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#trump press conference

johnschneiderblog · 6 months

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Lest we forget (even though we may want to)

If you've been trying for three years to erase from your mind the images associated with this T-shirt, I apologize. But maybe we should be forced to remember certain things - for our own damn good.

This particular T was a Christmas gift from one of my kids. I wore it a couple of times on the pickleball court when it still meant something; it got a few laughs.

Memories faded; images got supressed; the shirt soon lost its punch.

Let's revisit: On Nov. 7, 2020, four days after the presidential election, the defeated Donald Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, hosted a bizarre state-of-denial press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping near Philadelphia.

It was a baffling choice of venue and although the Trump campaign never admitted it, speculation was that somebody meant to book the posh Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia. Oops.

Nontheless, the presser proceeded. Trump's legal team hurled wild and baseless claims about electoral malfeasance while rivulets of hair dye trickled down Rudy's cheeks.

Remember?

#John Schneider #Four Seasons Total Landscaping #Trump press conference #Rudy Giuliani #three-year anniversary

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reasoningdaily · 9 months

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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis Press Conference 8.14.23

The DA spoke about the sweeping indictment brought against former president Trump and 18 others. Forty-one criminal charges include conspiracy to commit false statements and filing false documents.

#donald trump indicted in ga #trump 4th indictment #trump election tampering #trump hit with RICO #DA Fani Willis #Fani Willis #Georgia #georgia election fraud #Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis Press Conference 8.14.23 #Youtube

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trmpt · 2 months

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2018/07/16/trump-and-putins-helsinki-summit-relationship-as-skewered-by-cartoons/

2018

Trump and Putin’s Helsinki summit relationship, as skewered by cartoons

#we still don’t know exactly what was said in their Helsinki meeting #putin referred to it as a negotiation #trump looked like a hostage in the press conference #trump russia

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fhear · 9 months

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Trump cancels press conference | FOX 5 News

#Trump cancels press conference | FOX 5 News

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garudabluffs · 1 year

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HAHAHA: Trump Starts 2023 with a New Year's Eve Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago, but Nobody Came

Sunday January 01, 2023 ·

READ MORE https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/1/2144824/-HAHAHA-Trump-Starts-2023-with-a-New-Year-s-Eve-Press-Conference-at-Mar-a-Lago-but-Nobody-Came?pm_source=story_sidebar&pm_medium=web&pm_campaign=recommended

102 Comments

#Trump #2023 press conference

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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Microsoft put their tax-evasion in writing and now they owe $29 billion

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

If there's one thing I took away from Propublica's explosive IRS Files, it's that "tax avoidance" (which is legal) isn't a separate phenomenon from "tax evasion" (which is not), but rather a thinly veiled euphemism for it:

https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

That realization sits behind my series of noir novels about the two-fisted forensic accountant Martin Hench, which started with last April's Red Team Blues and continues with The Bezzle, this coming February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

A typical noir hero is an unlicensed cop, who goes places the cops can't go and asks questions the cops can't ask. The noir part comes in at the end, when the hero is forced to admit that he's being going places the cops didn't want to go and asking questions the cops didn't want to ask. Marty Hench is a noir hero, but he's not an unlicensed cop, he's an unlicensed IRS inspector, and like other noir heroes, his capers are forever resulting in his realization that the questions and places the IRS won't investigate are down to their choice not to investigate, not an inability to investigate.

The IRS Files are a testimony to this proposition: that Leona Hemsley wasn't wrong when she said, "Taxes are for the little people." Helmsley's crime wasn't believing that proposition – it was stating it aloud, repeatedly, to the press. The tax-avoidance strategies revealed in the IRS Files are obviously tax evasion, and the IRS simply let it slide, focusing their auditing firepower on working people who couldn't afford to defend themselves, looking for things like minor compliance errors committed by people receiving public benefits.

Or at least, that's how it used to be. But the Biden administration poured billions into the IRS, greenlighting 30,000 new employees whose mission would be to investigate the kinds of 0.1%ers and giant multinational corporations who'd Helmsleyed their way into tax-free fortunes. The fact that these elite monsters paid no tax was hardly a secret, and the impunity with which they functioned was a constant, corrosive force that delegitimized American society as a place where the rules only applied to everyday people and not the rich and powerful who preyed on them.

