How Trump’s Toothless IRS Let the Rich Off Easy David Cay Johnston ~~ DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

 https://www.dcreport.org/2021/06/26/how-trumps-toothless-irs-let-the-rich-off-easy/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Introductory remarks by dmorista:  

This fine article by long-time veteran journalist David Cay Johnston points out that tax collections and tax law enforcement on the rich has fallen well over 99% from what it was during Donald Trump' first year in office. Johnston is a long-time investigative reporter who knows how to find and analyze the public and private records that contain the real information that the Corporate Controlled Media so assiduously hides from the populace of the country. Trump appointed a Beverly Hills tax avoidance and tax evasion attorney, named Charles Rettig, as the Commissioner of the IRS, a position that Rettig still holds. Johnston estimates that the rich, under this new “go-easy-on-the-rich” tax collection regime, are now escaping around $1 Trillion per year in taxes. For some context $2.8 Trillion is paid annually by individuals / households, so the loss of tax revenue is on the order of 26.3% of what used to be the norm when upper income households paid at least some tax. Johnston points out that while the number of households that “earn” more than $10 million per year nearly doubled, the number of these households undergoing IRS audits fell from 2,605 during Trump's first year to 38 this year.

We clearly see that government is starved of funds at all levels, bridges and roads continue to deteriorate at an alarming rate, we have no public transportation or high speed rail networks to speak of in most of the U.S., local governments continue to spend lavishly on police while cutting funding for libraries, health care and public health, and other social services that people of modest means depend on. The national government spends unlimited funds on the military, gives Israel $4 billion a year at least, plus gives them all kinds of military equipment, and subsidizes any number or authoritarian regimes. The U.S. has entered a stage of Capitalism during which the “rich and well-born” largely retreat to their estates, fortified subdivisions, penthouses, and yachts (sailing around offshore). They refuse to pay enough tax to sustain the governmental functions that sustain their power and position in the country, and that sustain the country's position in the Capitalist hierarchy. I call this the Haitianization of the U.S. ruling class. In the end they will either manage to move all their assets out of the U.S., or they will see those assets fall precipitously in value, as the U.S. becomes ever more debilitated and unable to compete in the modern world ~~ dmorista

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Last laugh: Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. (Reuters)

New Data Show a 99% Drop in Post-Audit Collections; Commissioner Estimates $1 Trillion in Unpaid Taxes 

 

The amount of additional taxes that the richest Americans owed after the IRS audited their tax returns fell more than 99% in Donald Trump’s first full year in office, data tables released this week show.

Among households making on average $30 million in 2018, IRS auditors recommended less than $5.4 million in additional tax.

That’s not the extra tax owed by one rich tax cheat. That’s the total for all 26,517 households reporting income of at least $10 million in 2018—the first year of the huge tax giveaway Trump and the Radical Republicans in Congress engineered in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

The recommended additional tax under Trump fell 99.1% from the $610.4 million that tax auditors recommended in 2010, Barack Obama’s first full year as president.

Audits of wealthy Americans plummeted from 1 in 5 to just one in 700.

In Obama’s last full year in office, 2016, auditors found almost $106 million of tax owed by affluent households, 20 times as much as in 2018.

Even that 99.1% drop from 2010 to 2018 severely understates the collapse of tax law enforcement among the best off among us. That’s because the number of households making $10 million or more nearly doubled during those years from 13,322 to 26,517.

Despite that huge increase in wealthy taxpayers, the number of completed audits of these very high-income Americans collapsed, from 2,605 to just 38.

Looked at another way, in round numbers, audits of wealthy Americans plummeted from 1 in 5 to just one in 700.

‘Audit Roulette’

Such low risk of audit encourages the wealthiest Americans to play audit roulette. That’s a tax game in which people understate income or, more often, overstate deductions figuring they have little risk of getting caught.

Those who do get caught often negotiate to pay the tax, interest and a penalty with no public record of their misconduct. This policy of settling, many times for dimes on the dollar, enables future tax cheating, especially by people in positions of trust such as financial executives and personal managers.

I calculated the numbers in this report from the IRS 2020 Data Book, which the service released Thursday after a month-long delay. Each year for decades, I have analyzed the numbers in the annual Data Book and other reports, consistently finding less and less tax law enforcement, especially at the top of the income ladder.

