Tag: champagne socialists

Why Is Multi-Millionaire Bernie Sanders Begging For $27?

Bernie Sanders, who is a multi millionaire from taking big pharma money and other ‘perks’ of being a high profile elected official, posted a video over the weekend begging people to fund him touring around the country to essentially complain about President Trump and Elon Musk.

Here he is asking people to give him money so he can stay in swanky hotels and blather to conference rooms full of leftists about “the oligarchs,” “authoritarianism,” and “the richest people in the world” running the government.

As if this guy has any clue what “working families,” struggle with. 

No working class people are sitting around crying about Trump eliminating fraud, sorting out the disaster at the border and making the government more efficient.

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Democrats Say They’re Fighting Inequality. But Many of Their Policies Favor the Rich.

In the grand ballroom of American politics, Democrats have long waltzed to the melody of progressivism while ridiculing Republicans’ preference for outdated tax cut tunes. Ironically, they don’t want to pay for their style of big government with higher taxes on ordinary Americans, which their expansionary ambitions would require. Instead, they loudly proclaim that they want to tax the rich. It remains to be seen how true this is.

Indeed, while Democrats profess their devotion to social justice and fight against income inequality, they often push for policies that favor the rich. Take their nonstop battle over the last five years to ease the tax burden of their high-income constituents.

The State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), placed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income. This move predominantly affected high earners in high-tax states like New York, California, and many others that are Democratic strongholds.

That’s a tax hike on the rich. This shouldn’t bother Democrats, who are usually happy to demonstrate their egalitarian chops by clamoring for that very thing. Yet this time, by demanding repeal of the SALT cap, they are on the front lines of a battle to restore tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out, when affluent Californians and Northeasterners felt the pinch, Democrats were ready to cha-cha for tax relief.

Contrast this with the refusal by moderate New York Republicans to vote for Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) for House speaker in exchange for doubling the deduction cap to $20,000 for individuals and $40,000 for married couples. Now, this might mean these guys really didn’t want Jordan as speaker, but they wouldn’t roll over even in exchange for tax cuts for their own constituencies.

Would New York Democrats be so principled? Back in 2021, 17 of 19 members of this delegation threatened to block a Democrat-sponsored infrastructure bill if the SALT deduction cap wasn’t entirely repealed. I would have been OK with that crony bill failing; I highlight this incident only to reveal some Democrats’ commitment to tax breaks for rich blue-state voters.

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Socialist Scholar Cornel West Owes $500,000 In Taxes

Socialist professor and presidential candidate Cornel West wants “massive investments” including “free college tuition” and “Medicare for All” as part of his presidential campaign.

Just don’t expect him to chip in on the bill.

According to the Daily Beast, and confirmed by West, the Union Theological Seminary professor owes over half a million dollars in taxes.

The Green Party candidate has “more than $500,000 in outstanding federal tax liens lodged against him in two states” dating back to 2005, according to the liberal news outlet.

He explained, when asked on Monday by commentator Charlamagne Tha God, that not paying taxes is part of his “gangster proclivities.”

“They’re not wasting no time attacking you because now they’re saying you owe a half a million dollars in taxes and they’re trying to say it’s hypocrisy on your part,” the commentator said.

“Because you spent so much of your life advocating for higher taxes on the wealthy. I’m like ‘I ain’t never heard any of this about Dr. Cornel West before but now all of a sudden he’s running for president,’” he said. “Everything’s coming out the woodwork,” another host said.

“Absolutely, absolutely, and the thing is, I mean, I told you before, I got so much gangster in me, I was a gangster before I met Jesus. I ain’t nothing but a reformed sinner with gangster proclivities,” West said on the show.

“Partly it’s because I do like to give to loved ones and others too,” he said. “But I take responsibility for it too. But it don’t make no difference to me.”

“They want to use it as a distraction. Why don’t you keep the focus on the suffering that I’m highlighting?” he told Charlamagne Tha God recently.

Instead of focusing on West’s legal obligation to pay all his taxes, the obligation that all Americans share, the media should instead focus on “the suffering” people in Appalachia, Chicago and Harlem.

