November 7, 2017: Good Morning, Tax-Paying Chumps!

 

11/7/17: Good morning, Tax-Paying Chumps. I know you plumbers, speech therapists, and tattoo artists pay your taxes. You can’t help it. You’re not rich enough to pay a $1,000-per-hour tax lawyer to finagle a deal. 

 

Wilbur Ross won’t even be taxed once. 

Anyway, you know what Paul Ryan says. What this country needs most is…healthcare for poor kids. No, we’re joking! Funding for the CHIPS program is stalled in Congress right now. 

What we need is to put an end to the estate tax – which almost no Americans pay. That way poor billionaires like Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross won’t be taxed twice. You know, once on income, a second time when he dies. 

We all know guys like Ross never game the system! They pay more than their share. Oh, wait. 

Documents leaked this week show: 

A)    Ross has lucrative business ties with Russians, despite U.S. sanctions imposed after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of the Ukraine. 

B)     Ross “forgot” to mention these ties during his Senate confirmation hearing. 

C)    Ross has most of his cash stashed where he doesn’t have to pay taxes, in secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.

 

Do you have a secret account to hide your cash in the Cayman Islands, Mr. or Ms. Tax-Paying Chump? 

No, you do not. (See: 11/8/17.)

The blogger, right, and his wife: both tax-paying chumps.

August 2, 2018: Does President Trump Have a White Stripe Down His Back?

 

8/2/18: Paul Manafort gets pummeled in court. Did Trump’s onetime campaign manager launder tens of millions of dollars in cash? It seems so. Did he avoid paying taxes whenever he could? Yes. Did he live a lavish lifestyle, while doing the bidding of Putin and his allies in the Ukraine? Yes! 

____________________ 

“Cyprus is, effectively, the money-laundering country of choice for criminals from Russia.” 

Bill Browder, critic of Vladimir Putin

____________________ 

If it walks like a skunk...

 

Testimony shows Manafort once spent $21,000 for a watch. He shelled out $15,000 for an ostrich skin coat, $9,500 for a vest to match. He spent $900,000, at one store, in just five years, on suits, $450,000 for landscaping at one of his seven homes and millions more on renovations for a home he gave a daughter. Manafort often liked to pay his bills with drafts on Cyprus banks. 

The reason would seem clear. “Cyprus is, effectively, the money-laundering country of choice for criminals from Russia,” Bill Browder, a leading critic of Vladimir Putin tells reporters. “And the reason … is because the Cypriot authorities turn a very active blind eye to the money-laundering.” 

How extensive is the spider’s web of cash woven by criminal types working through Cypriot banks? According to the Dallas Morning News, when the Panama Papers leaked in May 2016 (revealing massive tax evasion by many of the world’s wealthiest individuals), the Bank of Cyprus was cited 4,657 times.

 

Why might this worry the President of the United States? Consider who organized a group of investors in 2014 to buy the Bank of Cyprus for $1.3 billion. That would be none other than Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. Who co-chaired the bank with Mr. Ross, who stepped down join the cabinet in 2017? 

The Morning News reports: 

Ross’s first co-chair was Putin appointee Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, a former KGB agent and long-time associate of Putin. In 2015, Strzhalkovsky was replaced by Maksim Goldman, is [sic] director of strategic projects at Viktor Vekselberg's Renova Group and sits on the board of Rusal. 

 

Trump’s name appears 3,540 times. 

Just for fun, consider the shady possibilities revealed in the sentences above. Putin’s name appears in the Panama Papers. So does President Trump’s. Actually, his name appears 3,540 times; although there may be some plausible explanation why “Trump” turns up as often as it does. 

The Guardian, a leading British paper, has examined the leaked documents and detailed a complex $2 billion money trail that leads straight back to Putin. Vekselberg is currently under sanction by the U.S. government, which means he’s blocked from getting his mitts on an estimated $1.5-$2 billion dollars in assets. Rusal, a company which exports aluminum, is owned by Oleg Deripaska, and in April was placed under sanctions by the Treasury Department. Deripaska and Manafort have a long history of working on all kinds of questionable deals. 

