UDI  New York City.  3/26/16.

A memo was released by an anonymous source within Donald Trump’s campaign today that reveals the candidate’s strategy to bring the press into compliance after he is elected.  According to some legal experts, the memo implies a danger to first amendment liberties such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech, if Donald Trump becomes president,

The memo says that Mr. Trump has been “frustrated” by reporters and critics who fail to understand his message.  “How many times have I told them how great I am?,” Mr. Trump lamented.   “And how often have I told them how over-rated and horrible everybody else is?  But they still don’t get it, and many in the media are unfair to me.  And those horrible reporters who are mean to me will have to pay a price.  Believe me.”

Mr. Trump has a solution to the problem of “unfair” reporters, i.e. those who don’t sing his praises.  As president, according to the memo, he plans to change the law.  He has previously said that when he becomes president, he’ll change the libel laws so that he can sue people who say bad things about him and get money from them.  But this memo reveals an even more extreme form of retribution against people in the media who dare to criticize Donald Trump.  The memo is entitled, “How the Media Will Be Patriotic and Help Me Make America Great Again,” although some Trump opponents have dubbed it “The Fascist Memo.”

The memo discloses that after taking office as president, Mr. Trump intends to issue an executive order, or decree, mandating that all members of the media say only positive, supportive, patriotic words about President Trump and his policies.  The Trump decree will apply to all media, including  t.v., radio, print, and the internet.  Mr. Trump says in the memo that “the American people are tired of anti-Americanism, negativity, and partisan bickering in the media, and I’m going to put a stop to it.  This will be how we make America Great Again.”

Specifically the memo says that President Trump will modify the federal criminal code to provide for the prosecution of unpatriotic and seditious content in the media.  Such content, critical of the President, or anyone in his administration who is performing his  duties, will be subject to the new law.  Those in the media who create “negative” content, criticizing President Trump and others in his administration, or their policies, “will be guilty of the crime of treason, punishable by up to ten years in prison.”  Those convicted may also be sent to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  To assure a fair trial, defendants will not be entitled to a jury, and the trials will be held in special “patriotic courts,” tried by judges appointed by President Trump for this purpose.  The memo also says that family members of the traitors who are prosecuted under the new law, will be targeted.  In some cases family members of the accused will be tortured in front of their families, a technique developed and perfected by the former dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. The denial of a jury trial appears to fly in the face of the 6th amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees a right to a jury in all criminal cases.

At a hastily called news conference on the campaign trail today, Mr. Trump appeared along with Michael Mcshyster, an attorney for the Trump campaign, to defend and explain the memo.   Asked what it meant to “target” family members of those prosecuted under the new law, Mr. Trump replied to the reporter, with visible irritation:  “That’s a stupid question.  You’re over-rated.  Everyone knows what targeting means.  It means they’ll get what’s coming to them.  It’ll be great.”

Mr. Trump has previously called for “targeting” the family members of terrorists.  In clarifying what he meant by “targeting,” in an interview with Fox News Host Bill O’Reilly in February, Mr. Trump defended the policy of murdering the wives and children of terrorists. This despite the fact that it has never been the policy of the United States to murder women and children, even those who are family members of our enemies, even in war time.  In fact, murdering non-combatants  is a violation of international law, and of American treaty obligations.  Members of the armed forces are forbidden from following orders to murder innocents in war time, even if ordered to do so by the President.  When questioned during a Republican debate about the duty of the military to disobey illegal orders, Mr. Trump said, “If I issue the orders, they’ll obey.”

Mr. Trump turned over to his attorney questions challenging the constitutionality of his proposed executive order to silence his critics in the press.  Mr. Mcshyster, a graduate of the Frederick Law School, and partner in the New York firm of Mcshyster, Dewey, Cheetham, & Howe, was asked by a reporter whether the proposed executive order wouldn’t be a flagrant violation of the first amendment.  The Trump campaign attorney replied, “Actually, it’s not a violation of the first amendment at all because the law will only apply to traitors and subversives who seek to undermine Mr. Trump’s efforts to restore America to greatness.   Any member of the press who doesn’t want America to be great is clearly a traitor and therefore not entitled to first amendment protections.  There is a legal precedent for this.  During the Administration of President John Adams, as I’m sure you’re all aware, we had similar laws against Sedition, and they worked quite effectively, in helping to launch this great democracy.”

