanders will increase funding for the IRS, so it will have a war-chest to enforce audits and tax collections for those in the 1%t bracket.

Now, this is where things start to get scary. It’s a slippery slope. First, the billionaires are targeted, then the rich. Soon, it will be the middle class. After a while, there will be no one left to tax. It is frightening to have a politician with power weaponize government agencies to specifically target a group of Americans and closely scrutinize them just because they have more money than others.

The study has some fundamental flaws. The rich often pay lower tax rates—compared to others—due to their penchant for generating revenue through capital gains—and not from salaries. Money made in stocks, bonds and business ventures is treated differently by the IRS than salaries. The greater the risk, the higher the chance of success or failure. When you invest in the stock market, start businesses or purchase real estate, there is a chance for making a lot of money or losing it all. We read about those who succeed. However, for every success story, there are thousands of people who have tried to start a business venture or invested in the stock market and lost some—or all of their money.

Most ultra-wealthy people have their money tied up in illiquid investments, such as real estate or in companies. They also have money invested in the stock market, private equity and hedge funds. The money is not readily available. If they are forced to sell their holdings to raise money for taxes, it would take a long time to dispose of their assets and, most likely, will incur large losses due to the pressure to divest at inopportune times.

Missing from the study and political rhetoric is a plan to change the tax code for the top percentile. The rich have the financial resources to hire the best and brightest lawyers, accountants and tax experts. Rather than focus on the percentage they’re paying, the study and presidential candidates should look into closing the legal loopholes, clever accounting and legal maneuvering that the uber wealthy have access to—and the public at large does not.

There is a narrative that depicts wealthy people as just falling into their fortunes. Yes, some people inherit large inheritances from their families. The reality is that most multimillionaires and billionaires earned their money by taking risks and offering a product or service that people want or need.

What people don’t understand is that just because you have money now, doesn’t mean that you’ll always hold onto it. Think of all the great companies that no longer exist today and imagine the people who had their life savings tied up in it. Consider all the stories you hear—famous sports stars and celebrities who earn fortunes, but then lose it all to bad investments and poor advice from their managers.

We should also be leery of targeting certain groups because they’re unpopular. Instead of targeting the rich, some say that we should focus on the government reigning in their expenditures, which would lessen everyone’s taxes. There are billionaires, such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has pledged his wealth to charity and spends his billions on improving the quality of life for everyone. The founders of Facebook, Amazon and Google are multi-billionaires who have created jobs for tens of thousands of people.

There are many self-made millionaires in business, music, sports, entertainment and other endeavors who have made sacrifices and worked hard to amass their money. Why should their efforts be punished by being forced to pay even higher taxes?

Instead of promoting class envy and antagonism, maybe our elected leaders should design a fair and equitable tax system and install checks and balances on how they waste our tax dollars.

The right wants to destroy traditional public schools

Occupy Each Other

October 15, 2019

John Hanno: The reason I’m not impressed with this U.S. Senator is because the ignorant dimwit has his head up his butt !

“It is no secret that the folks on the anti-government right want to destroy traditional public schools any way they can, budget cuts, vouchers, tax credits, unregulated charter schools.”

 

The right-wing war on college
By Chris Fitzsimon – 10/25/2011
http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/…/the-right-wing-war-on-colle…/

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The civil rights leader ‘almost nobody knows about’ gets a statue in the U.S. Capitol

The Washington Post -Retropolis

The civil rights leader ‘almost nobody knows about’ gets a statue in the U.S. Capitol

By Gillian Brockell                      September 20, 2019

Officials, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), participate in the dedication ceremony for the statue of Ponca Chief Standing Bear of Nebraska in Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. (Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Officials, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), participate in the dedication ceremony for the statue of Ponca Chief Standing Bear of Nebraska in Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. (Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Chief Standing Bear just wanted to bury his son at home.

The teenager, on his deathbed, told his dad he was worried that if his bones were not buried with his ancestors, then he would be alone in the afterlife, according to biographer Stephen Dando-Collins.

So in January 1879, Standing Bear left Oklahoma’s Indian Territory for Nebraska with his child’s remains.

That act of grief and love set in motion a chain of events that would make Standing Bear a civil rights hero. On Wednesday, he was honored with a statue representing the state of Nebraska in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall.

