“Trump basically said to go fuck them up!…this makes me so happy.”
The Proud Boys Are Lapping Up the President’s Instruction to “Stand By” – Mother Jones
Author: peterimrich
“A serious tax cheat” is how his biographer David Cay Johnston describes Donald Trump. Johnston reports on the New York Times investigation into the finances of the US president, revealing Trump has previously lost two income tax fraud trials.
The Trump Tax Returns: Donald deducts $US70,000 for hair-styling – Michael West
Police enforcement is against First Amendment Rights: ” The right to protest is protected by both the U.S. Constitution and the Texas Constitution. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”
A Human Rights Watch investigation found that police deliberately trapped and assaulted medics, legal observers, and peaceful protesters.
New York Faces Lawsuits After Police Violence
“He’s been blocking the original HEROES Act for 138 days. As always, his priorities are appalling.”
As McConnell Dismisses New Covid Relief Bill as ‘Political Stunt,’ Survey Shows 60% of US Families Struggling to Get By | Common Dreams News
Worst-case predictions say Greenland will be melting 600 per cent faster than its present rate by the end of the century That alone could add around 30 centimetres to sea levels, without accounting for Antarctic melting Cutting our emissions rapidly buys us time to adapt to rising sea levels
Greenland ice sheet loss already ‘unprecedented’ and set to accelerate – ABC News
The biggest cause of environmental destruction in our country is the Right-wing ideology shared by conservative politicians and media groups, writes Sue Arnold.
Environment is the enemy of Right-wing governments
Alan Tudge, Richard Colbeck and Paul Fletcher are the latest Morrison Cabinet ministers to be mired in scandal, but no one is responsible for anything in this Coalition Government, writes managing editor Michelle Pini.
The Coalition protection racket: Why Tudge won’t budge
The question taxing many is why are our security services and not the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) running our relationship with China? The answer is complex and begins with the onset of the Howard era in 1996 and continues to this day.
Security agencies assume greater role in Australian policymaking
The truth is, the European leaders feel alone because they know that what Trump has dismantled cannot be rebuilt so quickly and so easily,” she said. “As for the others, Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, they must be telling themselves what we already knew: They can do everything, because the US isn’t a leader anymore.”
US Presidential Debate: Trump-Biden face-off prompts shock, despair and, in China, glee
Even though Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm, raked in billions in profits last year, new documents show their tax rate actually went below zero. This may help explain why CEO Stephen Schwarzman has spent nearly $25 million to help Trump and GOP senators win: to ensure the tax breaks enriching Blackstone stay in place.
Private Equity Firm Blackstone Actually Had a Sub-Zero Tax Rate Last Year
Asked how much actual money he was likely to make this financial year, Mr Morrison said you would need to contact the Australian Gas Industry Association to find out the exact details.
Scott Morrison Has Just Released His Tax Return, And It’s A Little Bit Odd | The Shovel
One of the few bright spots in his portfolio is overseas investments. In 2017-2018, the first two years of his presidency, he earned $73 million from projects abroad, especially resorts and other properties in Scotland and Ireland. But he also took in $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey. Given how much in the hole Trump is, even $6 million every four years from the Philippines or $2 million from Turkey could be a substantial incentive for Trump to please the rulers of those countries.
Did Trump Throw Kurds under the Bus for Turkey because of his Istanbul Revenue Stream?
So many issues in recent times, many of them pre-COVID-19, have highlighted how the Australia, which we tried to project to the world in 2000 as a Dinky Di paradise is dead, buried and cremated.(Thank you, Tony Abbott, for the quote! You certainly helped the rot set in!)
A ‘Fair Go’ is now a Myth – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Anushka Britto ponders whether individuals spreading COVID-19 by breaking the rules and violating quarantine requirements should be held legally accountable for the consequences of their actions.
How #COVIDiots may be held responsible for their actions
Depressingly readable is the best way to describe Paul Barry’s revealing biography of Rupert Murdoch. I placed the word mongrel in the title of this piece but it could just as easily used scumbag which means a contemptible or objectionable person. It is a story about one man. A man with a love for money, power, influence, acquisitions, wives, children and even scandal. Scandal makes money.
Murdoch: forever brutal – » The Australian Independent Media Network
While Ms Herriford’s lemonade stand did make a profit last year, she wanted to be clear that she does have a loan owing to her mother worth $14 – around $439,999,986 less than the loans owed by the Trump Organisation.
Lemonade Stand Paid More Tax, Made More Profit, Than All Of Donald Trump’s Businesses Combined | The Shovel
News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch was stunned when he heard about Donald Trump’s $750 tax bill, saying he has not seen a tax payment that high before.
Murdoch Shocked To Learn Of Trump’s Tax Bill: “$750 Is Extraordinarily High” | The Shovel
Donald Trump routinely claims he “built the greatest economy in the history of the world.” It is a claim rarely challenged in the mainstream media. If true, it would be at least part of a possible claim for re-election. But is it true? There are five things we need to know to evaluate Trump’s claim to economic wizardry.