One critic of Donald Trump, however, was not persuaded.  Sam Samson, a spokesman for “Donald Trump Is A Douchebag,” a conservative political action committee with headquarters in Washington D.C., issued the following statement:

“I call on my fellow Republicans to wake up and reject totalitarianism.  We’ve all seen this movie before.  We know how it ends.  We’ve seen it in Cuba.  We’ve seen it in North Korea.  We’ve seen it in Iraq, and in Syria.  Our parents’ generation saw it in the 1930’s in Italy, in Germany, and in the Soviet Union under Stalin.  It ends when the charismatic Great Leader, loved by millions of followers who are blind, deaf, and dumb, leads the great national parade, the troops marching, the band playing, the masses cheering.  And they all follow the Great Leader – over the cliff.  It ends with millions loaded into freight train cattle cars.  It ends with those who speak out for freedom thrown in dungeons, in gulags, or in concentration camps.  It ends with social degradation, mass oppression,  bombs exploding, cities burning, and millions of lives destroyed.  It ends in wretchedness, weeping, and the gnashing of teeth.”

In reply to Mr. Samson’s comment, Donald Trump tweeted, “This guy’s a loser.  He has blood coming out of his wherever.  He’ll be the first one we go after when I become President.”

In “The Paranoid Style,” (op ed. May 15), Michael Mukasey attacks Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who disseminated Edward Snowden’s bombshell, as “paranoid” because Greenwald is more worried about NSA collection of metadata than he is about terrorism.  Mukasey may be right that Greenwald fails to grasp the threat from Islamic terrorists.  However, Mukasey misses the bigger point with his calming re-assurance that the NSA database can only be “searched to determine if a suspicious phone number overseas … has called or been called by a number in the U.S.”

Bill Clinton reportedly had thugs gather information on and intimidate women who threatened to reveal his sexual improprieties.  And Democratic operatives listened in on phone calls of Speaker Newt Gingrich.  Under Obama a politicized IRS, protected by the politicized Attorney General’s office, has gone after Obama’s enemies.  Dinesh D‘Souza, who made a movie critical of Obama, faces a dubious prosecution for alleged improper campaign contributions.

In THE TAXMAN COMETH, the main character wonders why there’s no word for the opposite of paranoia, i.e. if you think no one is out to get you when they really are.  The closest term he can come up with is “oblivious.”  “Oblivious” describes Mukasey’s sanguine re-assurance that we have nothing to fear from NSA spying.  We’re supposed to sleep well knowing the data will never be used for anything except catching terrorists.  People like Obama, Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, and the Clintons would never use this data against their adversaries.

Hitler and Stalin only dreamed of such Orwellian technologies.  But don’t worry about totalitarianism, Judge Mukasey; it can’t happen here.  Uh-huh.

Jim Greenfield

                                                by Jim Greenfield     4/3/14   

 According to polls, Americans are rejecting Obmacare en masse.   Frustrated by its disastrous roll-out, the Obama Administration has desperately sought to salvage this bureaucratic fiasco by getting endorsements from athletes and celebrities, who are ignorant about the product they’re endorsing.  Their sales pitch to buy Obamacare is a con and their marks are young people. 

 Obamacare is beyond the pale even for liberals.  It’s Robin Hood in reverse as it redistributes wealth from poorer young people, to wealthier  middle-aged people.  If too few healthy people sign up, Obamacare will collapse from inadequate funding.  To survive financially, Obamacare requires high premium payments from healthy people to subsidize the high costs of care for older sicker people. 

