Elite Impunity - Politicians, Tech, Media, and Taxes
Politicians
As expected, this week the Supreme Court decided the state of Colorado couldn't keep Donald Trump off the ballot for violating the 14th Amendment. If you follow politics, you are going to read approximately a million opinions on the decision, so we can dispense with legal analysis in these pages. Here are a couple, if you're in need of such things.
What the Court has done, and what it continues to do, is protect Trump and politicians more broadly from punishment for corrupt and illegal actions done while in office. You may recall we talked about the Court's repeated undermining of bribery laws - they have declared that politicians who enrich themselves in exchange for favors can just, you know, do that.
While the Justices rushed to reinterpret the Constitution to protect Trump's primary ballot access in a state he's going to end up losing badly, they need months to deliberate on a far more impactful question - whether Trump has blanket immunity from crimes he did in office.
In April, the Court will hear Trump's appeal and could rule later in the spring or summer. This is convenient, since Trump's trial was due to start this week. The Court refused to rule on a prior request by the Special Counsel to expedite a decision on blanket presidential immunity, but it's happy to take its time during an election season that is - in its own words - so important that the Court can't risk throwing it into 'chaos'. Yep.
We are going to have so many more months to talk about Trump's criminal trials - including the documents case a Florida judge Trump appointed is slow-rolling. He's the highest profile criminal politician to receive special treatment from a court system increasingly inclined to do so, but he's certainly not the only one.
Sitting Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on a dozen more criminal charges this week. The party that claims to be in favor of prosecuting corrupt leaders hasn't done anything to remove him from his position. He's a free man, and one of the country's most powerful politicians, while facing reams of evidence he's been working on behalf of foreign governments in exchange for cash for years.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams continues to have his close confidants' homes raided by the FBI. It is pretty clear that Adams took illegal campaign donations on behalf of at least one foreign country (Turkey) and used his prior position in city politics to benefit said donors. He won a narrow mayoral election against a real reformer and now spends his time saying weird shit and manufacturing budget crises with impunity. Will our new definition of bribery soon be extended to doing favors for illegal campaign cash? Can't wait to find out!
We've got a judiciary that writes laws now, and with upcoming SCOTUS decisions will likely wrest regulatory authority away from the agencies in charge of keeping us safe. Sure they've been effectively neutered by the courts, but politicians can have bribes, as a treat. Congress doesn't punish the judiciary for overreach, and the judiciary says it's okay for Congress and their pals to do crimes. What a country.
Tech
Arguably, the only people more insulated from the consequences of their actions than politicians are wealthy tech executives. Matt Levine has posited that losing a billion dollars as a tech founder is not disqualifying and may actually be good for the resume, and it's hard to argue he's wrong.
Adam Neumann and Travis Kalanick became billionaires, despite their businesses doing nothing but losing unfathomable amounts of money. Mark Zuckerberg is quite literally answerable to no one, while his products are shown to have enabled horrific crimes and human misery around the world.
Even in crypto - the rare tech foray that resulted in some arrests - the people responsible for hastening the planet's demise with their imaginary money are still profiting handsomely from what remains of the industry.
Speaking of crypto, remember the metaverse? Facebook is still spending billions a quarter on it, which it offsets by bribing its shareholders via its immensely profitable ad business.
And then there's AI, which is still just as bad as it was a few weeks ago, the last time we talked about it. The rush to cash in on the hype bubble has companies building massive datacenters in deserts at an even faster pace, which was already probably going to doom the planet before we got excited about chatbots. Their tech is so half-baked it's having public meltdowns and spewing gibberish, creating violent and sexual imagery and multiracial Nazis. Yet, despite weekly public spectacles that would have risen to the level of scandals for huge tech firms like Google and Microsoft, they're given a pass to disable a few features, or roll back some code, and we all pretend AI is a fully baked product.
When AI inevitably flames out like crypto, blockchain, and the metaverse there won't be accountability, because why would there be? The people who made the money will still have it, and can deploy it pumping the tech industry's next shiny bauble. The power in tech is so heavily concentrated among a small number of players at the top that no one ever seems to lose.
Like the courts protect politicians, VCs and financial firms protect the tech geniuses whose half-baked 'inventions' they fund and sell at a profit to late-arriving retail investors or their own finance buddies to be resold until the stone is bled dry.
