Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

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NEVER thought I would see anything like this kind of **** in my lifetime. Sorry I have.

It's worth noting that these developments noted by Brock didn't all occur overnight or during the Trump regime but are the outgrowth of deliberate decisions, some, such as the seating of Justice Lewis Powell, made as far back as the Nixon administration. I watched all this slowly unfold, the "Southern Strategy", the counter-demonstrating "hardhats", the resentment of affirmative action, the decline of organized labor, the end of the Fairness Doctrine, the rise of the religious right, the constant criticism of "big government" as something we should fear, the tax-cutting insanity, the well-funded conservative think tanks, the vulgarization of political culture, the seating of ultra-conservatives on the judiciary – all might be seen as gathering storm clouds. I think what really pushes it all over the edge is the recognition by the Republicans that they are a minority and will remain so and their subsequent commitment to voter suppression and blatant election fraud.

The military/industrial operated behind the scenes to ensure this scenario played out as well.

The military/industrial operated behind the scenes to ensure this scenario played out as well.

There are three stories in the news today that seem to me to add up to a larger picture.

First is the story of money laundering, which seems suddenly to be all over the news. Today we learned that federal prosecutors in Detroit have broken into a massive money-laundering operation between the United States and the United Arab Emirates called “The Shadow Exchange.” They confiscated $12 million and suggest this is the tip of the iceberg.

This story comes just weeks after the release of the Pandora Papers, which detailed the ways in which the world’s wealthy hide money. The United States is one of the money-laundering capitals of the world, and the consequences of our lax financial legislation are coming home to roost. Experts say that because of the lack of transparency required in our financial transactions, hundreds of billions of dollars are laundered in the U.S. every year.

Another story from earlier in the month by Casey Michel in Politico reveals what happened to a small town in Illinois when a Ukrainian oligarch bought a factory there apparently in order to launder money. The townspeople believed they were looking at a new, prosperous future with new investment in the town, only to watch the abandoned factory decay. And then, miraculously, another investor appeared, but that man, too, seems to have been using the purchase simply to launder money. Now, the factory is decrepit and must be dismantled at great cost to the town, along with the townspeople’s dreams.

The second story that caught my attention today is the continuing news dropping from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Today we learned that a Facebook researcher created a profile that appeared to be of a political conservative North Carolina mother and that within five days, Facebook’s algorithm was steering the profile toward QAnon, a conspiracy theory touting then-president Trump as a secret warrior against a widespread pedophilia ring in the highest levels of government.

Although the fake profile did not follow those recommended groups, the profile was then inundated with groups and pages full of hate speech and disinformation. Other stories recently have emphasized that Facebook officials knew of the radicalization of users before the January 6 insurrection but declined to address the issue.

People often make the mistake of thinking that Facebook profits from the advertising it sells to users, but in fact the system works the opposite way. A media company profits from packaging users to sell to advertisers. Facebook has sliced and diced its users so that it can sell us with pinpoint accuracy to political interests eager to divide us or drive our votes.

It appears we now have hard evidence that the company knew its algorithms were peddling disinformation to divide us, and it did not fix them.

Tonight’s third story is that former president Trump’s loyalists set up a “command center” in mid-December at Washington, D.C.’s famous Willard Hotel to try to overturn the election. Those meeting to come up with a scheme to overturn the will of the voters included John Eastman, who wrote the memo outlining how Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to count the electors for certain states and thus throw the election to Trump; Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; adviser Stephen K. Bannon; former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, a convicted felon pardoned by Trump; One America News reporter Christina Bobb; and Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn.

It is significant that as this story has hit the news, Eastman, the author of the infamous memo, is running from it. He went to the respected conservative magazine National Review to argue, quite preposterously, that his memo was simply a thought exercise that he did not endorse.

The very choice of the Willard, rather than Trump's own hotel, suggests an attempt to create distance from the president, but Kerik, who rented the rooms, billed the Trump campaign for the $55,000 hotel bill. (Those participating are likely to discover that campaign activity is not part of official duties and so cannot be covered by executive privilege.)

To me, these three stories are as illustrative of this moment as the three crucial stories in the January 1903 edition of McClure’s Magazine were of the corruption that led to the Progressive Era. In that famous 1903 magazine, investigative journalists Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell exposed the political and corporate corruption that were silencing the voices of individuals in the United States and driving them into poverty.

The first two of today’s stories suggest the rise of global capital in our financial system and its power over us through the dominant influence of social media, a new technology most of us don’t understand particularly well. That power has led to the third story: the attempt of a president who has lost an election to turn to a Big Lie, spread through social media, that his victory has been stolen from him, and that his supporters must take matters into their own hands.

KIeptocrats, autocrats, and criminals are making a strong bid to control our country.

Will they succeed?

Maybe. But in a similar moment after 1903, the American people reasserted the rule of law.