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig

Charles Rettig, the Beverly Hills tax avoidance lawyer who Trump appointed IRS commissioner, told the Senate Finance Committee in April that tax cheating has become rampant. “It would not be outlandish to believe that the actual tax gap could approach, and possibly exceed, $1 trillion per year,” he testified.

Individuals paid $2.8 trillion of income tax in 2020.

Trillion-Dollar Tax Gap

A trillion dollars of individual income tax owed but not paid would be well more than twice the official IRS “tax gap” estimate of $381 billion, about 70% from individual income taxes. Corporate profits, payroll and other taxes make up the rest of the gap. You can learn what the tax gap is and how it is measured here.

Rettig, in his testimony, made a point that I have made for years – the official tax gap is a low-ball estimate. I’d be surprised if the tax gap isn’t at least a trillion dollars.

It relies heavily on surveys of what people say about how honestly they file their taxes. Those responses wouldn’t include major league tax cheats or people advised by some of the most crafty accountants and lawyers in America and abroad, as revealed by the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers exposes of tax cheats and their advisers.

Fewer audits among people who rely on wages and wage-like income such as pensions make sense because employers, pension plans and others verify the income people report on their income tax returns. In addition, under the Trump/Radical Republican tax law changes that took effect in 2018, only one in 13 taxpayers can even itemize deductions. In short, for most working Americans, opportunities to cheat no longer exist.

However, among the $10 million and up group, less than one dollar in five is verified as wages or pensions, my annual analysis of IRS Table 1.4 shows.

Cheating Business Owners

Congress trusts these high-income taxpayers, many of whom own businesses, to fully and honestly report their income and only take lawful deductions. Without many more audits, however, who knows.

Auditing only 38 out of more than 26,000 tax returns filed by the wealthiest Americans tells us next to nothing about their propensity to cheat.

The IRS cuts in hunting for tax cheats were far less severe for the working poor.

Among families applying for the Earned Income Tax Credit, the IRS audit rate was 1.8% in 2010, but half that level in 2018.

The amount of additional tax the working poor owed after audits fell by two-thirds under Trump, although that may reflect that about a third of these audits were still in process at the end of the federal budget year. In 2010 under Obama, that was true for just 11 out of almost a half-million audits of the working poor.

When we get the data for 2019 and 2020, it will almost certainly show an even more appalling record of favoritism to wealthy tax cheats.

WATER PROTECTORS OCCUPY WORK SITES AND LOCK DOWN TO LINE 3 PIPELINE ~~ Unicorn Riot.

https://popularresistance.org/water-protectors-occupy-work-sites-and-lock-down-to-line-3-pipeline-construction/

~ posted for dmorista ~~ 

Hubbard County, MN – Dozens of water protectors descended on two work sites for Line 3 construction in Northern Minnesota this morning, stopping construction at both sites for the day. Around 14 people locked down to various construction vehicles and even the pipeline itself.

Unicorn Riot documented the situation live from the ground. Watch nearly nine hours of streams from today, including this morning’s five-plus hours stream and the late afternoon police response below:

Final approvals in November 2020 gave Enbridge, a Canadian energy corporation, the go-ahead to complete construction of what the company is calling the Line 3 Replacement Pipeline. The planned pipeline route stretches across 337 miles of traditional Anishinaabe Territory in Northern Minnesota, beginning at tar sands mines in Alberta, Canada and ending at refineries in Superior, Wisconsin.

Water protectors opposed to the contentious Line 3 pipeline project have regularly staged non-violent direct actions that stop construction, with several hundred arrested in in action campaigns over the last year. In June, 179 people were arrested when thousands of water protectors shut down an Enbridge pumping station for two days as part of a multi-pronged Treaty People Gathering in Northern Minnesota.

Participating in the July 1 lockdown, Ginger Cassady, the Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network, called on President Joe Biden and the financiers of the pipeline project to stop Line 3 construction.

“Im in Northern Minnesota at the Headwaters of the Mississippi protesting Enbridge’s toxic pipeline. This pipeline is not only a direct assault on Indigenous people but it’s also an assault on their local land treaty rights.”– Ginger Cassady, E.D. Rainforest Action Network

Earlier in the week on June 28, dozens of Hubbard County Sheriffs barricaded the entry into the Namewag Camp, a privately-owned property used by water protectors. This prompted a wave of supporters showing up to the land in solidarity. Nearly a dozen people were arrested near the roadway by authorities during a two-day span before the sheriffs left the property. Some believe the Hubbard County Sheriff’s aggressive, unusual enforcement of a minor clerical issue involving a county road easement by the camp property was timed to coincide with Enbridge drilling nearby under the Mississippi River.

