The Political Slant

A Directive Disallowing Dalit Discrimination

Dalit Lives Matter

The United States has been described as “the melting pot” because between 1820 and 1920, 80 million people emigrated to the U.S. and became citizens. Certain prejudices are beginning to rear their ugly heads. The city of Seattle became the first city to outlaw caste-based discrimination on February 1, 2023.

To offer some explanation, we quote Forbes of February 3, 2023: “The caste system is a social hierarchy structure that divides people at birth into social classes—it has roots in South Asia and Hinduism but also impacts African, Middle Eastern and Pacific communities.”  Dalits, also known as “Untouchables” are the lowest of Hindu culture, and have been for several thousand years.  Several universities have already adopted policies that forbid discrimination based on the caste system.

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Follies, Foibles and Falsehoods

Some liars make themselves famous for the wrong reasons, and all of the exposed liars make 2022 an annus mirabilis. Sunny Balwani is getting thirteen years in federal prison for misleading investors out of millions of dollars. Elizabeth Holmes who partnered with Balwani, was sentenced to eleven years for claiming her biotech firm Theranos could do things it, in fact, could not do. Sam Bankman-Fried faces a potential one-hundred fifteen year sentence in the federal slammer if he is convicted in federal court of bilking crypto investors out of billions of dollars. According to one of my law professors, going up against the Feds is almost always a losing proposition.

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The Fed’s Fiduciary Fumble

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The Covid pandemic created a lot of economic changes. Privileged employees who taunt their employers and claim they will never return to their office. Wages moved up because of a lack of talent. (“Talent” is human resource jargon for employees.) Members of the U.S. Congress made high-yielding stock purchases because of inside information, and now dare their constituents to try to make such inside information trades illegal while they waive their gains in the face of their electorates.

Some information before we continue. There is a public organization called the Federal Reserve System. No, wait, it is a private organization. No, wait, the Fed, as it is called, is, um, both. Owned by the banks (big ones, naturally) the Fed is a privately held public organization, and don’t you dare ask the names of those banks. After all, knowing the names of those banks would open to public scrutiny decisions about interest rates charged to the public, and we just can’t have that, now can we? After all, private organizations that have a vested interest in public policy deserve their privacy, now don’t they? If only they were on Facebook, then we could buy all of their personal information, but no, they have far too much money for that to happen.

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Scrapping the Slippery Slope Supposition

Not a lawyer, but took a few law classes; the professors taught the law classes as if they were teaching in law school. The constitutional law professor (Harvard grad, by the way) stated that there were aspects of the law that our Supreme Court deliberately stayed away from, because they were “slippery slope” issues. Welcome to the slippery slope, America.

The recent decision, which will probably be known as Dobb v. Jackson, turned to federalism. “Turned to federalism” means the issue has been turned back to the states to decide for themselves. The federal protection of abortion is no more. The SCOTUS decided that the federal protection of the right to get an abortion was not constitutional, that is to say, there is nothing in our Constitution that guarantees the right to get an abortion; Roe v. Wade is overturned.

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Wrecking the Refund Reckoning

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The student debt problem remains, but there are always options.  Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.,  Maxine Waters, D-Calif. and Senator Elizabeth Warren, like spoiled children who can’t get what they want the fair and proven legislative way, will create a workaround. The aforementioned representatives are suggesting, or, even insisting, that President Biden achieve what they cannot accomplish via legislation by issuing an executive order relieving millions from their student debt.  An executive order would be a great boon (in the way of votes) for the Democrats who pushed for it. Look for such a move close to the election, where it will be firmly in the minds of voters.

To quote Senator Elizabeth Warren: “Student loan debt is crushing millions, especially during this pandemic. It’s an anchor dragging down our struggling economy.” So adding trillions to the government debt will be a good economic move?

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Iran Has More Progressive Abortion Laws Than Texas – Video

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Should the SCOTUS leak of the Alito draft decision prove true and powers go back to the state level, Texas will effectively have more restrictive abortion laws than the entire country of Iran. Manila Chan sits down with famed professor (and party to the JCPOA negotiations in Vienna) Mohammad Marandi, of the University of Tehran, to discuss the hot social topic du jour – abortion, women’s choice, and the role of government. We’ll learn some Iran 101 basics with the professor and see what Iranians think of the Roe v Wade issue dominating the headlines in the US.

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

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by Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.Series: The Secret IRS Files Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.

