- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- socialism@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- socialism@beehaw.org
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I hope future people will give him the medal he deserves instead.
Let’s make sure that neither cristofacists nor
corporation-friendly libertarianseconomically-minded individuals come to power.
In other words, don’t fucking give up that you’re the source, and journalists mustn’t give up their sources either.
Or, you could flee to another country. Is Edward Snowden still alive?
I’m amazed Reality Winner is still alive.
That name probably makes it hard to search for her. I’m too lazy to try and prove my assertion one way or another
Seems it’s the opposite, the unique combo is popping up plenty. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s changed it since.
He leaked private information of an individual. People are bending over backwards to say how in this case being against privacy is actually good
Your mistake is seeing the rich as people.
Because there are very few rules that should be universal. “Keeping tax returns secret so they don’t expose the benefits rich people get” isn’t one of them.
It’s literally the law, protecting everyone’s privacy
Only a moron thinks the law is inherently moral.
So you’re going to say violating someone’s privacy is moral, but only if you don’t like them? What’s the logic
How about this: Billionaires and presidents don’t get to keep their taxes secret. Deal?
He didn’t leak every billionaire’s tax record, so don’t make it a billionaire tax record thing like this post suggests
Your reading comprehension sucks, pal.
The logic is that you’re a troll or a Russian bot. Fuck off.
There are exceptions to almost every rule. As there should be.
Yes, from the comments I see sentiments like the rich and Trump fans are not people. Just dehumanize your opponents and everything is permissible.
Not dehumanizing them, taking away their private citizen status, because it’s right in the title “Public Official”.
They are people. They’ve simply forgotten that we are people too, equal to them in every way except the size of our bank accounts.
As for the Trump supporters, I understand why they supported him in 2016. I struggle to see why they still do after what he’s done since, ie: lowered taxes for the rich again.
How much privacy is expected of the POTUS? Precedent is established and in the case of the Presidency strictly adhered to until as of recently. Nah, the public was given what was owed to it.
Precedent of Presidents voluntarily releasing their tax returns. This wasn’t voluntary
Yeah, because the cunt doesn’t give a shit about serving the people he’s supposed to represent. Or do you also think Hitler was entitled to some privacy and the enigma code shouldn’t have been broken?
Hitler would deserve privacy if he were a United States private citizen. He was not, he was a foreign leader.
See no he doesn’t if he’s a public official. The task of governing a large population requires transparency. I can’t believe that you argue in good faith that either a murdering fascist or a two bit con from New York deserves access to privacy while handling the affairs of multiple millions of people. Privacy laws do not apply to heads of state. You’re still arguing that these people should be able to avoid accountability for very real crimes.
I hate transparency too especially when it comes to President of the United States.
Did he release them himself? No? Then he has the same rights as everyone else
Trumptards aren’t people
So I guess killing them is not murder, since they are not people, right?
He revealed corruption. Whistleblower
No, he did not
We need more people like him
I hear revolution is calling!
Let me know when the guillotine is assembled.
Not holding my breath.
WOW, WSJ are scumbags!
No surprise there.
It annoys me to no end that real-life whistleblowers end up in jail, have to emmigrate or die under mysterious circumstances, but fictional whistleblowers are cheered on in theatres and novels.
It’s like America has a severe case of cognitive dissonance that the world sees, but is happy to stay that way no matter the cost.
Oh, we’re not happy… But those who rule us pretend to be.
Same thing happens with fictional businessmen
We have a severe case of conservatism. It is a plague long overdue for a cure.
Winstonchurchilcure.jpg
ELI5?
Winston Churchill meme showing cure for insomnia. Bullets are handy cartridges. Gun is applicator. Used recently as a meme for curing fascism.
I like that.
Historically, that’s the only thing that’s worked.
Real life whistleblowers don’t have a full team of Hollywood PR professionals boosting their image.
The closest we came to a real whistleblower celebrity was Edward Snowden. And when he left Hong Kong for Russia, all the liberals who thought he was a based freedom fighting chad decided oops nah, Big Russia Foreign Agent disregard everything about that PRISM shit.
I still suspect that change in attitude toward him was at least partially manufactured. The rich absolutely did not want the public lionizing him.
Fictional whistleblowers are cheered on because the public likes whistleblowers and the people making the fiction know that but real whistleblowers are persecuted because the people in power do not represent the public
As has been said here before, not many cheered for Chelsea, Snowden, Reality or even Assange.
We can’t keep blaming the elite who rule us if we’re not willing to put boots on the ground and shut the nation down until politicians do the right thing.
And it’s not impossible … just look at France to see how it should be done.
There’s a severe lack of political will in the US that I attribute to both isolation and electoralism. Many if not most Americans believe the extent of their political actions should be voting for a president every 4 years and any political organization or movement outside of this typically gets co-opted or rebranded into something useless. America is very good at handling it’s citizens and very good at squashing radical political movements.
Most people simply don’t care because they don’t truly believe there is anything they can actually do about it. Better to just not worry about it.