Standing Bear was born sometime between 1829 and 1834 in the Ponca tribe’s native lands in northern Nebraska. A natural leader, he became a chief at a young age, according to the Nebraska History Museum.

By 1858, the Poncas were forced to cede most of their land except for a small area by the Niobrara River, where they became farmers rather than buffalo hunters. But they did well, growing corn and trading with white settlers often.

Ten years later, as described by Dee Alexander Brown in the classic “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” the remaining Ponca land was mistakenly included in a treaty between the United States and the Sioux tribes.

“Although the Poncas protested over and over again to Washington, officials took no action. Wild young men from the Sioux tribes came down demanding horses as tribute, threatening to drive the Poncas off the land which they now claimed as their own,” Brown wrote.

The U.S. government finally took action in 1876 but not in the way the Poncas had hoped. Congress declared that the Poncas would be moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma in exchange for $25,000. Though the bill stated clearly this would all happen “with the consent of said band,” when the Poncas declined the inferior land they were offered in Oklahoma, they were forced to leave anyway.

By the time they arrived in Oklahoma in 1878, it was too late in the season to plant; they also didn’t get any of the farming equipment the government had promised them. More than a third of the Poncas died of starvation and disease — including Standing Bear’s sister and his beloved son.

Standing Bear and his burial party evaded capture while they traveled home but were caught and detained after visiting relatives at the Omaha reservation.

The man who caught them, Brig. Gen. George Crook, had been fighting Native Americans for decades, Brown wrote, but he was moved by Standing Bear’s reasons for leaving the Indian Territory and promised to help him.

Crook went to the media, which spread the story of the plight of Standing Bear and his fellow prisoners nationwide. Then two lawyers offered to take up their case pro bono, and asked a judge to free the Poncas immediately.

Though Crook was sympathetic to Standing Bear, since he was the official carrying out the federal government’s orders to detain them, the civil rights case that resulted was called Standing Bear v. Crook.

The U.S. attorney argued that Standing Bear was neither a citizen nor a person, and as such did not have standing to sue the government.

On the second day, Chief Standing Bear was called to testify, becoming the first Native American to do so. He raised his right hand and, through an interpreter, said: “My hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. The same god made us both. I am a man.”

The judge agreed, ruling for the first time in U.S. history that “the Indian is a ‘person’ ” and has all the rights and freedoms promised in the Constitution. The judge also ordered Crook to free Standing Bear and his people immediately.

Despite the landmark decision from the judge, his opinion still drips with prejudice, calling Native Americans a “weak, insignificant, unlettered, and generally despised race.”

Standing Bear returned to the land by the Niobrara River and buried his son alongside his ancestors. When he died there in 1908, he was buried alongside them, too.

A few decades later, in 1937, the state of Nebraska sent two statues to the U.S. Capitol. Each state is allowed to pick two historical figures to represent them in National Statuary Hall, and Nebraska chose politician William Jennings Bryan and Arbor Day founder Julius Sterling Morton.

(This provision is also why there are at least eight statues of Confederates in the Capitol. Neither Congress nor the Architect of the Capitol has the power to remove them; it must be done by the states that sent the statues.)

In recent years, Nebraska lawmakers voted to replace both statues. Bryan was replaced by Chief Standing Bear; soon, Morton will be replaced by a statue of author Willa Cather.

At the dedication ceremony Wednesday, which included Ponca tribal leaders and members of the House and Senate, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said it was an honor to recognize “one of the most important civil rights leaders in our country that almost nobody knows about.

“And we hope to be able to correct that today and tell his story,” Ricketts said.

Trump Betrayed the Kurds. He Couldn’t Help Himself.

Donald Trump walks away.
JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS
 

President Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds stung deeply. “They trusted us and we broke that trust. It’s a stain on the American conscience.” These, according to The New York Times, are the searing words of an Army officer who has worked alongside the Kurds in northern Syria.

Kurdish forces played a central role in aiding the United States in fighting the Islamic State. But in a phone call a week ago Sunday, Trump gave the green light to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to invade northern Syria—and, in the process, to engage in what even one of Trump’s most loyal supporters, Senator Lindsey Graham, describes as the “ethnic cleansing” of the Kurds.