“This is just a matter of trying to hit you below the belt and keep the distraction,” he added.”

He appeared to deny a report from the Daily Beast that he also owes $45,000 in child support, saying the outlet was “lying about his kids.”

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AOC goes NIMBY, says there’s a better solution than housing migrants in her district

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., who has moved to the radical end of her progressive agenda multiple times since she was elected to Congress, apparently has been struck with a serious case of NIMBYism.

That stands for “Not In My Backyard,” a sentiment that is attributed to those who definitely do not want various responses to social problems close to them.

In this case, it’s a tent city for migrants.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been working to deal with an influx of some 10,000 migrants who ended up in the city after crossing into the United States illegally from Mexico.

The pending proposal involves building a tent city in the district that elected Ocasio Cortez to house about 1,000.

Adams spokesman Fabien Levy defended plans for the tent city.

“No location is perfect, but we are confident in this decision. And we’re glad that so many local elected officials recognize we’re in an emergency and are willing to work with us towards a successful rollout,” Levy said.

In a report in the New York Daily News, Ocasio Cortez ripped the mayor’s ideas.

“I think we can get to a place with a better solution here,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

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AOC Hit With Fines and Warrants for Dodging Taxes

Democratic New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 14th C.D., often talks the talk about taxing the rich but she seems unwilling to walk the walk personally.

According to a 2019 financial disclosure report Ocasio-Cortez filed with the House of Representatives, she declared herself founder of Brook Avenue Press. Her Bronx, N.Y., company, designed to publish books about NYC children, fell behind in paying NYS corporation tax.

The state’s Taxation and Finance Department dissolved her company, issuing a Proclamation of Dissolution on October 26, 2016. Involuntary dissolution is invoked by tax authorities on corporations that fail to pay taxes for two consecutive years. NYS tax authorities explain that involuntarily dissolved companies are still required to file returns and pay taxes owed until they comply with state tax law.

Brook Avenue Press was slapped with a $1,618 tax warrant by the state tax department on July 6, 2017. That was approximately two months after the former bartender announced her candidacy to oppose then-incumbent Joe Crowley, according to the New York Post report. The 14th congressional district represents constituents in parts of two city boroughs: Queens and The Bronx.

The unpaid tax obligation of the New York congresswoman has swollen to $2,471.68 from interest and fees applied by the state. An email request to the representative requesting comment was not immediately returned.

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Ibram X. Kendi is the false prophet of a dangerous and lucrative faith

Ibram X. Kendi’s name appears everywhere: in school curricula, corporate training programs, even the Navy’s official reading list. The Boston University prof is a blazing supernova in the constellation of radical-chic race activism. But be warned: His philosophy would jeopardize the bedrock American ideal of individual dignity and equality under law. 

Kendi’s rise was swift and significant. He published a bestselling book, “Stamped from the Beginning,” in 2016. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Kendi’s next book, “How to Be An Antiracist,” began selling an astonishing number of copies, including institutional sales to public schools, government agencies and professional groups, all seeking to understand the ongoing racial unrest; he was a campus and media fixture at the height of the crisis.  

But after the protests died down, Kendi’s work faced new scrutiny, revealing a simple truth: Kendi is a false prophet — and his religion of “antiracism” is nothing more than a marketing-friendly recapitulation of the academic left’s most pernicious ideas.

Born Ibram Henry Rogers, Kendi presents himself as a radical subversive. But in reality, he is an ideologist of elite opinion, buoyed by government and corporate patronage. Kendi’s work has been endorsed by Fortune 100 companies, the federal bureaucracy and the US military — the very power structures he claims to oppose.

Kendi’s core thesis — that racism is the single, self-evident cause of racial differences in everything from school grades to incarceration rates to income and thus must be rectified using “antiracist discrimination” — reiterates critical race theory’s basic concepts. Kendi’s “gift,” in other words, is for translating ivory-tower theories into media- and corporate-friendly narrative.