According to the Cato Institute  (“Obamacare: A Bad Deal for Young Adults. www.cato.org/publications/briefing-paper/obamacare-bad–deal-young-adults ): “Those provisions [of Obamacare] would drive premiums down for 55-year-olds but would drive them up for 25-year-olds—who are then implicitly subsidizing older adults. ….Those provisions …and individual mandates essentially redistribute income from young to old.”

These findings are corroborated by a Heritage Foundation study,  “How Will You Fare in the Obamacare Exchanges?” (http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/10/enrollment-in-obamacare-exchanges-how-will-your-health-insurance-fare).

The study finds that in 45 states premiums increase under Obamacare, particularly for young adults.  In eleven  states they go up more than 100% for 27 year olds.  In another sixteen  states premiums go up from 51% to 100% for 27 year olds.

 In Oregon, premiums for 27 year olds have risen 55% under Obamacare.  Monthly premiums for 50 year olds have increased only 7.4%.

 The Heritage study states:  “The Obama Administration is desperate for younger people to enroll to prevent an adverse selection death spiral. As pointed out by Sam Cappellanti, ‘The enrollment of these low cost young adults…is essential … to subsidize the costs of insuring the elderly and chronically ill.’”

 From these studies it’s clear Obamacare will disintegrate without a massive transfer of wealth from healthy young people to sick older people.  To get young people to buy into this bad deal they must be conned or coerced. 

 The middle-aged beneficiaries of this wealth transfer are far wealthier than the young people from whom the money is extracted.  Young people have far lower earning power than the older, higher skilled recipients of these subsidies.  Earnings peak when workers hit middle age.  In 2009, peak income occurred in the 40-55 years old age group where people earn more than three times as much as younger workers. ^ (“A Peak Earning Years Portfolio”  . Bloomberg Business week. March 17, 2009. Quoted at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_earning_years).  Obamacare takes money from financially struggling young people and hands it out to wealthier older people. 

 If you’re a healthy young adult buying Obamacare insurance is a sucker’s deal.  The most popular provision of Obamacare is the rule prohibiting insurance companies from turning down people with pre-existing medical conditions.  But the pre-existing condition requirement creates a paradox that violates the most basic principle of insurance.

 For example, why do you purchase fire insurance for your home?   You do so, because if the house  burns down the enormous cost of rebuilding would be unaffordable.  But suppose the law changed to require insurance companies to pay to rebuild homes even if the homeowner  didn’t purchase the insurance until after the fire?  You would then have no incentive to pay for insurance until after the home burned down.

 Obviously such a perverse law would put the insurance companies out of business and we’d all have to live with catastrophic risk.  Yet this is exactly how Obamacare works.   Why would a healthy person pay for insurance he doesn’t need when the law allows him  to buy it after he gets sick?   Obamacare attempts to counteract this oxymoron by creating a phony, negative  incentive to buy health insurance; it’s called “the individual mandate.”  The individual mandate seeks to frighten  healthy people into buying insurance at inflated prices,  contrary to their own financial interest, by siccing the IRS on those who disobey the mandate

 But in this rare instance, the IRS is a paper tiger.   The law only permits the IRS to impose penalties for refusing the mandate by deducting the fine from your tax refund. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/01/everything-you-need-to-know-about-life-under-obamacare-2/)  So if you don’t get a tax refund, i.e if you arrange not to have excess taxes taken from your paycheck, guess what!  The IRS can’t collect the fine and you can tell them to go jump off a cliff. 

 So if you’re young and healthy, it’s stupid to pay these inflated prices for Obamacare.  It’s smarter not to  purchase insurance unless you get seriously ill..   One caveat: if you get sick suddenly you may have to wait for the next open enrollment period to sign up for insurance.  But even with that wrinkle, a rational cost/benefit analysis suggests you’re better off not buying what Obama and his pitch men are selling. 

Jim Greenfield is the author of THE TAXMAN COMETH, a brilliant satire about tax evasion. www.taxmancometh.net.  Jim hosts a highly entertaining and provocative weekly radio show every Sunday afternoon from 1:00 to 3:00 on KPAM 860 A.M.  www.jimgreenfieldshow.com. 