Social media sites use content moderation to attempt to cultivate safe spaces with accurate information for their users. However, content moderation decisions may not be applied equally for all types of users, and may lead to disproportionate censorship related to people's genders, races, or political orientations. We conducted a mixed methods study involving qualitative and quantitative analysis of survey data to understand which types of social media users have content and accounts removed more frequently than others, what types of content and accounts are removed, and how content removed may differ between groups. We found that three groups of social media users in our dataset experienced content and account removals more often than others: political conservatives, transgender people, and Black people. However, the types of content removed from each group varied substantially. Conservative participants' removed content included content that was offensive or allegedly so, misinformation, Covid-related, adult, or hate speech. Transgender participants' content was often removed as adult despite following site guidelines, critical of a dominant group (e.g., men, white people), or specifically related to transgender or queer issues. Black participants' removed content was frequently related to racial justice or racism. More broadly, conservative participants' removals often involved harmful content removed according to site guidelines to create safe spaces with accurate information, while transgender and Black participants' removals often involved content related to expressing their marginalized identities that was removed despite following site policies or fell into content moderation gray areas. We discuss potential ways forward to make content moderation more equitable for marginalized social media users, such as embracing and designing specifically for content moderation gray areas.

(...)

Since 2016, conservatives have accused social media platforms of intentionally censoring con-servative political speech [73, 113, 123]. They often base their claims on isolated cases in which conservative accounts were suspended from a site, did not show in search results, or were not being promoted sufciently by a site’s recommendation features [88]. Recently, several unprecedented cases further infamed their claims. In 2020, Reddit banned its largest pro-Trump community “r/The_Donald” [63] after frst quarantining the community [57]. In January 2021, Twitter permanently suspended @realDonaldTrump account [60] and Facebook subsequently suspended Trump’s accounts indefnitely [129] after attaching warning labels on violating posts [100]. On the surface it may seem that social media platforms are censoring conservative speech, but examining the events that precipitated these moves reveals them as responses to repeated rule violations. These dynamics align with Seering et al.’s [106] fndings that in online communities, “virtually all rule changes were made in response to unexpected incidents either gradually over time or suddenly following a specifc incident.” Researchers have argued that platforms’ responses to defance of rules constitute reasonable attempts to forestall further violence, and that they are not examples of ideologically motivated censorship [4]. To date, studies have found no evidence to support the claims that social media platforms unfairly remove or reduce distribution of conservative speech [83, 88]. Rather, a series of studies concluded that depending on the metric, right-leaning Facebook pages outperformed left-leaning pages or performed similarly [45, 79, 80]. More likely, platforms enforce rules based on the nature of the content in question. For instance, a recent study found that right-wing Twitter users spread misinformation en masse touting hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 remedy, sometimes drowning out expert information to the contrary, while Twitter attempted to remove this false and dangerous content [5]. In an investigation of comment moderation on YouTube, Jiang et al. [68] found that higher levels of misinformation, hate speech, and extreme partisanship resulted in heavier comment moderation for right-leaning videos. In a follow-up study reasoning about political bias in social media, Jiang et al. [69] again showed that the likelihood of comment moderation on YouTube was equal across left- and right-leaning videos. Similarly, an audit of Google’s search algorithm revealed that the algorithm was not biased along political lines but instead emphasized authoritative sources [83]. Another line of research indicates that the political right generates more online falsehoods than the left [74, 127], which inevitably leads to more content removals. For example, Kornbluh et al. [74] found that all of the top manipulators and false content purveyors on Facebook were right-leaning, and Zannettou [127] found that 72% of tweets with warning labels were shared by Republicans, while only 11% were shared by Democrats. Together, these studies helped explain why some conservatives believe their content is censored on partisan grounds when, in fact, it is being removed or demoted because it violates platform rules [4]. In response to widespread content moderation on mainstream platforms, conservatives have attempted to fee to alternative platforms like Parler and, more recently, Gettr [89]. Both promoted themselves as upholding free speech via lax moderation policies, yet quickly lost appeal for many users due to the toxic environments and rampant misinformation that emerged in the absence of effective moderation[89].

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, recently took to social media to warn that Democrats have hatched a dastardly plot. “Democrats,” he said, “want to track every penny you earn so they can then tax you and your family at the maximum possible amount.”

Well, yes. Democrats want Americans to pay the full amount they owe in taxes.

What doesn’t get enough attention is that many Republicans seem not to agree.

Resistance to taxation is the rotten core of the modern Republican Party. Republicans in recent decades have sharply reduced the federal income tax rates imposed on wealthy people and big companies, but their opposition to taxation goes beyond that. They are aiding and abetting tax evasion.

Republicans have hacked away at funding for the Internal Revenue Service over the past decade, enfeebling the agency. When the rich and powerful open loopholes in the tax code, Republicans reliably fight to keep the loopholes open. Indeed, they valorize Americans who find ways to pay less, a normalization of antisocial behavior that may be even more damaging than the efforts at bureaucratic sabotage.

Former President Donald Trump’s loud and proud declaration that paying very little in taxes “makes me smart” was just a more brazen articulation of what has become party orthodoxy.