“When I see racial disparities, I see racism,” Kendi says, to the exclusion of other explanations. His logic often descends into dizzying circularity and tautologies. When asked to define the word “racism,” he told attendees at the Aspen Ideas Festival that it is “a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.”

In another nod to 1960s-style radicalism, Kendi also claims to oppose capitalism. “The life of racism cannot be separated from the life of capitalism,” he says. “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.”

But Kendi, like his counterpart Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, is a prolific capitalist in his personal life. He charges $20,000 an hour for virtual presentations and has merchandised his entire line of ideas, releasing self-help products and even an “antiracist” baby book. He gratefully accepts millions from tech and pharmaceutical companies on behalf of his Antiracism Center. Fighting Big Capital, it turns out, is a lucrative enterprise.

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Orwell and the Woke

Epigraph: “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. 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.” George Orwell, “Animal Farm”

What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants?

Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a designer dress to the more than $30,000-a-ticket Met gala? Her entourage needs were certainly well-attended to by masked Morlock servants.

Did the leftist celebrities at the recent Emmy awards gather to discuss opening Malibu beaches to the homeless when the (unmasked) stars virtue-signaled their wokeness?

For answers about these hypocritical wokists, always turn first to George Orwell. In his brief allegorical novella, “Animal Farm,” an array of animal characters — led by the thinking pigs of the farm — staged a revolution, driving out their human overseers.

The anti-human animal comrades started out sounding like zealous Russian Bolsheviks (“four legs good, two legs bad”). But soon they ended up conned by a murderous cult of pigs under a Joseph Stalin-like leader. And so, the revolution became what it once had opposed (“four legs good, two legs better”).

Our own woke, year-zero revolution is now in its second year. Yet last year’s four-legged revolutionaries are already strutting on two legs. They are not just hobnobbing with the “white supremacists” and “capitalists,” but outdoing them in their revolutionary zeal for the rarified privileges of the material good life.

The Marxist co-founder of BLM, Patrisse Cullors, is now on her fourth woke home. She has moved on from the barricades to the security fences of her Topanga Canyon digs in a mostly all-white, all-rich rural paradise–the rewards for revolutionary service.

Professor Ibram X. Kendi has evolved from the edgy revolutionary work of flying all over the country, hawking his Orwellian message of “All racism bad! But some racism good!” Now he has mastered the art of zooming the wannabe woke for his $20,000 an hour avant-garde hectoring.

What of Colin Kaepernick, the mediocre second-string quarterback turned sudden firebrand? He refused to stand for the national anthem and spread his “take a knee” kitsch throughout professional sports.

Kaepernick became a boutique revolutionary multimillionaire. For $12 million a year, he pitches Nike sneakers, often made in Chinese forced-labor camps.

Woke NBA star LeBron James, from his $23 million Brentwood mansion, blasts America for its endless unfairness–in service to his totalitarian Chinese paymasters who will ensure his good life with an eventual lifetime $1 billion payout for hawking their goods.

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Team AOC Promotes ‘Tax The Rich’ Merchandise Collection After Met Gala Stunt

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) campaign is promoting “Tax The Rich” merchandise from her campaign store following her stunt at the Met Gala last week.

Team AOC “launched an email campaign Tuesday night offering up a policy paper” and re-upping her “‘Tax the Rich’ merchandise pitch,” according to the Boston Herald. The line first launched in December 2020.

“Whether the message is on a sweatshirt or something more formal, the facts are the same,” Team AOC said in its email to supporters, promoting the line. “In order to reshape our economy and make it work for all of us — not just those who can self-fund their trips to space — we absolutely must Tax the Rich.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s team decided to promote the “Tax The Rich Collection” after she wore a dress to the Met Gala emblazoned with the message “Tax The Rich.” While Ocasio-Cortez insisted that the dress was a message to the attendees of the Met Gala, the self-described democratic socialist received heavy criticism for seemingly hobnobbing with the class of people she claimed to be against.

According to her campaign website, Ocasio-Cortez’s “Tax The Rich” line has six products: a sweatshirt for $58, a tee-shirt for $27, a “dad hat” for $28, a sticker pack for $10, a mug for $27, and a tote bag for $27.

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