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War on Crime – We All Are Victims

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War on Crime

So after 40 years of “tough on crime,” it’s come to this. In addition to the military-industrial complex, we have the penal system / financial complex as something to worry about. We now have perverse incentives in place to continue the expansion of incarceration as the answer to all of our societal problems. It makes perfect sense to keep building new facilities whose sole purpose is to enrich the corporate investors, who enable governments to pretend they are addressing their crime problems by locking up miscreants for longer sentences. All in the name of being tough on crime, which politicians love to tout to their voters.

In the October 15 issue of Science Magazine, there’s an outstanding summary of current research and trends in the social sciences regarding incarceration in the US. They show how the past 40 years of tough on crime has ignored secular trends on reduced crime rates (yes, homicide rates for the last couple of years have gone up). Instead, the incarceration rate keeps going up, and we are building a class of people who find it impossible to function in society after they are released from prison.

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War Criminal Talk

 

There’s been much talk lately about ‘war criminals’ – with the latest accusation coming from the United States accusing Vladimir Putin of Russia of war crimes in the ongoing war in Ukraine, now in its sixth week. The rhetoric climbed to the highest levels in early April 2022 when for just the second time in history – a state was suspended from the UN Human Rights Council. In the UN’s 77 years, Russia joins Libya in this dubious distinction. This, highlighting not only US hypocrisy but that of all nations who supported the US-led vote because there is no other member country that has left behind greater humanitarian crises in its wake than the United States of America.

Take for instance Laos. The tiny, landlocked, Southeast Asian country was the staging ground for the first proxy war between the United States and Russia (then the Soviet Union). Many today, can compare the events unfolding in Ukraine to those of 1960s Laos – caught in the crosshairs of the American invasion of Vietnam, to the lesser-known Secret War in Laos that spanned four consecutive US presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. 

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AOC’s Atrocious Assessment

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (from this point described as AOC) has determined capitalism in the United States as “irredeemable.”  AOC has a degree (cum laude) in economics and international relations from Boston University. So a member of the U.S. Congress with an economics degree describes capitalism as: “Capitalism is an ideology of capital-the most important thing is the concentration of capital and maximize profit.” While the aforementioned quote is a great summary of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, there are other considerations regarding capitalism.

Capitalism was outlined by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in1776, with the newly-minted United States as an “early adopter” (gosh, I’m sure I heard that somewhere else.) Mercantilism, which preceded capitalism, was the fruitless feudal attempt of the nobility to retain the wealth created by the peasants and serfs. The United States gave up the feudal system and set out on a capitalist journey after fighting off the greatest power on earth. In case you are wondering, Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the states from granting titles of nobility, that is, prince, duke, or any other title to a citizen. In short, the founding fathers had enough of kings and royalty. (I’m sure they would have exempted Elvis, but that’s another essay.)

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Invest in America; It’s Now or Never

Invest in America

What is “vengeful taxation”? That seems to be the sticking point now for my senator Joe Manchin from supporting some version of the Democratic social safety net spending program. Note how over the years, the emphasis in discussion has changed from describing the objective of the bills, to strictly focus on the overall cost of the programs. But back to “vengeful taxation”, according to Manchin it is not vengeful to seek the correction of the 2017 tax cut bill, as long as the tax rate for corporations keeps them globally competitive. Whatever that means.

Joe Manchin (D-WV)

Look, we in West Virginia have benefitted from the attention paid to this small, land-locked state lacking in so much of what is valued in the US these days. Having a Senator at the fulcrum of power is useful. And I am reminded of how small this state really is when I recall we encountered Senator Manchin at a local restaurant as he came in, bereft of staff and entourage, to join a party at another table. He gave us a couple of minutes as my wife pressed a couple of points home to him, and he was able to respond in the way many politicians have mastered – clasping hands, literally backslapping, and saying nothing that could not be interpreted in many different ways.

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Pugnacious Putin’s Presentiment

With 100,000 troops on the Ukraine border, Vladimir Putin (whatever his title) is playing a very dangerous game. Putin wants the Ukraine. His Russia is not enough for him. Like any power-hungry autocrat, the largest country on the globe is not enough. Putin doesn’t want to “liberate” Ukraine; he wants to enslave it, although he will put any conflict in terms of a “liberation.” He will also explain any conflict as being Ukraine started by the Ukraine, even though the Ukraine has no interest in attacking Russia.

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I Am Not the Left

The Left

Not too long ago, after watching my neighbor’s FUCK BIDEN flag proudly flutter in the afternoon breeze, I wondered if there wasn’t something that we could / I could / you could do to make things better instead of even more divisive, and I got the seed of an idea.  Not a complete idea, just a thought:  Maybe I/we could sponsor some sort of contest to encourage people to write songs or poems about unity or the goodness of our nation. 