Debunking the Myth of “The Greatest Economy Ever” | The Smirking Chimp
What is America really fighting over in the upcoming election? No particular issue. Not even Democrats versus Republicans. The central fight is over Donald J Trump.
The Coming Civil War Over Trump’s Ego | The Smirking Chimp
The Republican-led legislature passed a new law presenting another hurdle — felons had to pay off all their fines to vote — but last week, billionaire Michael Bloomberg donated US$16 million to a fund designed to help them do that.
No mail-in votes, proof of citizenship: the long history of preventing minorities from voting in the US
“He’s in a very precarious financial situation,” Painter said. “And we don’t know who the creditors really are. Because if Deutsche Bank makes a loan, you have no idea whether Deutsche Bank has the risk attached to that loan, or whether somebody else has made a commitment to Deutsche Bank to take on a piece of that, or all of it.” That poses national security and other risks to the United States and also highlights the legal and financial uncertainty Trump and his web of businesses may face if he loses in November. “When he’s not president anymore, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Painter said. “And neither does he, so he wants to stay in order to continue to prop those businesses up. The minute he’s out, I think the loans could get called. And there could be a lot of investigations.”
Trump Needs To Win The Election To Keep His ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ Card | HuffPost Australia
It’s tempting to turn the new reporting on Donald Trump’s tax shenanigans, paying only $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017, into a story about Trump as a singular villain. He’s despicable, but he could only get away with it because we live under a system that allows the wealthy to rip off $266 billion from the country every single year.
Our Tax System Allows and Encourages Massive Rip-Offs Like Trump’s
Hartcher seems to use the Swedish and Freedom House studies as an opportunity to focus yet again on China as the worlds worst regime. When one could have easily have said China has done more than any other country to deregulate and allow it’s citizens freedoms and conditions they never previously had. Where as we are increasingly being surveilled and our privacy shredded like never before. China has educated, extended the life expectancy housed and provided work for more of it’s citizens can we say the same? We can’t even say we are proud of the social metrics that indicate we have improved the lives of Australia’s Indigenous people the most incarcerated people not just in Australia but the world. (ODT)
One of the things that slipped by unnoticed this year was some troubling news about the state of democracy. While the world was busy with the pandemic, a Swedish research group published its annual study of the health of democracy worldwide.The topmost countries in the Varieties of Democracy report are Denmark, Estonia and Sweden. Australia ranks the 14th freest nation, the US No. 36 and China 174th out of 179. The only countries ranked lower are among the world’s hell holes of suffering and repression – Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea and North Korea. Australia turns out to be a beacon of liberty in a darkening world. But the metatrend towards illiberalism means that even the freest countries need to work on renewing their democracies.
Under cover of COVID there’s been troubling news about tyranny’s rise
Will this finally shut O’Brien up no way!
We have learned a lot from the judicial inquiry into hotel quarantine in Victoria, and the lessons should not be obscured by the fact that the failures were systemic and cultural, rather than the result of people acting corruptly or in bad faith.
Victoria hotel quarantine inquiry: systemic issues more urgent than individual blame | Australia news | The Guardian
The old cliché that you get the government you deserve, irks me greatly, because I am fairly sure that a majority of us do not deserve the government we have been lumbered with!
A personal view of a failed democracy – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Allegations of involuntary hysterectomies conducted on people in a migrant detention center? Record numbers of children going to bed hungry? The revelation that President Donald Trump sat on his hands upon learning that Russia paid bounties to kill American soldiers? It’s futile to pinpoint when exactly Trump’s America left the community of civilized peoples. It’s more important and useful to explain how we kid ourselves about the fascist impulses of his “ordinary” supporters that hide in plain sight.
Trump’ Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism
Politically speaking, the world will survive the Trumpocalypse. The United States is a different matter. Trumpism, like COVID-19, has both exposed and amplified the manifold defects of this country, from widespread racial injustice to a failing social safety net. All the world’s a stage, as the Bard once said, and the international community has front row seats to watch, with a mixture of pity and fear, the tragic downfall of the once-great United States.
Has Trump done Irreparable Damage to US Partnerships Abroad?
President Donald Trump paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the past 15 years, according to a bombshell report in The New York Times. Trump, who has fiercely guarded his tax filings and is the only president in modern times not to make them public, paid $US750 in taxes to the federal government the year he was elected, 2016, and $US750 again in his first year in office.
Donald Trump paid just $750 in US income taxes in 2016, 2017: report
Will Germany finally shake the LNP out of it’s sleepwalking dream about coal?
Australian wind and solar farms could help Germany phase out its use of coal under a major export deal which also promises to create thousands of new jobs. Europe’s largest economy has identified Australia as a potential supplier of the vast quantities of hydrogen needed to decarbonise its heavy industry in order to adhere to the Paris climate accord and to achieve Chancellor Angela Merkel’s goal of net zero emissions by 2050.
