Never Mind the $750, What About Trump Paying More in Taxes to His Dictator Buddies?
The real scandal is Trump paying tribute to Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte while exploiting US tax code
Well then. Let’s talk about Donald Trump paying six figures in taxes to the governments of India and the Philippines. (I know, Russia seems sexier, but it’s not there and that is not the point.) He paid $145k to India and $156,824 to the Philippines.
Plenty of people are gonna focus on Trump and the IRS. Go ahead, it's a rabbit hole. Chances are he has taken advantage of every legal loophole offered to him by our broken tax system.
The same ones that gave us Michael Bloomberg, one of the top 20 richest people on Earth, who ran for President as a Democrat for just about half an hour, simply because he wasn’t having enough fun playing chess with his dollars on the sidelines. To the Soros conspiracy theorists, look into Bloomberg’s political contributions and see who’s been kissing his ring.
Look at the net worths of McConnell, sure, but also Pelosi, Schumer, and my good friend Earl Blumenauer. How’d they get so rich?
That’s all only so much political volleyball. The attendant media circus surrounding Trump’s abysmal $750 tax payments to the IRS is meant to captivate the public and allow politicians to campaign for themselves and their respective party’s nominee.
This is a workaround media uses for the equal time rule, which lists these exceptions: “within a documentary (CNN Films, anyone?), bona fide news interview (who determines that?), scheduled newscast (“…and joining us now”), or an on-the-spot news event.”
Anyway.
India and the Philippines have become close friends with the US as all three have seen the rise of tyrants as their heads of state. Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, and Donald Trump are comic book villains of the highest order, only they’re real and, as my real friend Sarah Iannarone says, "the cruelty is the point."
Modi's India is a scary place. Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians face religious persecution under the guise of various public safety measures rooted in conspiracy theories. Imagine an America where the Ku Klux Klan - a white Christian supremacy organization - aids law enforcement not just in arrests but in perpetrating violence including murder and arson in immigrant communities, against synagogues.
That’s what’s happening in India, with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right wing paramilitary organization acting as the armed wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Modi is a member of the BJP.
India has swung hard right after the liberal Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, a Sikh who maintained warm relations with Barack Obama. The parallel between India and America, where populist nationalism usurped a short-lived period of liberalization, is chilling in light of the fact that both movements emerged following an administration led by a member of a minority community that has experienced historic disenfranchisement and abuse from the majority.
Under rumors that Muslim migrants are intentionally spreading COVID, they were placed on stricter lockdown conditions. Sikhs are jailed on accusations of backing terrorism with a UN-supported referendum for the secession of Punjab state, to become the Sikh Republic of Khalistan. On the eastern edge of the Muslim world, it would be a welcome addition to the geopolitical sphere.
Modi enacted a purge of Muslims in Gujarat state in 2002 when he was its governor and may have been a participant in the anti-Sikh genocide of 1984. He's more like David Duke than Donald Trump. India isn't just nuclear capable, they've amassed an arsenal and are in tense conflicts with Pakistan to the West and China to the North. They are deporting refugees from Burma/Myanmar to certain death.
Rodrigo Duterte referred to Barack Obama as a "son of a whore" in an interview and openly expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. His anti drug campaign enabled law enforcement to perform extrajudicial killings of "suspected drug dealers," citing them as a national security threat. Over 15,000 people, mostly young men, have been summarily executed in the streets.
Duterte has expressed a desire for revenge against the United States' past imperialism of what he emphatically called "MY country" in an Al Jazeera interview in 2016. Trump's alliance with Duterte, including Trump's high praise on the campaign trail, including a possible model for a US drug policy.
Anyway, given the reality that Trump is cash poor (that wasn’t just a joke on Family Guy, most of his assets are liquid), it’s likely he really WAS in a degree of debt, personally and politically, to these men. He has funded those governments with tax payments.
And now, he’s part of a global axis of evil.
That’s the greater scandal.
Okay, Robert Reich, now tell me how much Trump has paid in taxes in Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Japan. I've got all the tea on these mutants.
Alex DiBlasi, Green Progressive candidate for Congress (OR-3), and Member, Progressive International.
DiBlasiForCongress@gmail.com
@Alex4Oregon on Twitter
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