Enbridge plans to have construction completed by the end of the year. Meanwhile, direct actions by water protectors seeking to halt construction are expected to continue through the summer.

Donald Rumsfeld, Killer of 400,000 People, Dies Peacefully ~~ Spencer Ackerman

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-rumsfeld-killer-of-400000-people-dies-peacefully/

~~ suggested by a guest contributor ~~

Do not mourn the defense secretary. Mourn his victims. There were nearly too many to tally, but his Pentagon refused to count anyway.

The only thing tragic about the death of Donald Rumsfeld is that it didn’t occur in an Iraqi prison. Yet that was foreordained, considering how throughout his life inside the precincts of American national security, Rumsfeld escaped the consequences of decisions he made that ensured a violent, frightening end for hundreds of thousands of people.

An actuarial table of the deaths for which Donald Rumsfeld is responsible is difficult to assemble. In part, that’s a consequence of his policy, as defense secretary from 2001 to 2006, not to compile or release body counts, a PR strategy learned after disclosing the tolls eroded support for the Vietnam War. As a final obliteration, we cannot know, let alone name, all the dead.

But in 2018, Brown University’s Costs of War Project put together something that serves as the basis for an estimate. According to Neda C. Crawford, Brown’s political-science department chair, the Afghanistan war to that point claimed about 147,000 lives, to include 38,480 civilians; 58,596 Afghan soldiers and police (about as many American troops as died in Vietnam); and 2,401 U.S. servicemembers.

Rumsfeld was hardly the only person in the Bush administration responsible for the Afghanistan war. But in December 2001, under attack in Kandahar, where it had retreated from the advance of U.S. and Northern Alliance forces, the Taliban sought to broker a surrender—one acceptable to the U.S.-installed Afghan leader Hamid Karzai. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld refused. “I do not think there will be a negotiated end to the situation, that's unacceptable to the United States,” he said. That statement reaped a 20-year war, making it fair to say that the subsequent deaths are on his head, even while acknowledging that Rumsfeld was hardly the only architect of the conflict.

Crawford in 2018 also tallied between 267,792 and 295,170 deaths to that point in Iraq. That is almost certainly a severe undercount, and it includes between a very conservatively estimated 182,000 to 204,000 civilians; over 41,000 Iraqi soldiers and police; and 4,550 U.S. servicemembers. As one of the driving forces behind the invasion and the driving force behind the occupation, Rumsfeld is in an elite category of responsibility for these deaths, alongside his protege Dick Cheney and the president they served, George W. Bush.

Rumsfeld’s depredations short of the wars of choice he oversaw—and yes, responding to 9/11 with war in Afghanistan was no less a choice than the unprovoked war of aggression in Iraq – were no less severe. His indifference to the suffering of others was hardly unique among American policymakers after 9/11, but his blitheness about it underscored the cruel essence of the enterprise. When passed a sheet of paper that, in bureaucratic language, pitched a torture technique of forcing men held captive at Guantanamo Bay to stand for hours on end, Rumsfeld scribbled a shrug on it: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day.” Months earlier, when Rumsfeld was banking on using the U.S. military to invade Iraq, a reporter asked about using U.S. forces to provide security for rebuilding Afghanistan at a moment before Taliban resistance coalesced. “Ah, peacekeeping,” he sneered in return, explaining that such tasks were beneath U.S. forces.

But to those forces, for whom he was responsible, he was no less indifferent. In Kuwait in December 2004, National Guardsmen preparing for deployment confronted Rumsfeld in the hope of enlisting his help with a dire circumstance. They were scrounging through scrap heaps for metal to weld onto their insufficiently armored vehicles so the RPGs they were sure to encounter wouldn’t kill them. Rumsfeld let it be known that the war mattered, not the warfighter. “You go to war with the Army you’ve got, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” he replied.

