January 31, 2024

Delaware is a global haven for tax dodgers.

How tax dodging and corporate secrecy found a home in Delaware, with Hal Weitzman

Excerpt…

Hal Weitzman: Most of us interact with Delaware companies at least once a day. If you think about Delaware companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Visa, MasterCard, or Walgreens or Walmart or CVS, I could go on and on and on, Delaware is the corporate air that we breathe.

Paul Rand: Now, wait a minute, you might be saying. Isn’t Amazon in Seattle? Isn’t Google in California? And isn’t Walmart in Arkansas? Well, it turns out that all of these companies are actually registered in Delaware.

Hal Weitzman: So this is a state that has fewer than a million residents. The populations about the size of Tucson or Grand Rapids metro area. But it has 1.6 million companies registered there, including two-thirds of the US’ biggest public companies and-

Snip…

Tape: Backpage.com is one of America’s largest classified websites, but it’s best known for selling sex. The majority of Backpage’s revenue is generated through prostitution related ads in its adult services section. Law enforcement officials have dubbed it the world’s top online brothel.

Hal Weitzman: In fact, at its height, Backpage was involved in three-quarters of the child trafficking reports received by the National Center For Missing And Exploited Children. This was a Delaware registered company, that even months after it was shut down by federal law enforcement in 2018, was still considered to be in good standing by the Delaware Secretary of State’s office, because they’d paid their annual fees. So there’s a case of human trafficking. There are cases of money laundering, of arms trafficking, of drugs trafficking, all not going through Delaware, but all using Delaware businesses. And as I say, with the protection of the United States law.

Continues…

https://news.uchicago.edu/how-tax-dodging-and-corporate-secrecy-found-home-delaware-hal-weitzman

January 28, 2024

He's bananas.

More than half, per Pfizer:

How Genetically Related Are We to Bananas?

https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/how_genetically_related_are_we_to_bananas

January 27, 2024

He's just damaged.

As evinced by his entire adult life, there is no good in Donald J Trump.

January 27, 2024

Lordy, MeidasTouch got the tapes.

Alina Habba Melts Down After Trump Ordered to Pay $83.3 Million in Damages

https://www.meidastouch.com/news/alina-habba-melts-down-after-trump-verdict-carroll

January 26, 2024

What Jerry Jones stood for.

A Sept. 9, 1957, AP Photo shows Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in the background of a group of defiant white students at Arkansas' North Little Rock High School blocking the doors of the school, denying access to six African-American students enrolled in the school. Moments later the African American students were shoved down a flight of stairs and onto the sidewalk, where city police broke up the altercation.

AP Photo | William P. Straeter | NBCDFW.com

Source: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/ive-forgiven-him-says-black-student-in-1957-photo-with-jerry-jones-outside-segregated-school/3134478/

January 25, 2024

Democracy depends on truth.

I have long loathed the rightwing bias of the paper's ownership, but have respected their work to provide a platform for excellent reporting. They also archive -- and share -- their work.

Thus the city of Los Angeles, the State of California, and the entire United States have lost a quarter of democracy's adherents at LAT. Newspapers, for all their faults, are the best way I know for a community to share what citizens must know.

The nation's founders understood this. That's why the only business mentioned in the US Constitution is the Free Press.

First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If we don't know what's what or who's who we won't know why it's going on. And by why I mean mass murder, wars without end, global and domestic fascism, and the treason.

January 23, 2024

Pruneface was a Klansman

The late Honorable Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young on Ronald Reagan, before he was elected president:

"Pruneface."

On Ronald Reagan, after he was elected:

"President Pruneface."



Reagan, White As Snow

by Alec Dubro
www.tompaine.com/, May 13, 2007

EXCERPT...

Domestically, he opposed every legislative remedy for African Americans, betraying a meanness of spirit and an open racism. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote in The Guardian in 2003:

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South", and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights."

It's hard to believe now, but in 1965, a higher percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Voting Rights Act than Democrats. Reagan, then, wasn't following party tradition; he was making a grab for the white racist vote-and it worked. Southern Democrats abandoned the party en masse for one more welcoming to white supremacy. No wonder so many loved, and still love, the man: He validated people's whiteness.