We also know that Manafort possessed something of immense potential value during the 2016 campaign. In an email to a Russian intermediary, Manafort offered to keep Deripaska informed on what positions Trump was planning to take regarding sanctions on Russia. Here one might surmise that Manafort would be working hard to steer Trump in a direction the Russians would want him to go in order to end those sanctions, perhaps for the right price. “If he [Deripaska] needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in a July 7, 2016, email, sent to Konstantin Kilimnik.

 

Who is Kilimnik? His name surfaced again in March when Mueller’s team was wrapping up a case against a Dutch lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan. Zwann’s crime: lying to the F.B.I. about dealing with Kilimnik. 

Zwaan wasn’t the only man dealing with Kilimnik during the campaign. As Bloomberg explained last spring: 

Now, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has fleshed out another detail. [Rick] Gates said he knew Kilimnik was a onetime Russian military intelligence officer, according to a Tuesday court filing. The FBI is even more direct: Agents believe he has “ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016,” according to the [court] filing.

 

You can call all of the above “Fake News” if you like. But there’s more we already know and likely a great deal more that Mueller and his team have uncovered in the last fifteen months. 

We’ve all heard the cliché about the duck. Let’s try this instead. If it walks like a skunk, hisses like a skunk, and emits noxious gas like a skunk, it’s a skunk. The fundamental question Mueller must answer in weeks to come: Does President Trump have a white stripe down his back?

April 4, 2019: Does Donald Trump Pay Taxes to Support the Military - or Even Build His Own Great Wall?

 

4/4/19: Trump decides to spout all kinds of nonsense to begin the month. For example, he threatens to shut the border with Mexico. That idea is so dumb GOP lawmakers force him to recant within 24-hours (see: 4/3/19). Next, he insists wind turbines cause cancer, a claim so absurd the White House decides to address it by not addressing it. He complains about an immigration decision issued by “Judge Flores,” a judge who doesn’t exist. 

In fact, in one talk with reporters, the president butchers the word “origins,” stating it as “oranges.” 

Then, because he’s incapable of admitting even ordinary slips of the tongue, White House aides are forced to spend their time (paid for by the American taxpayer) denying Trump messed up the word at all. 

He could have said “origami,” or “orgasm,” or “original fried chicken.” He’d have insisted he got the word “origins” right.

 

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IN OTHER NEWS, Republicans reacted Thursday to news Democrats would subpoena the president’s tax returns. 

“The Democrat agenda is still strictly focused on harassing the president,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise whined. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy labeled the request “a waste of time.” He warned that Democrats wanted to “use the power of government, the fear that every American has the government has become so strong they go after you because they don’t politically agree with you. It’s wrong.” 

There are a few flaws in his complaint – including the fact McCarthy once told a gathering of Republicans that he thought Trump was one of two people the Russians paid. Nor does “every American” need to worry. Democrats are not subpoenaing “every American.” They want to see President Trump’s returns. 

If we have any brains left after listening to Trump and his enablers, we might remember the time Candidate Trump said he’d be happy to release his taxes – as soon as an audit process ended. 

 

We have a right to know if our leaders pay their share. 

We know that almost every other major party presidential candidate in the last forty years has released his or her taxes. Gerald Ford released nothing more than a tax summary in 1976. He was the sole exception. Ronald Reagan released a single year of returns in 1980 and Mitch Romney went with two in 2012. By comparison, Bob Dole gave us thirty years’ worth of returns. Hillary Clinton, in 2016, released fifteen years, covering from 2001 to 2015. 

Let’s be blunt. If you don’t dare show your taxes, maybe you shouldn’t run for the highest office. The American people have a right to know if their leaders are paying their share to keep the parks open, inspect the foods we eat, test the drugs we take and – yes – construct the Great Wall of Trump. 