Germany names hydrogen the hero of its post-coal future
A new Netflix film, The Social Dilemma, would have us believe that increasing social division and polarized political rhetoric is the product of Facebook and Twitter, and not the fact that income inequality has returned to pre–Great Depression levels.
Don’t Blame Social Media. Blame Capitalism.
Overwhelmingly, Australia’s leading economists want the budget to boost social housing and the JobSeeker unemployment benefit rather than bring forward personal income tax cuts.
Top economists back boosts to JobSeeker and social housing over tax cuts in pre-budget poll
Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt’s plan to let private patients access hospital treatments at home under their health insurance has opened up a fierce debate over how much control funds should have over care, as private hospital operators warn against a shift towards an American-style “managed care” model.
Greg Hunt’s care-in-the-home plan sparks warning of US-style health model
I have no doubt there are plenty of anachronistic, pettifogging, cumbersome provisions of industrial relations law that both sides could readily agree to remove. But I doubt that’s what the employers are seeking. They want their quid without any quo. Equally, I don’t doubt that much could be done to minimise the time-wasting involved in the regulation of business, without compromising other public policy goals. But too often removing “green tape” is code for sacrificing long-term protection of our environmental assets in favour of letting a few developers temporarily create a few hundred jobs while they build some highly automated mining project.
Budget warning: more rent-seeking won’t create ‘jobs and growth’
Hefty cuts to income support mean that Australia now faces a potentially more deadly epidemic than Covid-19. But it is largely avoidable, writes Michael Tanner.
Cuts to JobSeeker, Jobkeeper: out of the frying pan and into the fire – Michael West
Certainly, such manoeuvres would be entirely consistent with, if not exemplify, some of the core traits of the emperor complex we have now deciphered in Donald J Trump: delusional, omnipotent, narcissistic, arrogant, lawless and distrustful. Juvenile. Tyrannical, resentful, unhinged, misogynist and, perhaps most worrying of all, Putinesque.
Emperor Donald Trump: a psychological profile of an American nightmare
Trump and McConnell have corrupted the Supreme Court and th judicial branch for a generation. Time to fight dirty
The Supreme Court is finished: Republicans have killed it. Now it’s time to fight back | Salon.com
Beech reports that much of the world is also shocked to hear President Donald Trump talking like the leader of a banana republic and saying that he might not accept the election results if former Vice President Joe Biden wins in November.
‘I Feel Sorry for Americans’ — the World Grieves for the US Because of Trump’s Disastrous Presidency | The Smirking Chimp
The hallucinatory world of anticommunism-without-communism is dangerous and violent. Its partisans believe they face an existential threat, which in principle licenses almost any level of violence. The state, as historian Ellen Schrecker points out, has been the teeth of most anti-communist networks. But it has often been bolstered by private militias, whether they be Minutemen, Klans, squadristi, the Sturmabteilung or Brazil’s Green Shirts. That is the significance of the eruptions of militia violence in the US, the hate mobs in India, and the Green Shirt revivalists in Brazil. When these people start to see red, blood flows in the streets.
Why is the nationalist right hallucinating a ‘communist enemy’? | Richard Seymour | Opinion | The Guardian
Proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, stokes fears of renewed violence | US news | The Guardian
“This is a critical moment,” said Brown, a Democrat. “We have seen what happens when armed vigilantes take matters into their own hands. We’ve seen it in Charlottesville, we’ve seen it in Kenosha and, unfortunately, we have seen it in Portland.
Proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, stokes fears of renewed violence | US news | The Guardian
The administration calls Moncef Slaoui, who leads its vaccine race, a “contractor” to sidestep rules against personally profiting from government positions. Slaoui owns $10 million in stock of a company working with his team to develop a vaccine.
Trump’s Vaccine Czar Refuses To Give Up Stock In Related Drug Company | Crooks and Liars
New analysis reveals the government intends to cut billions of dollars from university research, while re announcing funds from elsewhere in the budget The government’s proposed changes to higher education funding will cut $2 billion a year from university research budgets, according to new analysis prepared by the sector’s peak body.
National Times | Facebook
Almost instantaneously, the bombshell Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, changed her relationship with the platforms upon which her generation grew up.
‘It makes you want to throw your phone in the bin’: The film turning teens off social media
Moreover, O’Neil cites that the Morrison government has its priorities misplaced, cutting subsidies for people who need it most rather than focusing on a jobs-based plan that can bolster the economy. “Despite not having a plan for how to get people back into jobs, the Morrison Government is now cutting support for the people in our community who have been hit hardest by this pandemic,” said O’Neil.
Jobs plan must be a way forward, says ACTU – » The Australian Independent Media Network
According to an ABC report, government funds were fast-tracked to Foxtel during the coronavirus pandemic. This news will raise eyebrows, as the media — like so many industries — tries to survive the pain and disruption brought by COVID-19. Why are some outlets missing out when others have their requests prioritised?
Federal Government fast-tracks grants to Foxtel
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