The poster-child for the IRS's new anti-impunity campaign is Microsoft, who, decades ago, "sold its IP to to an 85-person factory it owned in a small Puerto Rican city," brokered a deal with the corporate friendly Puerto Rican government to pay almost no taxes, and channeled all its profits through the tiny facility:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher

That was in 2005. Now, the IRS has come after Microsoft for all the taxes it evaded through the gambit, demanding that the company pay it $29 billion. What's more, the courts are taking the IRS's side in this case, consistently ruling against Microsoft as it seeks to keep its ill-gotten billions:

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-microsoft-audit-back-taxes-puerto-rico-billions

Now, no one expects that Microsoft is going to write a check to the IRS tomorrow. The company's made it clear that they intend to tie this up in the courts for a decade if they can, claiming, for example, that Trump's amnesty for corporate tax-cheats means the company doesn't have to give up a dime.

This gambit has worked for Microsoft before. After seven years in antitrust hell in the 1990s, the company was eventually convicted of violating the Sherman Act, America's bedrock competition law. But they kept the case in court until 2001, running out the clock until GW Bush was elected and let them go free. Bush had a very selective version of being "tough on crime."

But for all that Microsoft escaped being broken up, the seven years of depositions, investigations, subpoenas and negative publicity took a toll on the company. Bill Gates was personally humiliated when he became the star of the first viral video, as grainy VHS tapes of his disastrous and belligerent deposition spread far and wide:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1

If you really want to know who Bill Gates is beneath that sweater-vested savior persona, check out the antitrust deposition – it's still a banger, 25 years on:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/revisiting-the-spectacular-failure-that-was-the-bill-gates-deposition/

In cases like these, the process is the punishment: Microsoft's dirty laundry was aired far and wide, its swaggering founder was brought low, and the company's conduct changed for years afterwards. Gates once told Kara Swisher that Microsoft missed its chance to buy Android because they were "distracted by the antitrust trial." But the Android acquisition came four years after the antitrust case ended. What Gates meant was that four years after he wriggled off the DoJ's hook, he was still so wounded and gunshy that he lacked the nerve to risk the regulatory scrutiny that such an anticompetitive merger would entail.

What's more, other companies got the message too. Large companies watched what happened to Microsoft and traded their reckless disregard for antitrust law for a timid respect. The effect eventually wore off, but the Microsoft antitrust case created a brief window where real competition was possible without the constant threat of being crushed by lawless monopolists. Sometimes you have to execute an admiral to encourage the others.

A decade in IRS hell will be even more painful for Microsoft than the antitrust years were. For one thing, the Puerto Rico scam was mainly a product of ex-CEO Steve Ballmer, a man possessed of so little executive function that it's a supreme irony that he was ever a corporate executive. Ballmer is a refreshingly plain-spoken corporate criminal who is so florid in his blatant admissions of guilt and shouted torrents of self-incriminating abuse that the exhibits in the Microsoft-IRS cases to come are sure to be viral sensations beyond even the Gates deposition's high-water mark.

It's not just Ballmer, either. In theory, corporate crime should be hard to prosecute because it's so hard to prove criminal intent. But tech executives can't help telling on themselves, and are very prone indeed to putting all their nefarious plans in writing (think of the FTC conspirators who hung out in a group-chat called "Wirefraud"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Ballmer's colleagues at Microsoft were far from circumspect on the illegitimacy of the Puerto Rico gambit. One Microsoft executive gloated – in writing – that it was a "pure tax play." That is, it was untainted by any legitimate corporate purpose other than to create a nonsensical gambit that effectively relocated Microsoft's corporate headquarters to a tiny CD-pressing plant in the Caribbean.

But if other Microsoft execs were calling this a "pure tax play," one can only imagine what Ballmer called it. Ballmer, after all, is a serial tax-cheat, the star of multiple editions of the IRS Files. For example, there's the wheeze whereby he has turned his NBA team into a bottomless sinkhole for the taxes on his vast fortune:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

Or his "tax-loss harvesting" – a ploy whereby rich people do a "wash trade," buying and selling the same asset at the same time, not so much circumventing the IRS rules against this as violating those rules while expecting the IRS to turn a blind eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

Ballmer needs all those scams. After all, he was one of the pandemic's most successful profiteers. He was one of eight billionaires who added at least a billion more to his net worth during lockdown:

https://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaire-bonanza-2020/

Like all forms of rot, corruption spreads. Microsoft turned Washington State into a corporate tax-haven and starved the state of funds, paving the way for other tax-cheats like Amazon to establish themselves in the area. But the same anti-corruption movement that revitalized the IRS has also taken root in Washington, where reformers instituted a new capital gains tax aimed at the ultra-wealthy that has funded a renaissance in infrastructure and social spending:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

