Comment by edot

That might actually be a pretty genius strategy.

Well what you're describing could just be finding the most skilled lawyer in town. What the other person is describing is bribery and nepotism.

It’s not really excusing anything, just pointing out that Cantor Fitzgerald would be making money whether this Supreme Court ruling went for or against the Trump tariffs. So it’s not like they had to have any inside knowledge to be making money.

If you are the risk and the insurance for that risk you aren’t a middle man you are the mob.

Curious if part of this was the overall decline in government compensation relative to the private sector. The president makes roughly what the typical SV engineer makes after 5 years in big tech or as a fresh grad from a top PhD program. Meanwhile the people the president deals with have become unfathomably wealthy.

In 1909, the US president made 75k - roughly 2.76 Million in today's dollars. This is in comparison to the current 400k dollar salary of the president. As the president is the highest paid government employee by law/custom - this applies downward pressure on the rest of the governments payroll.

I see no reason why the president shouldn't be modestly wealthy given the requirements or the role and the skill required to do it well. Cutting the payscale to less than some new grads seems like a recipe for corruption.

>There has most certainly been a major decline in values over time that corresponds quite strongly with the rise in the perceived importance of wealth.

Are you sure that people in the past viewed wealth as less important? If anything, the 1960s hippie movement would represent a shift away from a cultural emphasis on wealth, no?

I would suggest that internet commenter nihilism and politician nihilism form a self-reinforcing spiral. If commenters will take a nihilistic view of your actions no matter what you do, you might as well secure the bag. And if politicians are always securing the bag, you might as well write nihilistic internet comments about them.

There will be a wild party across the globe when that man passes. Flags burning, fireworks, nude parades, more alcohol consumed than the day prohibition was lifted.

Red Hats will be crying in the street while sane and normal happy people dance like it's the rapture and kiss like they're falling in love for the first time all over again.

The older I get and the more I learn, the crazier it is that evangelicals abandoned / were conned into supporting Reagan over Carter, all the while claiming that Reagan was sent from God or something.

But then, I have seen the same thing played out recently: Biden, a devout catholic is considered borderline evil by my fundagelical parents (mostly due to religious channels from the US, even though they're in Canada), while Trump is approaching sainthood.

Remember when Richard M. Nixon was laid to rest?

It is a return of their capital illegally acquired by the federal government.

There are Non-Resident Importers, which are foreign companies that import goods into the USA, but do not have a presence in the United States. About 15% of USA imports come through NRIs.

For them this reversal sets up a true irony. Trump effectively forced US citizens to pay more the imported goods. He thought that money would go to the USA treasury. Now the US treasury has to pay it back, so it is a free gift to the exporting countries. Like China.

Truly delicious.

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There were something like six different stated intentions, most of which were entirely mutually-exclusive. Replacing income taxes was always the least credible of them.

maybe i lean too much in one direction, but what is a "legitimate tax"?

Once again, count on hn for the downvotes. Yep, those shall not speak of downvotes, or taxation.

I'm not even convinced that the first one has been decommissioned yet.

It's not just powerless, I see that Republicans seem to not care a yota about this type of fraud.

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Totally with you on the corruption angle. I was just pointing out that loaning businesses money isn’t inherently evil. I’m also unconvinced anyone I lent to actually wants to go through the trouble and political risk of fighting for a refund.

It is not a "weakness" of the majority that the criminal activity has left a mess.

Meh, Kavanaugh indirectly caused the whole mess, and directly caused many related and similar ones. It's a bad-faith complaint, Kavanaugh's actual track record is "always let Trump move fast and if he breaks things then whatever."

Basically we have a legal processes for courts going "this is weird and unlikely to stand and hard/impossible to fix afterwards, so do nothing until you get a green light", using temporary restraining orders and injunctions.

Yet Kavanaugh et al spent the last year repeatedly overriding lower-courts which did that, signaling that if someone said "let's figure this out first" to radical and irreparable Republican policies, the Supreme Court would not have their backs.

______________

> In case after case, dissenting justices have argued that the Court has “botched” this analysis and made rulings that are “as incomprehensible as [they are] inexcusable,” halting lower court injunctions without any showing that the government is facing harm and with grave consequences, including in some cases in which the plaintiffs are at risk of torture or death. The majority’s response to these serious claims? Silence.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supr...

Irrelevant. The people who would send the money for refunds are people who do take such orders.

With that attitude you will be shot on the spot for resisting.

Sure they have.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-cou...

> President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/us/politics/justice-depar...

> Judge Provinzino, who spent years as a federal prosecutor, had ordered the government to release Mr. Soto Jimenez “from custody in Minnesota” by Feb. 13. An order she issued on Tuesday indicates that the government failed not only to return his documents, but also to release him in Minnesota as she had initially specified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_G...

> On April 10 [2025], the Supreme Court released an unsigned order with no public dissents. In reciting the facts of the case the court stated: "The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal." It ruled that the District Court "properly requires the Government to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador."