If Rumsfeld was indignant at the Guardsmen’s questions, it reflected the unreality he inhabited and the lies he told as easily as he breathed. He wrapped himself in a superficial understanding of epistemology (“there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns…”) that a compliant press treated as sagacity. He wore a mask of assuredness, a con man’s trick, as he said things that bore no resemblance to the truth, such as his September 2002 insistence that he possessed “bulletproof” evidence of a nonexistent alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. As resistance in Iraq coalesced in summer 2003, Rumsfeld said it couldn’t be “anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance,” even as a reporter quoted U.S. military doctrine explaining why it was. He insisted, “I don’t do quagmires” when quagmires were all he did.

He had reason to suspect he would get away with it. Manipulating the media was, to Rumsfeld, a known known, since reporters loved Rumsfeld before they hated him. U.S. News & World Report put a grinning Rumsfeld on the cover above the headline “Rum Punch.” (“A Secretary of War Unlike Any Other… You Got A Problem With That?”) Vanity Fair dispatched Annie Liebovitz to photograph him amongst Bush’s war cabinet. People magazine called him the “sexiest cabinet member” in 2002. A typical thumbsucker piece, this one in the Los Angeles Times of August 17, 2003, began with the falsity that “Donald H. Rumsfeld has won two wars and won them his way...” The conservative press reflected the subtext. “The Stud” was what National Review called the septuagenarian Rumsfeld as it depicted him in a come-hither pose.

The scale of death Rumsfeld—and Bush, and Cheney, and so on—is responsible for does not even make him the bloodiest American of his era. That would be Henry Kissinger, whom the historian Greg Grandin estimates is responsible for between three and four million dead. But American elites embrace Kissinger – and more recently Bush – in a way they never would embrace the post-Iraq Rumsfeld. Kissinger, after all, never raised sufficient ire amongst general officers to make his continued tenure impossible, as Rumsfeld experienced in the spring 2006 “Generals’ Revolt” that presaged his November 2006 downfall.

But getting rid of Rumsfeld only compounded the tragedy of his works, rather than alleviating them. For the generals who came for Rumsfeld did not come for his wars. They came to save the wars from Rumsfeld, prolonging their agony and futility with the convenient alibi that they could be won, if only a change atop the Pentagon came. With U.S. troops still in Iraq and President Biden adding caveat after caveat to his Afghanistan withdrawal, removing Donald Rumsfeld from the wars only permitted them to continue to this day. Rumsfeld never faced any accountability for what he did, only political eclipse, and wrote an inevitable memoir about why he was right and what he did was good.The scale of death Rumsfeld—and Bush, and Cheney, and so on—is responsible for does not even make him the bloodiest American of his era. That would be Henry Kissinger, whom the historian Greg Grandin estimates is responsible for between three and four million dead. But American elites embrace Kissinger – and more recently Bush – in a way they never would embrace the post-Iraq Rumsfeld. Kissinger, after all, never raised sufficient ire amongst general officers to make his continued tenure impossible, as Rumsfeld experienced in the spring 2006 “Generals’ Revolt” that presaged his November 2006 downfall.

But getting rid of Rumsfeld only compounded the tragedy of his works, rather than alleviating them. For the generals who came for Rumsfeld did not come for his wars. They came to save the wars from Rumsfeld, prolonging their agony and futility with the convenient alibi that they could be won, if only a change atop the Pentagon came. With U.S. troops still in Iraq and President Biden adding caveat after caveat to his Afghanistan withdrawal, removing Donald Rumsfeld from the wars only permitted them to continue to this day. Rumsfeld never faced any accountability for what he did, only political eclipse, and wrote an inevitable memoir about why he was right and what he did was good.Starting around two years after Bush accepted Rumsfeld’s resignation, I would walk up Connecticut Avenue, NW each morning to my newsroom near the so-called Hinckley Hilton. Frequently, I would see a wizened figure walking south from his Kalorama mansion down Connecticut as I headed north. He carried a metal cane, but he didn’t lean on it: he held it in each hand, parallel to the ground, as if he were walking a tightrope. His teeth would be bared as he drew back his lips in the facsimile of a grin so familiar from his post-9/11 press conferences. It was all weird, but I never approached him, as he was accompanied by a bodyguard who would flash me the keep-walking-pal expression.

For the potency and vigor Rumsfeld wanted to project, he moved delicately. An elderly man, he walked starting with his hips, swaying one foot outward before sweeping the other one forward, slow half-moons of motion as he carefully descended the hill north of Dupont Circle. How frail was this man who can lay claim to the deaths of at least 415,000 people, and how bitter it is that unlike them, his name will be remembered, even in infamy.