If the IRS does manage to drag Microsoft through the courts for the next decade, it's going to do more than air the company's dirty laundry. It'll expose more of Ballmer's habitual sleaze, and the ways that Microsoft dragged a whole state into a pit of austerity. And even more importantly, it'll expose the Puertopia conspiracy, a neocolonial project that transformed Puerto Rico into an onshore-offshore tax-haven that saw the island strip-mined and then placed under corporate management:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#que-viva-albizu

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/13/pour-encoragez-les-autres/#micros-tilde-one

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #irs #puerto rico #puertopia #microsoft #micros~1 #tax avoidance #tax evasion #pure tax play #big tech can't stop telling on itself #corporate crime #rough ride #the procedure is the punishment #steve ballmer #pour encouragez les autres

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wilwheaton · 8 months

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The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

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breakingfirst · 6 months

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FLASHBACK: Remember when President Bush had Shoes THROWN at him? 🥴

#george bush #iraq war #america #president bush #conservative #republican #news #politics #trump #shoes thrown at bush #fyp #press conference #biden #potus #viral #trending

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metamatar · 14 days

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Is that trans politician who wants to demolish mosques contesting the elections bc she thinks Modi isn't fascist enough? I thought Modi was the most fascist

about hemangi sakhi contesting from varanasi from the right of modi. fascists have internal disagreements too, and the sangh is quite frustrated by how the bjp has enriched itself while using the sanghs ground labour to win elections without offering little power in return. she is not the first or the last trans woman in india to run elections from the right. in ram rajya, we brutalise muslims first.

modi is not the most fascist in practice because he is prime minister and does lipservice to the notion of indian democracy and will say things like oppressing muslims is the real secularism bc they've had it to good instead of saying hindu rashtra 4ever. note that this is not because he's actually less fascist, its just a useful electoral tactic.

their are lots of middle class indians who like that thing bc it lets them pretend not to be what they think of as the degenerate khaki shorts fanatical fascism. modi for very long has functioned metonymically as the clean face of the sangh (the butcher of godhra indeed) in that he never outright says shoot those [slur] dead in public and has not been actually convicted of murder. in general the bjp fights does narrative building on several fronts, modi never holds press conferences, while amit shah is known to be his enforcer, local functionaries will do brazen things that the top level will walk back when there's a bit too much outrage (garlanding the rapists of bilkis bano, giving a bjp seat to the guy best known for pulling a gun on protesting muslim women) but not be disciplined etc. it gives every kind of fascist something to love and hate about the bjp.

sometimes people diagnose that the only reason the revolt against trump was so serious in us civil society was because trump embarassed everyone. modi is a far more sophisticated kind of fascist.

#asks #anon

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reality-detective · 9 months

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Kash Patel says that Fani Willis broke the law when she allowed the leaked indictment charges and was 100% lying at her press conference when she blamed the leak on the clerks. He says that the entire case should be thrown out!

“Donald Trump’s team needs to challenge the grand jury’s indictment in this case. It is unlawful. Therefore, the case in it’s entirety must be thrown out because the district attorney herself broke the law.”💥

Awesome interview with X22 Report! 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think for yourselves #think about it #think for yourself #do your homework #do some research #research everything #do your own research #ask yourself questions #ask yourself #question everything #kash patel #x22 report

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qqueenofhades · 2 months

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Looks like Mitch it stepping down from leadership in November. Of course he'll be serving out the rest of his term until January because Satan himself would have to shuffle this absolute sack of bones and slime off this mortal coil before he gives up ALL his power. Wonder which unholy minion of Dump will take over for him...

Oh man, Mitch must be like, actively dissolving into a puddle of toxic black slime if he's remotely willing to step down/remove himself from power in the slightest degree before he literally dies at a press conference. Which, for the record, I think he should do. It would be hilarious and literally the least of what this country deserves in repayment for all the evil he's been responsible for wreaking on it.

We should also not forget, however, that Mitch is likewise well aware that his brand of hyper-competent, surface-level respectable evil is toast, and he's obligingly getting out of the way for the full-on frothing-mouth looney MAGAs to take over. We can at least hope that his replacement will be so busy sucking up to Trump and saying insane things that they'll have no ability to actually use the system and work behind the scenes to do evil things, as good ol' Addison Mitchell McConnell III has been so good at doing for his entire tenure. Die in a fire after flipping Trump both middle fingers, fuckwad. You're already on your way out, you've got nothing to lose. But will you? No.

#jcams88 #ask #politics for ts #it would be really funny if mcconnell now just totally let rip on trump #but he won't #because he is a pathetic sack of shit who literally has no other interest than supreme power #he hates trump but he will still use that power in trump's favor and step aside to clear the route for one of trump's worst lackeys #but yeah if he's actually stepping down he's gotta be like literally dying as we speak #do it mitch do it

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