If anything, the jester solidifies the king’s power by working for the king as a sort of pressure valve. The king wants some of the discontent of the people to be expressed openly, releasing built-up tension and ensuring that said discontent will not burst in actions that could really undermine his position. The jester is his means of doing that.
When we, the public, laugh at the king, our laughter is also an expression of his power. He wants us to laugh so as not to act. It is, then, his laughter grafted onto our faces. When we laugh at the king, it is actually the king laughing at us.
The king is still a human being. Refer to historical France and Russia for ways to deal with leaders who don’t listen to the people.
Real life whistleblowers endanger the real life rich.
Is the middle class endangered or extinct at this point?
The middle class is a made up idea to convince part of the working class that they are immune to the problems of the rest of the working class because they’re in a marginally better financial position.
You almost got it. The Totally Fucked class is there to remind the Not Rich class that it could be worse, and that if they rock the boat, they can easily be relegated to the Totally Fucked class if they miss a paycheck or two.
Nevertheless, he added, “the judge gave him a max sentence, claiming it was ‘a moral imperative’ to punish him as harshly as possible.”
This guy gets fried on ‘mOrAL iMpeRaTivE’ — but Trump and Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh continue to party on— while making a complete mockery of the ever apparent 2-tiered US justice system.
In a bourgeois state, the laws are for the little people.
United states of decay
This guy obviously shouldn’t be in jail, can someone expand on the guy who the article says was forced into psychiatric care?
Anyways this one legal loophole has been around for awhile—rich people can acquire really low interest loans against their assets so they do, and they use that to pay their expenses, and when it comes tax time they write down that they made some money but they also took out a massive loan so actually they’re in the red. If you own a house you could probably leverage this to some extent yourself. Maybe if everyone who could did it they’d close the loophole? Obviously you couldn’t get rates as low as a politician who chills with the Schwab CEO.
If you own a house you could probably leverage this to some extent yourself.
That’s a mortgage. Most people use it to pay for the house itself, but you are free to use the money in other ways if you already own the house. It’s probably the only leveraged asset many people own, and the interest rate isn’t particularly low at the moment, but it’s the same thing as getting, say, a line of credit against your yacht.
It’s called a secured loan. And a house secured loan (aka mortgage) isn’t as good as a stock secured loan.
Stock secured loans rates were basically zero for quite a few years. I think this is why all the venture capital suddenly dried up. Both owning a stock AND taking out a loan based on that stock at 0.25% APR is an insane deal. A year of interest on a million dollars is $2,500. And the stock you’re holding will outperform that. After a few years you just sell a bit of the stock to continue paying the interest of the loan.
Now that the interest rates are 6-7% things are different. Suddenly your yearly payment on that million dollar loan is $65,000 instead of $2,500. And your stock may not make 6% this year to pay for it.
It’s kind of a miracle this return to reality didn’t cause more of a collapse.
can someone expand on the guy who the article says was forced into psychiatric care?
Judging from how he was treated, it looks like he was one of the good officers the police say they have:
Really needed to go to FBI
There are also equity based life insurance policies I think you can do similar things. My guy explained it to me as the justification for the policy and of course because I’m a stupid simpleton, I’ve never looked at actually trying to do something with it.
Lol, I don’t want to even be in dept to myself.
Tax avoidance is the real problem, while tax evasion is largely a misdirection at people who begin to get a fraction of their wealth without the experience to properly manage it. They’ve even penalized people who essentially have nothing to do with the US, accidental Americans (those who’ve lived their entire life in another country), as tax evaders because of the slimmest thread of association to the US.
Imagine being growing up in a country for decades, working there and having everything there, and having the US show up and tell you that your day-to-day bank account down the street is really a foreign bank account, using their economic weight to have the bank freeze it and throw you out. It isn’t a case of the theoretical, it has happened, and those people have been forced to “renounce” (heckled) to fork out over $4k to get them off their back - and even the EU has been ok with this, largely because it also answers to the lobbyists of wealthy billionaires.
Meanwhile rich assholes use what are essentially shell corporations (they don’t even have to be because of the size of their wealth) to move their wealth to whatever fiscal paradise they want. They don’t even need to change their citizenship because they can just create a corporation with headquarters wherever they please for whatever tax benefits it gives them. This is the problem: https://time.com/6326583/tax-shelters-multinational-corporations/
Few us citizens will even protest this extreme injustice. Ask yourselves how this would play out in France.
I think the biggest problem is how it’s such a complicated issue, it’s really hard to just ‘rally the masses around’. Especially when there’s plenty of other runaway complicated issues we also need to rail against.
I think this is why the “Occupy Wall St.” protests ultimately fizzled. People were pissed, many knew exactly why, many had a vague idea, and many others just wanted to blow off steam.
One “advanatage” the rich have with their ideology is insidious simplicity. Does it serve money? Do that. Does it keep you rich and punish others? Do that. Terribly predictable, but they all unite under solidarity of acquiring currency. They’re not bothered with how it affects the planet or any other human beings that don’t threaten their accounts.