The Democratic proposal targeted by Mr. McCarthy — in the video he posted online, he calls it “un-American” — would make it harder for wealthy people to cheat on their taxes.

The I.R.S. estimated in 2019 that Americans conceal from taxation more than half of income that is not subject to some form of third-party verification like a W-2, the form that the government uses to verify ordinary wage income. This blind spot costs the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes. In comparison, more than 95 percent of wage income is reported.

Under the current version of the Democrats’ plan, which is part of the Biden administration’s sweeping “Build Back Better” legislation, banks would be required to submit annual reports on accounts with total inflows and outflows exceeding $10,000, excluding paychecks and government benefits. The banks would report the total amount deposited in the account and the total amount withdrawn. There would be no reporting of individual transactions. The information would give the I.R.S. a better chance to catch cheaters — and it would provide a salutary reminder for people to pay what they owe.

The Biden administration recently cemented an international agreement to establish a 15 percent global minimum tax on corporate income. The long-sought deal would reduce the incentive for American firms to evade taxation by pretending to generate revenue in low-tax havens like Ireland and roughly half the islands in the Caribbean — a practice that has become all but business as usual in industries with intangible products, like finance, technology and pharmaceutical research.

The minimum corporate tax, like the bank reporting requirement, is not aimed at increasing what is owed. It is aimed at collecting what is owed already.

Improving tax collection has another important benefit. Democracy — and capitalism — rest on a lacework of mutual obligation. People fulfill their own responsibilities because they are confident others will, too. Collecting taxes, especially from the rich and powerful, is an affirmation of that faith.

Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank based in New York, said that the corporate tax agreement, which includes 136 countries, is valuable as a demonstration that governments have the ability to impose their will on multinational corporations in the service of the public interest — a hopeful model for confronting other problems, like climate change.

“It can and should create more faith in governance,” she said.

Both plans, however, must overcome the united opposition of congressional Republicans.

The Republican Party was reborn in the 1970s under the banner of resistance to taxation, led by anti-tax men like Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan. It remains the party’s fixation, the one major area of policy on which congressional Republicans were able to agree during the Trump administration.

By way of ideological justification, Republicans like to talk about liberty, by which they mean a narrow and negative kind of freedom from civic duty and mutual obligation.

But the fervent opposition to taxation has always found its deeper wellsprings of motivation in concern about how the money will be spent. In the bellwether case of California, the rise of anti-tax activism was inextricably intertwined with the decline of a white electoral majority. It wasn’t a question of whether Americans should ever be required to help one another. The real question was who would be helped.

Opposition to progressive income taxation also draws strength from an imagined democratic ideal in which the people who vote for taxation, pay the taxes and get the benefits are all one and the same.

History tells a different story. From the outset, taxation in the United States was designed as an antidote to inequality. The government initially chose to raise revenue through tariffs collected from wealthy merchants. The introduction of a federal income tax in the early 20th century was a different means to the same end. In a historical analysis published last year, a pair of German political scientists, Laura Seelkopf and Hanna Lierse, showed that progressive taxation is a hallmark of democratic governance.

Political philosophers have long fretted that democracy allows the poor to plunder the rich. The opposite has proved more nearly true. Progressive taxation is not a threat to the wealthy. It is a small price to pay for prosperity.

Cutting taxes to starve social programs is, by itself, a threat to the sustainability of the American experiment in multicultural democracy. In enabling resistance to lawful taxation, Republicans are engaged in an even more direct assault.

Having failed to constrain government spending through the democratic process, they are seeking to undermine government.

Mr. McCarthy is right to frame a fairly technical change in tax rules as an issue that goes to the heart of American democracy. Democracies impose higher taxes than other forms of government because democracies are communities of common purpose. We create and maintain our society through our contributions.

Or we don’t. And things fall apart.

In the early years of our country there were no Federal income redistributions of any kind in effect. The major activities funded by the Federal government involved payment of government officials and the costs of naval and military forces.

There are sound economic reasons to avoid excesses in taxation...

The socialist paradises of the former USSR, its Eastern European satellites, and now Cuba and Venezuela were, and are not now, known for the economic prosperity of their unfortunate inhabitants.

The author ignores the history of our Government operated social welfare systems which is replete with unforeseen adverse side effects...

...the breakdown of Black family structures and sharp increase in single parent offspring among them following the Great Society programs.

Even the moderately socialist governments of the UK in the decades after WWII were unable to deliver prosperity to their people. That awaited conservative governments which came later and privatized railroads and other inefficient government-operated systems.

During the late 18th century tariffs and related excises were simply the most common form of taxation by nations.

Another reason to doubt Biden.
https://www.nationofchange.org/2021/10/22/the-big-lie-in-rahm-emanuels-senate-testimony/?fbclid=IwAR1BlCygz3dohireKcVq6oHNYmHiIZFp9UMRPXRreEF9Y6ZpGR_KqrT5XSU