We don’t want them stashing hundreds of millions, or billions, in offshore bank accounts, like several members of the Trump cabinet.

 

 

POSTSCRIPT: In the case of Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross it can be damnably hard to figure where he hides all his hundreds of millions. As Marketplace explains, “Each of the 664 dots [above] represents a business, holding company, offshore account, partnership or investment fund” in the Ross financial empire. 

See the dot below? 

. 

That’s what the “financial empire” of most American taxpayers who pay their shares looks like.

Trump is Winning the Imaginary War on Coal

AS A FORMER HISTORY TEACHER, I try to stick to proven facts on my blog. For example, I rarely quote Democratic politicians when I’m mocking President Trump. That would be like shooting obese orange fish in a puddle.

If you want to make fun of Trump, facts always suffice.

So, today, I thought it might be fun to consider the gory “War on Coal,” declared, as near I can tell, by “Muslim Obama.”

Luckily, right-wingers have Trump and all the other freedom fighters at Fox News to save our coal and also save our tinsel in the equally terrible, “War on Christmas.” 

That war was also declared by President Barack Hussein (“Did We Mention He’s A Muslim”) Obama.

By the way, if you believe in facts and not in Santa Claus, Obama isn’t a Muslim

And if you truly believed in equality, you might have the sense to know it wouldn’t matter if he was.

But today’s focus is not on Muslims, or liberals who want to kill and eat Donner and Blizten! Today, we are focusing on the “War on Coal!” If we can go back to the days of St. Ronald of Reagan, we know for sure there were no Muslims in the Oval Office and we can be equally sure that coal miners had a friend in the White House. Okay, maybe not a friend of coal miners’ unions.

Whatever! Let’s move on.

At least, St Ronald never declared war on coal. Bureau of Labor Statistics (which only go back to 1985 on the chart I can find) show that in January 1985 there were 170,500 coal miners at work in this great country.

Under Obama, that number fell to 50,700 in January 2017, that dirty bastard! Hey, did the right-wingers mention lately, he was born in Kenya????

So: BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, Obama.

Machinery replaced men with picks and shovels.

LET’S PUT UP A FEW MORE NUMBERS to shed some real light on your typical Fox News talking point. By January 1989, when Reagan’s second term ended, only 136,400 coal miners were still at work. That meant there had been a loss of 34,100 jobs in the mines; but this was not a war on coal. 

Nope.

Reagan loved miners. Obama hated them because he was a communist, not to mention a Muslim.

I know. That combination doesn’t make sense; but we are employing Fox News logic here and we are focusing on the “War on Coal!”

Luckily, America elected another Republican, George H. W. Bush in 1988. By January 1993, when he left office, the number of coal miners hard at work had risen…I mean, fallen…to 112,400.

Scratch another 24,000 coal mining jobs.

Next came Bill Clinton. By the time he finished his eight years in office, having chased Monica Lewinsky around the Oval Office until she was dizzy, only 71,300 coal miners remained. That meant another 41,100 jobs lost, not as bad as the combined jobs lost in the eight previous years under Republican leadership.

Still, if you were a miner, the trend lines really sucked; and as a good liberal, my sympathies always go to the working stiffs.

Under George W. Bush, coal mining rebounded, and everything was great in America again. Well, not counting when the entire economy crashed in 2008. You remember that great time—when the economy shed 3,889,000 jobs between February 2008 and the end of January 2009. 

Of course, fracking hadn’t caught on and the price of natural gas wasn’t undercutting the price of coal yet. From January 2001 through January 2009, jobs in the coal mines rose to 86,400. So that would be a gain of fifteen thousand plus.

Then came the “War on Coal,” launched for nefarious, flag-hating, un-American reasons by tree-hugging libtards, led by Commie Obama, or Muslim Obama, take your right-wing pick. 