According to Jennifer Griffin and Melissa Leon of Fox News, Trump was supposed to tell Erdogan to stay north of the border, but instead “went off script.” By Wednesday, the Turkish offensive began, with Erdogan’s aim to push back the Syrian Kurds from the border region. The results have been swift and brutal: the displacement of more than 100,000 people,  executions and war crimes, the escape of hundreds of Islamic State prisoners. (If Islamic State fighters escape, they’ll “be escaping to Europe,” Trump said last week—as if Europe’s problems don’t affect the United States.) For the Kurds, the consequences of America’s policy change will only get worse. “I don’t know how many people will die. A lot of people will die,” a senior military source told Fox News. Yesterday the Trump administration tried frantically to make Turkey stand down, but enormous damage has already been done.

Indeed it is. But betrayal is hardly new to Trump, who routinely abandons people who trust in him or the nation he leads. By now, this behavior should come as a surprise to exactly no one.

Betrayal is a leitmotif for this president’s entire life. Think of how he cheated on his wives. Think of the infant child of a nephew who had crucial medical benefits withdrawn by Trump because of Trump’s retaliation against his nephew over an inheritance dispute. Think of those who enrolled at Trump University and were defrauded. Think about the contractors whom Trump has stiffed. Think of Jeff Sessions, the first prominent Republican to endorse Trump, whom Trump viciously turned against because Sessions had properly recused himself from overseeing the investigation into whether Russia had intervened in the 2016 election. Think about those who served in Trump’s administration—Rex Tillerson, John Bolton, Don McGahn, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, and many more—who were unceremoniously dumped and, in some cases, mocked on their way out the door.

Also think of how Trump has disparaged his own country while making excuses for strongmen. When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Vladimir Putin “kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries,” Trump replied that “at least he’s a leader.” Besides, Trump asserted, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” And when asked whether Erdoğan was exploiting the coup attempt to purge his political enemies, Trump did not call for the Turkish leader to observe the rule of law, or Western standards of justice. “When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger,” he said.

As McKay Coppins put it in The Atlantic shortly after the president was sworn in, “Trump built his success on his willingness to toss aside mentors, friends, and family members during moments of frustration and chaos.” Serial betrayal is a central trait of Trump’s character, and his critics warned from the start against elevating such a person to the nation’s highest position of public trust. When the consequences are the serial humiliation of Cabinet secretaries and White House aides, they are easier for Trump’s political supporters to rationalize or overlook. But as the professor Robert King once declared, “Betrayal is a garment without seams.” The danger is far plainer when the victims of Trump’s betrayal are longtime American allies facing deadly force.

The Kurds were a mere afterthought to Donald Trump. Turkey’s Erdoğan is the type of authoritarian leader who can easily manipulate the president. Erdoğan wanted something done, and Trump was willing to do it.

A year ago, President Trump was praising the Kurds as “great” allies, vowing to protect them. “They fought with us. They died with us,” Trump said. “We have not forgotten.” But just a few days ago, he dismissed the Kurds this way: “They didn’t help us in the Second World War. They didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.”

President Trump doesn’t interpret his abandonment of America’s faithful and intrepid Kurdish ally as betrayal because he can’t even understand why betrayal is a vice. It’s like trying to explain color to a person born with no eyesight. He doesn’t appear to comprehend that a relationship without trust is not a true relationship; it’s merely an exchange of needs—and President Trump will betray anyone who no longer serves his needs.

“We should expect our current president to betray anyone or any principle or any norm or any ally whenever he has the impulse to do so,” a friend of mine who is a psychologist told me via email. (To make sense of the Trump years, an understanding of psychology is at least as helpful as an understanding of politics.) “This should scare us all, and there’s no evidence he is capable of deferring to someone else when his relationship indifference could (again) cost lives.”

My friend, who asked not to be named because she wanted to avoid being part of the political controversy, went on to say, “Expect betrayal, because [Trump] does not know what that even means.”

The betrayal won’t stop with the Kurds. Every individual, every institution, every government agency, and every American ally could meet a similar fate. Donald Trump’s loyalty runs exactly as deep to his fellow citizens, the rule of law, the Constitution, America’s best traditions, and traditional codes of honor and decency as it does to his previous wives, to his former aides, and to those he has done business with. “A stain on the American conscience” isn’t just a characterization of what Trump did to the Kurds in northern Syria. It may also prove to be a fitting epitaph for the Trump presidency as a whole.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.