I emailed a couple buddies and my favorite college professor – the only person with the possible exception of Vince Lombardi that I have ever idolized or revered – to see what they thought of my notion.  The response I got from my professor was quick and clear, and the caps are his: I HATE THE LEFT.

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The Brainpower of Humanity

New Year’s Day 2022, 6 AM

Another new January 1st:; another new year to look forward to; another old year to look back on.  A fleeting moment of reflection, resolution and recalibrating.  A flash of a lifetime to ponder what is working and what is not, what makes us happy and what does not, what is important and what simply is not.

It is easy to declare that personal health is the most important thing in life, for without that we are without our power.  It is easy to surmise that family is the most important thing, as our loved ones help us feel grounded and connected and loved.  Financial stability, education, professional success and societal status are all things that may top your list of ‘most important’, and to each his own.  Conversely, perhaps the most important thing is one that we usually don’t even consider: being human.

What sets us apart form the other creatures of Earth is that we are self-aware; capable of introspection, imagination, reasoning, and morality. These higher-level skills separate us from the beasts and form the basis of our global culture as a species.  So, what’s going on?  Because more and more we seem to be a nation and a people of non-thinking, non-reasoning, non-rational creatures.

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COVID-19, Conspiracies, and Corpses

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Before year 2020, what does not kill me makes me stronger. After the year 2020, it mutates and tries again. Freedom in the Unites States means you can choose to die if you wish. You have the right to refuse to wear a mask, and the organizations that you visit have the right to refuse you entry into their property if you decline to wear said mask. The reason these organizations have the right to refuse your entry is because you do not have the right to infect other people. When your rights impose a risk to other citizens, it becomes a societal problem.

Historically, free speech in the United States has seen limitations. You cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theatre.  Free speech ends when it threatens lives of other citizens. Citizens have been tried for manslaughter when they urged other citizens to kill themselves.  The great thing about the United States is that you may listen and follow the advice, no matter how naïve, of other citizens. If that advice results in your demise, then the mistake is yours, a decision you are free to make.

You may believe that you have the right to consume intoxicants and operate a vehicle, but if your behavior threatens the safety of other citizens, that right impinges on other citizens who have the right to be protected from your behavior.  As a citizen, you have the right to refuse vaccination, which in some cases, has cost people their lives.  Social media has become saturated with uncredentialed self-proclaimed “experts” who have found numerous reasons why you shouldn’t be vaccinated.  These experts have reasons too long to discuss in this essay. Statistically speaking, there is, and I will not deny it, a small amount of risk if you get vaccinated, since the vaccine has not been tested on millions of people, but that risk is very, very small.

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Rise Above

Fathers and daughters not speaking to each other.  Decades-long friendships broken and volatile.  Siblings screaming at each other, saying terrible, hurtful things.  More and more, this is America.  Angry, divided, hyper-political. 

What separates us today are not the age-old differences between Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals, or the right and left.  What has divided us and continues to divide us today is Donald Trump.  We love him and hope that he becomes King and lives forever.  Or we start each morning praying that this will be the day he dies.  There is no in-between, no agreeing to disagree, no compromise.  It is this irreconcilable difference that continues to tear our once-great nation apart.

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Reporting, Reproach, and Our Republic

According to The Wall Street Journal of September 18, 2021, on September 17, 2021 attorney Michael Sussman was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI regarding Donald Trump’s association with Russians. Specifically, Sussman (allegedly) lied about the Russian-based Alfa Bank and the Trump Administration. Mr. Sussman was an attorney for the law firm Perkins Coie and was working for the Clinton Campaign  when he presented then FBI general counsel James Baker documents purporting to show “secret internet communications between the Trump Organization and the Russian-based Alfa bank” on September 19, 2016.

The indictment reads that Sussman represented himself to the FBI General Counsel as a “good citizen” and was not working “for any client” and not an advocate for a candidate. It turns out that he was lying to the FBI, something that is taken quite seriously by our federal government. Just ask Martha Stewart about lying to the FBI. The first question should be: How competent is an FBI who can be fooled by someone (even a lawyer, who are universally generalized as being adroit liars) who misleads them about their employer. I’m pretty sure that having access to tax records and financial transfers (of which it seems that the federal government can review) might reveal that someone is getting money transfers from a firm associated with a political campaign. I guess that the IRS is too busy examining citizens with more than six-hundred dollars in their bank account than to verify the income of wealthy and powerful liars.    

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