Doesn’t that just apply to federal income tax? I think that they still pay other federal, state, and local taxes.
Edit. This:
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Wait, what tunnel is this?
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If he stopped promoting fascism. That’d do it.
They aren’t bothered by corruption; they see that as a natural perk of being an autocrat. It’s what they’d do if they had the chance. They aren’t bothered by incompetence, because they define competence differently.
A bloodthirsty autocratic bigot is what they want, and Trump is giving it to them.
The Trumpists outsourced some of their hacking and propaganda work to their Putinist allies. This is against US law, yes.
It is not, however, the slightest bit unusual in the global political context. Both Russia and the USA have been interfering in every election they can reach for decades.
The Russian assistance was not a major factor in Trump’s election. The DNC IT security was atrocious; elite hacker ninjas were not required to penetrate it. And for every crude Russian Facebook ad, a thousand home-grown American propagandists were at work, often much more skilfully.
The rule of law fell over a long time ago.
A true rule of law has never existed in the USA; see the Native American and Black communites for the most obvious example of that. On the other side, none of the GFC banksters and none of the CIA torturers spent a day in prison. Even Y’all Qaeda are walking free.
In more immediate news, “Fascism Forever” Gorsuch is on the USSC and Trump is stacking the already-shitty lower courts at a record pace. Oh, and the President is on tape admitting to serial sexual assault and obstruction of justice, and this has been public knowledge for months.
Yes, it does.
But the fire is not Russian collusion. The fire is American fascism.
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neoliberalism and conservatism have also been battering inner cities and black rural communities since, oh yeah, forever. funny black Americans didn’t vote for the overtly racist demogogue as an answer to that very same problem. Also, a lot of poor, rural whites voted Clinton. It’s not the economic issues that lead to Trumpism, it’s where you decide (and are relentlessly conditioned) to place the blame.
The democrats probably could have won with better economic arguments, but Trump’s economic arguments were incoherent, he would not have won without the racism. In a sane world, he should not have been able to win with it. Saying that both the democrats need to get on point AND Trump is evidence of America’s ongoing racism are not mutually exclusive.
also not pictured in your comments: all the white suburbanites who voted for Trump. their belt wasn’t hollowed out…
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Yep. Spike Lee covered that succinctly a long time ago:
Celebrity exceptions and “the good ones” aside, the expression of racism and xenophobia is deeply connected with right-wing populist movements (and to a lesser extent and less frequently with left-wing ones). When ignorant and/or stupid people are left with nothing but their skin and ethnic privilege to fall back upon and see that fading, too, this is what happens. Without easily identifiable enemies, demagogues like Il Douche or Putin or any of the right-wing populist leaders crawling out from under the rocks across the globe are nothing.
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No one is blaming him for the rise of it, we’re blaming him for benefiting off of it.
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What I want know is, what with demokrat party love for Moose and Squirrel? This much larger issue than whistling harmless tune, no comrade? I have idea. While they look selves in mirror, I pik left pocket, you pik rite? This work everytime.
Plenty of Hispanics voted for Trump despite the racist Mexican comments, and for that matter women despite the sexist comments. Women, it seems, voted along party lines.
Were Trump’s economic arguments really incoherent? They might have been pictured that way by much of the media that just made him into a buffoon, but when he stood in front of Carrier headquarters and said if they move the jobs south to Mexico there will be a tariff on the products - that resonated with the people that worked there. (Never mind that it might not have been so easy to implement via Nafta) By the way Trump may not be someone who is thoughtful but he knows the media game, his years of Reality TV taught him there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Many of these people were in states taken for granted by the Democratic party - Hillary didn’t even campaign in some of them. She won many of the cities, but in the country it was a total wipeout. You know what the Democrat Party response was to that? Walk away. Abandon those people. (BTW it is also hard to ask them for their vote when you just offended them by calling them deplorables.)
I don’t believe Trump has any business being president, but he outflanked a powerful Republican party (he repulsed many of them) and he outmanouvered Bill and Hillary Clinton who outspent him 2 to 1. And one of the reasons is because he tapped into this disaffacted population that has seen its fortunes drop over the past thirty years. Recall that manufacturing jobs have been moving south, first to Arkansas and other right to work states, and then Mexico and China. Recall that Bill Clinton brought in Nafta and got rid of many things the Republicans only dreamed of. I’m not talking about inner cities and black communities but areas of the midwest that used to be prosperous.
These people saw Wall St. get bailed out and saw that all of the recovery since the crisis went to the top.
Most of the jobs that have been created since are part time no benefit service sector jobs.
I respect Obama but he did nothing to punish Wall St. (even when they expected it). In fact her brought in some of the people responsible like Summers and Geithner.
He also served during the largest rise in inequality in years and did nothing. How many times did Obama talk about inequality? Once, during Occupy Wall St. and they focus grouped it and decided it wasn’t worth following up.
At the same time the Democrats ran someone with a lot of negatives, and I’m not talking about emails, but her previous support for TPP and her Goldman Sachs speeches which she refused to make public.
No question all the racists supported him, but for the Democrats to say it was all racism means to wash their hands of any responsibility, because they (and other western left parties) abandoned their traditional working class base and shifted to the centre long ago. Brexit is another example of that, people getting tired of technocrats deciding everything for them.
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I’m afraid that a specific and authoritative answer is beyond my legal knowledge, but I feel pretty confident in saying “Not much of it, and a whole hell of a lot less if they had any knowledge that there was money laundering involved in any way”.
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