And three years later, even with a recession to wrestle, coal mining jobs had increased to 89,700. In other words, Obama had declared war on coal and then coal jobs, for three years, still increased.

Only then did the decline set in again.

When President Obama left office in January 2017, only 50,700 coal mining jobs remained. That meant in his eight years in office, 35,700 coal miners died in bloody imaginary warfare, compared to 58,100 miners wiped out during St. Ronald of Reagan’s second term and George H. W. Bush’s single term.

IN OTHER WORDS, if you cared about facts, you had to ask: Did St. Ronald of Reagan hate coal miners himself?

I wasn’t able to find Bureau of Labor Statistics charts for the years before 1985; but this chart from WikiCommons makes clear the grim historical trends. The scale makes it hard to read. But it would appear there were roughly 250,000 coal miners at work in January 1981, when St. Ronald took charge.

And that would make him by far the biggest killer of coal mining jobs (roughly 115,000 during his two terms) in the last forty years.

The reality—if you have at least one eyeball that functions and you do more than stare at the leggy babes on Fox News—there never has been a “war” on coal. The trends  for decades, including the decline of the United Mine Workers, which Republicans have always cheered, have been running strongly against the miners and the miners’ families. The trends have been crippling states where mining once supported towns and entire counties and provided good-paying employment to those who preferred not to go to college and get degrees in teaching or engineering or computer science.

But if you had tried to blame Obama for a “War on Buggies,” your argument would make about as much sense.

There was no “War on Coal.” There wasn’t even a skirmish. 

Harsh economic changes were at work. Improved machinery and methods of extraction killed hundreds of thousands of mining jobs, starting a century ago. Changes in mining methods—from deep mining to hilltop leveling—killed tens of thousands more. And the decline in demand for coal has meant the elimination of many jobs that remained. The prices of solar power and natural gas have both fallen dramatically in recent years. And no president, not St. Ronald, not Obama, and not the big orange blimp in the White House today, is going to be able to turn back an this unfortunate historical clock.

You knew, for example, that coal was in terrible trouble, not because of President Obama, but because of changing realities when the Kentucky Coal Museum installed eighty solar panels on its roof in 2017.

Again, there never was any “War on Coal.” 

You couldn’t win it because it wasn’t being fought. It was more like a “War on Reality” waged by Trump and Fox News.

*

Has there been a slight uptick in jobs under Donald J. Trump. I mean for coal miners, not lawyers to defend him in court?

Yes. We now have 53,200 miners at work, a bump up of 2,500.

By contrast, the U.S. Department of Energy reported last year that there were 373,807 people working in the solar energy field. (See page 29 of the DOE report.) So, you could argue, if you wished to distort economics that President Trump declared “War on the Sun” when he imposed tariffs on imported Chinese solar panels earlier this year.

To understand how bogus the “War on Coal”  has always been all you really have to do is look at the facts.

And try to think.

POSTSCRIPT: AS A GUY WHO SUPPORTS good pay for workers, I understand exactly why coal miners are mad.

As a liberal, I wish they’d all unionize tomorrow (only about 3 percent are unionized today) and strike for better wages and benefits the next day. 

I wish a lot of workers would unionize and fight for higher pay. I wish the average coal miner, the average teacher, the average butcher, the average baker (whether or not he wants to bake a cake for the gay couple), the average candlestick maker, the average police officer, carpenter, plumber, electrician and teamster would all unionize next week and go on strike nationwide next month.

I wish the billionaires didn’t dominate the economy. I’d be happy if they all stopped hiding their money in secret offshore accounts. 

I wish the billionaires weren’t able, particularly in the wake of the Citizens United court decision (decided, 5-4, by the conservatives justices on the U.S. Supreme Court), to buy up politicians wholesale, like purchasing a quart of milk and a carton of eggs.