> During the [April 14 2025] meeting, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was up to El Salvador, not the American government, whether Abrego Garcia would be released.

(That was, of course, a blatant lie.)

"Seem more likely to" usually refers to the future, but is based on past behaviour. Hope that clears it up!

Suffer from a downvote-a-bot much?

Corrective upvote applied.

Having control of a company is not exactly "work".

The responsibility is on the parent; the parent should recuse themselves from decisions or discussions where there could be a conflict of interest involving their family members.

I can tell you what will happen instead.

If a dem wins in 2028, the big push will be one of reconciliation and acceptance. Let bygones be bygones. And it'll happen. And then for the next 4 years conservative media will absolutely pound that person's backside over made up and/or exaggerated corruption claims. Then in 2032 the GOP candidate will claim they're going to look into these claims.

We’ll be dependent on New York for that, as potus will pardon everyone save for a few suckers at the end, assuming he leaves office in an orderly manner.

The purge of DOJ (They can’t even find confirmable US Attorneys at this point.) and the military officer corps makes that not a certainty.

Nationalize the entire trump family fortune with RICO. Impoverishment is the perfect moral hazard to reign in hubristic and corrupt business practices.

> We need to see hundreds of life-in-prison sentences by the end of 2029

Best we can do is a couple dozen golden parachutes.

I think the precedent has been set - proactive pardons for all, every administration from now on

Merrick Garland is tanned, rested, and ready to not do jack until 2040.

How many cops/prosecutors/judges/prison guards/government employees support this administration?

Doesn’t seem like a trivial task, given the Nov 2024 election results.

The first thing on the agenda is to impeach & convict, if there were enough patriotic Americans in Congress it should be possible this afternoon.

Then they can take their time to reverse all immunity granted by this President so all snakes can be rooted out.

We've let criminal administrations get away with too much for too long. Nixon, Reagan, Bush Jr., and Trump 1 were all allowed to disregard the law and it got worse every time. We cannot move forward without purging crime and corruption from our system. Everyone from the top down to Billy-Bod ICE agent.

No more Merrick Garlands. No hand-wringing over appearances of weaponizing the DoJ. The next president needs to appoint an AG who enforces the law, and if they don't do it, they need be fired and replaced by someone who will.

I feel very strongly that's what should happen, and equally strongly that there's zero chance a democratic president will actually do that in a meaningful way. Dems sometimes talk a big game when they're out of power but when they're in power they actually quite enjoy the expanded powers and reduced accountability that's come about. That plus their usual ineffectual bumbling will combine to mean they basically doing nothing.

At this point I think I'm most scared of the next fascist president. Trump has opened up a lot of avenues for blatant corruption and tyranny. His greed and stupidity have so far saved us from the worst outcomes but someone with his psychopathy but more savviness will mean the true end of our freedoms.

Unfortunately, we have a two party system, and neither side is going to do anything about it. One side is complicit and actively participating in the fraud and grift. The other side is all talk and no action. If they win, they'll spend four years making excuses about why they can't actually do anything. They had four years to prosecute and imprison Trump 1.0 and just... talked and sat on their hands doing performance art.

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They did run a half decent candidate. Trouble is, too many people insist on so much more. If it's not the zombie of JFK they're staying home.

Why do you guys have only two parties and the executive is made of a pseudo king that rules with no opposition?

Right. So on one hand we have a gang of undisputable thieves (GOP), on the other hand we have honest but "not half decent" politicians (Dems). Tough choices all around!

There are more offices than just the president. Third parties often win in local elections (I don't know numbers, I doubt more than 5%). They win in state elections from time to time as well. If you get involved you can build a third party until it cannot be ignored.

When is the last time the Democrats ran a billionaire?

I think the swamp has been expanded more than replaced.

The message is just "swamp!" now.

Every accusation from Republicans, without exception, is either a confession, a plan, or an unfulfilled wish.

Another point of irony: Elon was tasked with "draining" the swamp and the left immediately goes to burn Teslas.

For me, when someone promises to "drain the swamp", they reveal their ignorance and selfishness with their shallow anti-swamp ideology.

Swamps are rich ecosystems with incredible natural beauty and diversity. Draining a swamp is extraordinarily bad in general, even if good for wealthy property developers.

Ironically, it seems that "drain the swamp" turns out to be an apt metaphor for what Trump and that gang have been doing, as promised.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

The swamp has always been him and his buddies. Pure projection. Everything he spouts is always pure projection.

It’s not even ironic. Trump never genuinely intended to do so, and anybody with a brain never trusted them to do so either. Just another case of “every accusation an admission” in the case of the leaders, and “it’s only bad when it’s not our guy doing it” in the case of the followers.

Joe Average will keep voting for them to pick his pocket, as long as they promise cruelty to the "Other Side".

Joe Average knows he is getting fucked over either way

Sadly people don’t have to remember. They have to be proven guilty.

Thomas is also married to such an operative.