 By bill greenfield

 Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I read Jim Greenfield’s “The Taxman Cometh” along with two other books that provided a most useful contrast. One was Eileen Rockefeller’s “Being a Rockefeller Becoming Myself”, and the other was Chris Matthew’s “Tip and the Gipper”.

 In the interest of disclosure and to explain the contrast: Jim Greenfield is my younger brother. We have politically diverse views and goals, but nothing would please me more than to see my brother succeed both in selling this book, and in having the greater political impact he covets. .. I only hope I can correct him in the error of his thinking in the process.

THE TAXMAN COMETH is really two books. The story itself is well-written, funny, and emotionally complicated. It tells of a used car salesman, Samson (who bears an unmistakable personality similarity to my brother). Samson takes on the IRS bureaucracy and his nemesis, Elliott Mess . The two engage in struggle to the death reminiscent of a Roadrunner cartoon. Having seen earlier versions of this story, and having had countless discussions with my brother about issues of character, human motivation, and the benefits and dangers of government activity, I can say that Jimmy has finally gotten it right. His Samson is politically at odds to my own world view but nevertheless a sympathetic character. Samson provides a perfect foil for Mess and the government mindlessness he represents. If I only read the story, I would probably start thinking I should become a Republican.

Unfortunately, Jim also provides a second book, with appears as “dubious philosophical musings” that are sprinkled among the chapters of the story. Jim’s musings are neither as evolved nor as nuanced as his Samson. Jim creates straw men that he can handily demolish in the style of the Fox News commentators. He equates government trying to improve opportunity to the poor in the form of such things as health care and education, with redistribution of wealth. Frankly, I have not understood why requiring that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett pay taxes at the same rate as Jim I do in order to provide a child in North Philadelphia with a decent school will make the child into a millionaire and Gates and Buffett into paupers. Nor do I understand why it sticks in Jim’s craw.

Jim’s Reply:  The above comment from my smarter older brother mis-states my view.  I never said I oppose using tax money for education.  As to the assertion that I equate “government trying to improve opportunity to the poor…with redistribution of wealth,” I never equate anything with redistribution of wealth except redistribution of wealth.  When the state uses its taxing power to take money from someone and give it to someone else that is the definition of redistributing wealth.  Whether the money is taken from the rich and given to the poor, or taken from the middle class and given to both the rich and the poor as is more common, either way it’s redistributing wealth.  Actually it’s more complicated than that.  They also take money from some in the middle class and give it to others in the middle class.  Along the way, the people who are doing all the redistributing manage to slip out some of the money and put it in their own pockets.  You can favor redistributing wealth, or oppose it, Bill, but don’t pretend it doesn’t happen.  It constitutes two thirds of the federal budget.  And by the way, my brother, you and I, like most Americans, are both payers and payees in this convoluted system.  We’re both receiving social security and medicare benefits, paid for by taxing younger working people who are less well-off than we are, who are struggling to support their children with what’s left after they pay taxes to pay our retirement benefits.  Is that your idea of “fairness?”  

……………………….

My simultaneous reading of the Rockefeller and Matthews books with my brother’s book was fortuitous in setting a context for my discomfort with Jim’s philosophical leanings. Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan may have had ostensible philosophical differences, based, in part, on O’Neill’s misreading of Reagan. Even though both descended from Irish immigrants, O’Neill, according to Matthews, saw Reagan as a kind of golden boy, not recognizing that the character he saw was what Reagan constructed out of a background more emotionally and financially impoverished than his own. (This political misreading does not come close to the Bobby Kennedy misreading of Lyndon Johnson, as per Caro, that Johnson “did not understand poverty”!!!). My point is that, political ideology aside; these two could work together because they came from a similar place where people understood what it was to compromise in order to get things done, and to make a deal and stick with it.