I wish guys like Wilbur Ross, our current Commerce Secretary, and Steve Mnuchin, our current Treasury Secretary, didn’t park their dough in places like the Cayman Islands, out of reach of the IRS. 

I wish they didn’t dodge taxes which the rest of us pay.

Last, but not least, I wish the president would release his taxes (apparently under audit for all eternity) so we could find out the truth. Is that chunky fat cat paying as much, percentage-wise, as the average coal miner?

At least the miner who still has a job?

A Liberal Champions the Struggling Super-Rich

  

IT MUST BE TOUGH to be a billionaire or a loose-change kind of multi-millionaire in America today.

For that reason, I feel it is my duty as a card-carrying liberal who has seen the error of his fiscal ways, to convince others that we should all get behind the GOP tax reform plan now wending its way through Congress.

It has to sad to be super-rich.

If you are one of the aggrieved, you pay (in theory) 39.6% of all the money you make in federal taxes. If you are a leading hedge fund manager and earned $1.6 billion by the sweat of your brow in 2016, as did James Simons, you would have left only $966.4 million to spend on your next family vacation.

It can’t be much fun to be a billionaire at Christmas, either. Please, Daddy, can we finally buy a real boat, you hear your daughter say. If you are Paul Allen, you have been paying exorbitant taxes all your life. This has nearly destroyed your incentive to work. But you soldier on. What choice do you have? You have to provide the necessities for your loved ones.

Luckily, you have scrimped and saved and have a bit left over in the form of the NFL team you own, the Seattle Seahawks, and a total of $17.8 billion in assets, and this crummy little scow (see below).

OF COURSE, IN A PERFECT capitalist society, which is exactly what we have in America today, as every Fox News viewer knows, the typical super-rich individual makes more money than the average worker because the typical super-individual simply works harder. He or she never bends rules or asks for government handouts, not even free football or baseball stadiums. In fact, these people create bazillions of jobs through their wealth for the average worker. Why, if we give them a tax break, they will create jobs for more lobbyists, to cite one irrefutable totally free market example. They will send fresh lobbyists to the nation’s capital, to help the 12,000 already there and those lobbyists will work only for the good of the American people.

For example, lobbyists from the drug companies will work tirelessly to see that drug prices come crashing down.

See how perfectly the free market works? The super-rich also create jobs for right-wing pundits, who sell the unwitting the bill of goods that anyone who says the system needs to be altered in even the slightest is actually a communist and wants to take away all their guns and make them stop saying, “Merry Christmas.” So, yes, this is absolutely the case. You deserve, if you are a company CEO, to make as much, on average, as what 335 of your employees makes every year.

If your workers don’t like it, this is capitalism, my friends, and you, the hard-working CEO, can ship a few jobs to Bangladesh, where workers know better than to expect pensions and health benefits.

Or paid vacations.

ALSO, YOU DON’T HEAR workers in Bangladesh complaining about a need for government safety regulations just because a factory collapsed on their heads and mashed 1,100 contented workers.

Government safety regulations stifle job creation!

And it may be even worse for the super-rich in America today, because I have also seen a shocking estimate that indicates top CEO’s make only 204 times as much as their average worker.

That would be tragedy atop catastrophe—making only as much, year in, year out, as your typical worker is going to earn over the next two centuries (assuming, of course, said typical worker doesn’t retire early).

We should also remember that with great wealth comes great responsibility. You have to decide, for example: Do I hide some of my multi-millions in the Cayman Islands. Or would a secret Swiss bank account be a better option?

Fortunately, the people of the Cayman Islands (population 61,559) know how hard you work. They’re not trying to reach in your wallet every day and steal a wad of your Benjamin  Franklins. So you can go down on your yacht and lounge around in the sun and talk to your Cayman Islands trust fund manager or visit one of the 200 international banking institutions located in this tropical land. You can also visit, perhaps, your company headquarters, or any of the other 95,000 headquarters located in the Caymans, which, if I do the math correctly, means your average corporate headquarters is producing 1 ½ jobs for every human being in the area. In other words, the people of the Caymans understand how a free market works and that is why they help guard $3.5 trillion in assets that you and other over-taxed, members of the top 1% have parked on the premises.