Media
In theory, the role of journalists and reporters is to hold the elites accountable, but they're beginning to look a lot more alike. At this point, securing a role as a tenured reporter at a major outlet practically requires you be cut from the same cloth as those you're covering.
The scant few entry-level jobs in journalism pay little or nothing at all - anyone who can survive in NY or DC on a miniscule salary must have help from somewhere, and familial wealth is the easiest path.
Nor are there that many of those jobs - even the biggest outlets employ a few thousand people, which is smaller than tech company engineering departments. Many journalists get their start in local news, which is being starved by both digital platforms and vulture capitalists, eliminating local jobs and decreasing newsroom diversity.
This means that anyone wanting to turn journalism into a career has to be lucky, well-connected, or both. It also means that the same sort of nepotism that pervades any elite institution exists at large media outlets.
This causes concern when the people reporting on a sitting President are also writing a behind-the-scenes book about him. Or when high profile tech reporters also socialize with and capitalize off relationships with tech billionaires. Meanwhile, reporters not ensconced in the upper echelons can face strict rules about social media use, or risk punishment for any dissent.
The erosion of local reporting, and a move away from deeply-reported stories at larger outlets means that we learn less about what's going on in the world, and less likely to hold anyone in power accountable.
Digital media orgs erecting paywalls while sites like Facebook deemphasize news means that the quality of information available to the general public has never been worse. Guess who doesn't use paywalls and would love people to stumble across their 'reporting'? Right-wing media outlets funded by dark money, disinfo and conspiracy theory sites, and the like.
Those same forces take advantage of a lack of media resources to change the country's laws by filing spurious cases all the way up to their friends at the Supreme Court, under the noses of a complacent press. A weak media is what the elites want, because they'd rather do their crimes and corruption with as little scrutiny as possible. A financialized, privatized press run by and populated with other elites is happy to oblige.
Taxes
If you earn around four hundred thousand dollars, give or take, you are in the top 1% of Americans. Of those 3.3 million or so high earners, how many of them would you say didn't pay their taxes? A thousand? Ten thousand?
Well:
The IRS plans to go after 125,000 high-income earners who did not file tax returns going back to 2017 — and the agency says hundreds of millions of dollars of unpaid taxes are involved in these cases.
Beginning this week, the IRS will start sending out noncompliance letters to more than 25,000 people who earn more than $1 million per year and 100,000 people with incomes between $400,000 and $1 million who failed to pay their taxes between 2017 and 2021.
Four percent of the highest earners in America didn't pay tax for four years? And they're getting letters?
Back in January, the IRS announced it had collected half a billion dollars in unpaid taxes from millionaires. This was debt the agency knew about and just...hadn't really put much effort into collecting?
That is because for years, the IRS hasn't done its job, because rich people have lawyers and are annoying to deal with. And, obviously, because one of the two major parties openly advocates for abolishing the IRS entirely and has sought to undermine it for years.
No one enjoys paying taxes, but normal people are required to, or they get in trouble. For decades now, the rich have viewed taxes as optional, even as they benefit the most from our deeply unequal society. The tax write-offs the wealthy receive should be enough of a leg up for them, but they'd rather simply pay nothing at all, daring the government to send even a threatening letter.
It is not a secret that the people in charge of things in this country think they are better than us, more deserving of wealth and power they've done nothing to deserve. Unfortunately, with the engineered decay of the rule frameworks our society rests on, the time may soon come when we have to decide whether to submit fully to the will of the powerful, or tell them enough is enough.
Short Cons
Road & Track - "I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race."
Pew Research - "The problem was even worse for Hispanic estimates. About a quarter (24%) of opt-in cases claiming to be Hispanic said they were licensed to operate a nuclear sub, versus 2% of non-Hispanics."
NYT - "Just five days after Election Day in 2020, a conservative lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro emailed a former judge who was working for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, James R. Troupis, pitching an idea for how to overturn the results."
CNN - "The Searle Freedom Trust, a foundation funded by the company’s former chairman, has doled out more than $200 million in grants over the last decade, sending more money to conservative non-profits than nearly any other private foundation in recent years, according to a CNN analysis."
Cord Cutters - "When the new terms and conditions message shows up on a Roku Player or TV, your only option is to accept them or turn off your Roku and stop using it."
Bloomberg - "Impax Asset Management, which hailed the Inflation Reduction Act as a game changer shortly after it was unveiled in mid-2022, now says the legislation has too many built-in hurdles that are delaying implementation and enriching middlemen while leaving less money for green projects."
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