It's true that Reagan knew enough to occasionally disguise his racism. He appointed Samuel Pierce to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where Pierce presided over the halving of housing subsidies. No matter. Reagan couldn't remember the man's name. Once, at a reception for the nation's mayors, he greeted Pierce with a '"Hello, Mr. Mayor." Despite this, a few black conservatives, such as Armstrong Williams, were willing to validate him as someone who knew better than the "civil rights establishment" what was good for African Americans.

But it was in foreign affairs that he showed that he could rise above mere opportunism and flaunt his racism for all the world to see. He was the best friend that South Africa's apartheid government had in the developed world.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/Reagan_WhiteAsSnow.html

For all the lurking Fundamentalists: Reagan and his ilk brought America full-spectrum evil.



Bell Book Says Officials Told Racist Jokes : Reagan Aide Says He Doubts Claim by Ex-Education Secretary

October 21, 1987|Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Reagan's first secretary of education says mid-level Administration officials made racist jokes and other scurrilous remarks during civil rights discussions, but Reagan's chief spokesman said Tuesday he does not believe it.

Terrel H. Bell, in a memoir of Reagan's first term, said the slurs included references to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as "Martin Lucifer Coon" and calling Title IX, a federal law guaranteeing women equal educational opportunity, "the lesbian's bill of rights."

SNIP...

Bell did not identify those who made the racist or scurrilous comments. He could not be reached for further comment.

In his book, he says the jokes about King were made as Reagan was deciding whether to sign or veto a bill establishing King's birthday as a national holiday. He eventually signed it.

Bell said: "I do not mean to imply that these scurrilous remarks were common utterances in the rooms and corridors of the White House and the Old Executive Office Building, but I heard them when issues related to civil rights enforcement weighed heavily on my mind."

Bell added: "It seemed obvious they were said for my benefit, since they often accompanied sardonic references to 'Comrade Bell.' "

CONTINUED...

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-21/news/mn-9912_1_racist-jokes

What it has to do with the present situation:



Media Ignores Ronald Reagan’s Unmasking as Donald Trump’s Racist Grandpa

By Tommy Christopher
Mediate, August 3, 2019

Excerpt…

You could be forgiven if you missed the news that a racist telephone conversation between then-California Governor Reagan and then-President Richard Nixon was unearthed and released this week.

The call took place in October of 1971, during which Reagan and Nixon discussed the United Nations delegation from the United Republic of Tanzania following a vote on a resolution to seat China in the world body.

“Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said in the brief recording.

“Yeah,” Nixon agreed.

“To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Reagan continued, to hearty laughter from Nixon.

Continues…

https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/media-ignores-ronald-reagans-unmasking-as-donald-trumps-racist-grandpa/

January 23, 2024

The Media Monopoly doesn't really like Democrats or Democracy.

They prefer managed wealth, a Socialized Capitalism wherein they manage to get all the wealth they can carry off.

Fair play? Equity? Bah humbug.

Right Wing Built the Mass Media Long Ago to Manipulate the Masses

https://democraticunderground.com/100217547007

January 23, 2024

Sammy the Grifter

Samuel Alito did not declare gifts from billionaire with case before US supreme court

Rightwing justice accepted private plane trip to Alaska for luxury fishing trip hosted by Paul Singer in latest gifts scandal

by Martin Pengelly
The Guardian, 21 June 2023 13.19 EDT

The US supreme court justice Samuel Alito accepted a seat on a private plane owned by the conservative billionaire Paul Singer, flying to Alaska for a luxury fishing trip hosted by another rightwing businessman, then did not declare such gifts or recuse himself when Singer had business before the court.

The latest blockbuster report on the tangled subject of supreme court ethics came, again, from ProPublica. The non-profit newsroom has already detailed the close relationship between another hardline justice, Clarence Thomas, and the conservative billionaire Harlan Crow.

Supreme court justices are subject to the same ethics rules as other federal judges but effectively govern themselves. The chief justice, John Roberts, has resisted calls to testify in Congress about the Thomas-Crow affair.

Snip…

On Tuesday, Alito published a controversial “prebuttal” to the new ProPublica report, using a Wall Street Journal column to say the piece was coming and to deny wrongdoing.

Continues…

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/21/samuel-alito-undisclosed-gifts-billionaire-paul-singer-supreme-court

January 22, 2024

MAGA Loomer is criminally insane.

Hope she gets some professional psychiatric support. She also deserves a visit from DoJ. All these NAZIs do is projection.