Be honest, now, my fellow liberal Americans!

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY to Alice Walton, the threadbare sister of the Walton clan, if you chanced to meet her? It can’t be easy for her, sitting down at Thanksgiving dinner and asking her snooty brothers to pass the mashed potatoes, knowing they look down on her because she’s a veritable pauper.

Don’t be obtuse! Alice Walton clearly needs a tax cut. And if she gets it she will rush out and create more good jobs for WalMart greeters. Her net worth, after all the crippling taxes, is a minuscule $38.2 billion.

By comparison, S. Robson Walton is worth $38.3 billion and Jim Walton is worth $38.4 billion.

In other words, Alice is hurting. If she spends $1 million every day she’ll be flat broke by the summer of 2121.

Do you want that? Do you really relish seeing Alice living in a cardboard box in some urine-soaked alley?

And think of Sheldon Adelson! He’s still slaving away at age 84 and donating wads of cash to GOP politicians. Buying politicians by the shopping cart full isn’t cheap and if you have to pay for politicians as a business expense, yes, you deserve a tax cut! A guy like Adelson donates $150 million in 2012 to defeat Barack Obama and gets nothing for his investment! So he has to donate $45 million to elect Donald J. Trump and assorted Republicans, exactly the type of men and women who are going to look out for the average blue collar worker. Plus Adelson has to chip in $5 million to help fund the Trump Inauguration and all he has left is a measly $35.4 billion.

THINK OF THE POOR Koch brothers, Charles and David, who got both literally and figuratively killed while Commie Obama was in office. In 2008 each brother was worth $19 billion and by the time Commie Obama left Washington their fortunes had dwindled to…$48.5 billion.

Each.

Come to think of it, I am often reminded by my dear conservative friends that I should thank President Trump because he is foregoing the $400,000 annual salary he is owed as Tweeter-in-Chief.

And that saves taxpayers plenty.

Fortunately, he has made ends meet since the election by ordering a modest increase in membership fees at Mar-a-Lago. With 500 members, and a doubling of the fee to $200,000, you can see why Mr. Trump and all his friends at this exclusive golf club can’t survive without a tax cut.

By now, I trust all my readers are weeping profusely. So let’s finish with a few quick examples to show why the super-rich need relief. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross (estimated worth: $2 billion) needs a cut so he can hire a good accountant and hide even more wealth in offshore tax havens. Martin Shkreli needs a break so he can keep the single recorded copy in the world of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin by the Wu-Tang Clan, for which he paid millions. This will allow him to focus on his work and stick to raising drug prices by 5,000%, which he did do.

Yes, my liberals, it is time to eat some delicious crow.

IT IS TIME TO ADMIT the GOP tax reform plan will make America great again. Call it: The Revenge of the Robber Barons!

The CEO of General Electric will get the tax cut he needs and be able to make the hard decisions with a clear head, decisions like laying off 12,000 more workers. Or contacting suppliers in China—where, for some odd reason, all GE light bulbs are now made.

If Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin gets a tax cut he and his wife will be better able to afford the cottage they bought recently in the nation’s capital. Also, she will be able to afford more $15,735 clothing ensembles.

The humble Mnuchin abode on Massachusetts Avenue: a bargain at $12.6 million.

Last, but not least, economically speaking, if the GOP tax plan passes as currently written President Trump himself will save an estimated $1 billion dollars.

Or to put it in perspective: his tax cut, which he will have earned by draining the swamp and filling it with gold bars for billionaires, will be equal to what 20,558 ordinary workers make annually in America.

And that, my friends, is exactly how we make America great again. 

That and by electing Judge Roy Moore, an accused sexual predator, to the United States Senate!