Eileen Rockefeller’s title is also the outline of her entire story. She was born into a world of privilege at a level that could be considered royalty. It is not just that her family does not want for anything; it is that they live on a different scale than regular people. Instead of buying a second or third home, they buy second and third islands, and then bring in workers to create entire economies that did not exist before. How does a child find meaning and individual purpose in such an environment? First of all, the family understands the importance of cutting through and moving beyond the issue of status and money. There is no tone of entitlement in her or her parent’s behavior, and frequently there are references to relationships that clearly bypass social status. Secondly, once you get past noticing that an experience occurred on uncle Laurence’s 55 foot yacht, or that the home in Maine had 50 rooms, the stories themselves are no different than one would read about any child growing up in a successful family. A child of a successful family may seem to “have it made”, but in fact, the wish to be recognized for one’s own merit and accomplishment is magnified by the accomplishments of parents and grandparents, not made easier. The child of a wealthy and well-known family must fear that she will not only be liked and manipulated in order to gain favor, but that she will not be seen as having any value of her own.

Which brings me to Jimmy and his musings. Jimmy and I may not have been born Rockefellers, but sure were not Reagans or O’Neills either. Our father was a graduate of Harvard Law School and both of his brothers were lawyers as well. His uncle Albert entertained three US presidents and many world class leaders other celebrities on his compound in Philadelphia. Relatives who were reasonably intelligent and had some ambition, such as my brother and I, would attend Ivy League colleges, get professional degrees, graduate without debt, and contribute to the family wealth during our lifetimes. Relatives with even limited intelligence or ambition would never be without cars or health insurance. They would get what education they could without incurring debt, and most likely, would own their own homes. In this context theoretical constructs about capitalism and other esoteric economic models are a quaint luxury that may serve as a kind of cover for some inconvenient truths. Like, for example Uncle Albert championed civil rights and introduced Martin Luther King to a Philadelphia crowd in 1961, and Jim’s and my parents were always great supporters of civil rights, But the Brooklyn Dodgers were denied service at the Ben Franklin Hotel, when Jackie Robinson became a member of the team. Uncle Albert owned the Ben Franklin Hotel.

My debate with my brother over many years has nothing to do with capitalism, which is the system to which we both owe our financial well-being. My issue is with fairness. I don’t understand why a child born to parents without means should have less access to the basic needs of life than we did. This has nothing to do with making all things equal, or with reducing the luxury of the wealthy. It has to do with believing there is a minimal level of support to which we think our fellow humans are entitled. It is hard for me to understand why my brother, and many other people who are equally or even more comfortably situated, seem so focused on getting more for themselves.

Jim’s Reply:  I don’t make the argument that capitalism is fair.  It isn’t.  But the only alternative to capitalism is socialism, and socialism isn’t fair either.  My brother has discovered that life is unfair and, being a high-minded guy, he’s troubled by that.  Fine, if you think it’s unfair  join together with other high-minded people who think it’s unfair, and do what you can to help the poor.  Use your own money to do it or raise money from other people who are willing to donate voluntarily to the cause.  But don’t imagine you can solve the “fairness” problem by building huge government bureaucracies, funded by taxes, and run by power-hungry politicians and petty tyrant bureaucrats.  We’ve tried that approach for 80 years, and all it’s done is create a dangerously corrupt concentration of power in Washington.  Life is even more unfair when Washington power-brokers decide who gets what than when wealth is distributed according to the admittedly Darwinian vicissitudes of the market. 

                            ………………………………

Capitalists are as divided on this issue as any other group. It is interesting to me, however, that the capitalists who stand with me on the issue seem to be pretty much out front on the matter. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Ted Turner are capitalist titans and public icons as well. On the other side, I cannot think of a single capitalist who actually speaks out himself, with the possible exception of Mitt Romney. They would prefer to quietly spend millions suppressing the vote and getting other people to speak falsehoods, truisms and half-truths. I keep thinking that if Samson, I mean … Jimmy, could understand this, we might get an even funnier sequel that really could be the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of our time.

Bill Greenfield