A majority of these injustices are essentially us being very unhappy with all the complicated, multifaceted, complex ways in which these weaponized simpletons pursue cash and the power to acquire more cash. We know something is VERY wrong, but untangling it enough to unite under a common demand is a much heavier burden.
A lot of the problems boil down to FPTP-voting and the current way political campaigns are financed. They result in this polarized deadwater where money and power practically become synonymous words wielded to keep anything from changing via journalism and the courts on this matter. It’s exactly as intended by the old roman aristocrats that designed it over 2 millenia ago to maintain influence regardless of voter outcomes.
Occupy Wall street was attacked by one of the most coordinated police actions in US history. Never forget that.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy
Excellent dig-up. Thanks for this. :) It’s really hard to maintain “what really happened” as time goes on. I can’t believe this was so long ago.
If recent memory serves, the answer is rage for a few days then back to life as usual.
There’s only so many times you can guillotine the same corpse before it gets old. After all it’s “eat the rich”, not “slice the rich like toast”. So a few days will be sufficient.
Complacency it is, then. Nothing you can do about, so why even bother?
I’d love to “bother” but do you have any suggestions? The French method ain’t what it used to. The people need direction and I’m not talking about politicians. Everytime one pops up they get disappeared. The powers that be have gotten very good at keeping the status quo. So until that changes, yeah complacency it is.
Isn’t there some kind of amendment you guys are so proud of? Something to do with tyrannical governments? I know solidarity isn’t your thing entirely but it makes me wonder what you guys are waiting to happen before you use those guns. I hear they also help against disappearing. I realize that’s a big step but you could at least take to the streets, no?
Also, “the powers that be” don’t keep the status quo. The complacent populace waiting for something to change is. You are way more than them but for some reason you don’t channel that power.
They won’t do anything because they are selfish, lazy, weak, authoritarian cowards.
They can’t and won’t even enforce their own rules on Lemmy so what makes you think they’re going to do anything to save their own country?
You end an abnormally high amount of your sentences with question marks. Not just in this post, but in general. Are you German or something?
If you want people to be violent, go ahead and start. My usual policy for this is: you first.
Lol, thanks for the analysis and your valuable contribution to the discussion. I will vow to better my excessive use of question marks based on your feedback. Can I still ask questions or is it just the question marks you are irked by❔
Your “usual policy” is exactly my point, by the way. You wait for someone to do something, for something to change just as long as you don’t have to do anything and can stay angry but complacent. Change doesn’t come in the form of some feature update you can download, you have to actively work for it.
Oh sorry, I didn’t mean that to be critical, it was just something I noticed and was curious about. I thought it might be an acquired-English language thing. I’m realizing now it’s just, like, passive aggressive? Or maybe passive passive? Lol. Idk?
Yeah, that’s a fair point. But it strikes me as shockingly similar to calling for other people to do something on Lemmy? You know, because calling for undirected street violence from another country on an internet message board isn’t, like, better? It’s worse maybe?
I’m getting into using your punctuation style lol. You get it? It’s kind of fun? Or? Like I like it? Or?
We can vote.
Best joke yet in this thread.
And the Judge was furious they couldn’t give him a harsher sentence. That five years was quite literally throwing the book at him. It’s a felony, though, so even after he gets out he’ll be stripped of his rights to vote or purchase a firearm. His job prospects will dwindle to the point of non-existence. And I think he’ll be prevented from owning a computer or accessing the Net, given the nature of his crime.
Computer restrictions can be part of probation, but after that, he should be okay to own one. Voting right is a state-by-state thing, I think. Firearms are 100% everywhere for him, though.
hold up… even after release he has no right to vote? how fucked is that
Archive link … because I couldn’t get the posted link to work.
Well, nobody stood up for Assange of Snowden, rather the opposite, I’m not surprised of this outcome.
I just learned: In ancient times the government paid money to their citizens to get their fellowship. Only conquered countries had to pay taxes.
And in ancient times in Mesopotamia, there have been quite regular debt reset events. All private debts got null. Commercial debts still were valid.
I‘m currently reading „Debt“ by David Graeber. Interesting to read how religion, money, guilt and debt are intertwined. How we are forced into the rat race by burden us with debts - with both, moral and financial debts.
Only conquered countries had to pay taxes.
“Debt: The First 5000 Years” is such a good book because it really exposes the dynamics of conquest.
Conquered countries had to pay taxes in the coin of the realm. Coin was paid to the soldiers occupying the country. So in order to pay taxes, you were obligated to do business with the occupying soldiery. This system very quickly sorted the folks willing to accept conquest from the folks intent on rebellion, and it had a secondary benefit of enriching the defectors.
The conception of currency as a means of delimiting who is and is not a part of your society is really a genius bit of social engineering.
I’m on my 2nd reading of Bullshit Jobs by Graeber, I’ll have to pick up Debt; I hear a lot of good things about it.
