Election

I just finished a book about the Pentagon Papers and came across some rather startling information that is eerily similar to what is going on today. When the Viet Nam War was going badly and Johnson decided not to run for reelection, Humphrey broke with Johnson and came out against the war. At that time Nixon had a large lead in the polls and this changed. His lead further declined when Johnson announced that peace talks would begin. Nixon had contacted a Chinese American woman named Anna Hennault who was an avid anticommunist and convinced her to contact the leadership in South Viet Nam and explain they would get a better deal if they waited for Nixon to be president. They then agreed to stop the peace talks and Nixon once again moved ahead in the polls. What Nixon didn't know was that Johnson had tapped the phones of the South Viet Nam President and knew of the Nixon plot. Johnson contacted Senator Dirksen and asked him to intercede with Nixon to stop the interference. Nixon then called Johnson and said he was not directly involved in any discussion with the South and Johnson accepted that. Johnson was not convinced but it was so close to the election he was afraid to release the information feeling it would be cause undo harm to the election process. He also would have to admit that he was tapping the phone of the South's president. In other words it was a case of an American presidential candidate using a foreign country to interfere with an American election. Apparently President Obama found himself in a similar situation and decided not to make a big deal out of the Russian interference feeling that Hilary would be elected and it would all go away. He also would have to reveal how he knew about the Russian involvement and perhaps there were things going on better left unsaid.

Income gap

The gap between the rich and the poor is greatest in California and one of the reasons has to do with immigration and emigration. Between 2007 and 2016 five million people moved out of California and 4 million moved in but they were quite different in their demographics. The people moving in were high income people from states like New York and Illinois while those moving out were low income earners. The poor working people find it difficult to find affordable housing and things like the cost of utilities and commuting are too high. While the working poor are leaving they are being replaces with non working poor who live on government programs.

Hidden taxes

Many articles point out that half of the working people pay no income tax and that is true but they do pay social security and Medicare tax and a plethora of hidden taxes. Some of these hidden taxes include tax on utilities (water, electric and heating), tax on cell phones, sales tax on non-food purchased, cable TV tax, gasoline tax, tobacco tax, liquor tax and these are all regressive taxes meaning they hurt the poor. A person who earns $200,000 per year is not concerned if their electric bill is $300 instead of $100 but somebody who earns $50,000 is. Even things like toll roads and tipping are regressive and the mandate penalty under Obamacare hurt the low income people. The reason these taxes are popular with politicians is that they raise a lot of money. Another area of concern to low income people are fees and fines. Things like traffic tickets and the cost of car license and drivers license are more of burden on the poor. Most people would be amazed if they could see how much they pay ech year in these not so obvious areas.

Crime list

We live in a society where people do not lie. They obfuscate or they mislead or most recently they lack candor. Political correctness has now moved into the courtroom. This follows the strategy used by those in the know who answer questions by saying, I can't remember. This is closely related to the defense of intent, I didn't mean to do it or this is not what I meant. When all else fails you can refuse to answer (take the fifth) and retire and live happily ever after. I am keeping this list in case I ever get charged with a crime.

Crime

In 1994 Bill Clinton signed the crime bill and since that time crime has gone down. Prier to the signing crime rates were about 600 per 100,000 people but since then there has been a steady decline down to 350 per 100,000. The interesting thing about this is that there are numerous articles on the Internet attesting to the fact that the number of people in prison does not correlate with crime rates because the numbers in prison had been going up before the law was passed. For many years leading up to 1980 the prison population was around 200,000 but then it started to rise. By 1986 it was up to 400,000 and in 1994 the year the law was passed it was 600,000. Since then it has continued to rise and is now at 1,500,000. This is the kind of thing that makes statistics so tricky.

Oligarchs

Russian experts say that Putin is moderately wealthy but that he has a fortune in the names of other Russians known as oligarchs. This was brought to the world stage when a Russian attorney named Sergei Magnitsky was working in the tax department and discovered some serious irregularities. He was later found guilty of tax fraud and died unexpectedly in prison at the age of 37. This caused an international outrage and led to the congress passing the Magnitsky act. The Russians are so upset with this act that they tried to convince people that they had damaging information on Hilary and Trump so they could bargain for the repeal of the act. In December 2012 the US Congress adopted the Magnitsky Act. It enables the US to withhold visas and freeze financial assets of Russian officials thought to have been involved with human rights violations. Russian businessmen and high ranking officials are illegally accumulating large sums of money and the government is looking the other way. It is a quid pro quo arrangement which allows Putin to build assets in other names thus keeping him free from scandal. It has become so widespread that all interested parties are aware of what is going on but no one dares to bring charges against him. One of the oligarchs Nikolai Glushkov was accused of stealing and was given asylum in London in 2006. He became a critic of Putin's and last week he was found dead and the police are suspecting murder.

Investigate

There is now talk of another special prosecutor and when that happens we will have the congress right where we want them. The will be spending the next few years investigating each other and that will keep them out of our hair. There are at least 5,000 federal criminal laws, with 10,000-300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally. In fact, our entire criminal code has become a leviathan unto itself. In 2003, there were only 4,000 offences that carried criminal penalties. By 2013, that number had grown by 21 percent to 4,850. The code has become so big, that the Congressional Research Service and the American Bar Association simply do not have enough staff to adequately categorize every law we have on the books.