SANDINISTA NICARAGUA, MORE DIGNIFIED AND VICTORIOUS THAN EVER By Carlos Fonseca Terán,

https://popularresistance.org/sandinista-nicaragua-more-dignified-and-victorious-than-ever/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Nicaragua Is In The News Again.

But Not For Being One Of The Countries With The Greatest Reduction In Poverty And Social Inequality Worldwide Since 2007 (Poverty By Half, Extreme Poverty By A Third, And Going From Being The Fourth Most Unequal Country To Being The Fourth Least Unequal In Latin America).

Nor is Nicaragua news for being the country with the highest level of direct ownership of the means of production by the working class in the Western Hemisphere (more than 50% of GDP and nearly 80% of economic units); nor for being one of the countries in the world that has most reduced illiteracy in the same period of time (from 35% to 3%); or for being one of the countries with the largest increase in per capita investment in health (from U$32 to U$70) and with the largest reduction in infant mortality (from 29 to 11.4 per 1,000 live births).

Nicaragua is not news for being the country in the world that has most reduced the gender gap (from 90th to 12th), the country with the highest presence of women in its cabinet (58.82%), as well as having the fourth highest presence of women in the legislative branch (48.4%) and being the country that most radically applies the criterion of gender equity across its social policies.

Nor is this country in the news for being among the countries that have most increased electricity coverage (from 53% to 99%) and the one that has most increased its renewable energy sources (from 2% to 90%); nor for being the safest country in Central America and one of the safest in Latin America (with a rate of 3.5 homicides per year per 100,000 inhabitants, Costa Rica being the closest with 11.2); nor is Nicaragua news for having one of the governments in the world with the highest sustained popular support for the longest period of time (with rates around 60% in the last eleven years, almost uninterruptedly).

But it is not for any of these achievements that Nicaragua has once again become newsworthy, but because it has applied its laws in a sovereign way, the most recent of these laws having been approved by an overwhelming majority of the people’s representatives in the legislature and under which the relevant authorities, using their legitimate powers and fulfilling their constitutional duty, have ordered the arrest of various individuals (nineteen at the time of writing) for one or other of the following crimes:

• Actions publicly declared and undertaken by almost all those who have been arrested, aimed at achieving the imposition against Nicaraguan institutions and citizens of unilateral coercive measures by a hostile foreign power, the United States, with the purpose of boycotting public administration and the application of State policies, including the implementation of social programs thanks to which Nicaragua has reached the indices mentioned above via its model of social transformation and improvement in the living conditions of the great majority of its citizens.
• Conspiracy to destabilize the country, in the service of that foreign power, the United States, through the implementation of terrorism and violent actions in general.
• Money laundering in the financial operations of the “Violeta Barrios de Chamorro” Foundation, which also financed journalists, “political analysts” and writers (all of them claiming to be “independent”) with money coming from agencies known for their role in destabilizing governments not aligned with the interests of the United States, some of those agencies being the US government bodies like USAID and NED, but also others like the Soros foundations, and also European agencies such as OXFAM. That funding has been acknowledged by the people concerned. It is worth noting that when Nicaragua’s Foreign Agents Law was created, which obliges those who receive donations from other countries to report them and inform about their final use, this foundation formally closed its operations to evade complying with the law, in spite of which it continued receiving funds from the foreign agencies cited above as well as others. The specific operations of this criminal network are still under investigation by the competent authorities, who will explain the results of the investigation in due course.
• Serious anomalies in the administration by a banking entity of financial resources used to support illicit activities linked to finance from the aforementioned agencies.

Nicaragua is not obliged to justify to foreigners what it does or does not do in full and legitimate exercise of its sovereignty and self-determination, and in the defense of those principles, but in the face of the campaign of lies against the country that flood the news media daily, it is right and proper to defend it, just as the Sandinista Revolution has the right and duty to defend itself in any context, including of course, the battle of ideas.

The laws being applied by the Nicaraguan authorities to the people detained and who are receiving due process in accordance with the current legal norms, are similar to those that exist in most countries whose governments, brazen in their interference, have condemned the approval and application of those laws in Nicaragua for crimes committed after their entry into force, not for crimes prior to their entry into force, but for crimes committed subsequently, in compliance with the principle of laws being non-retroactive since the illegalities and crimes committed and promoted by most of these people during the attempted coup d’état in 2018 have already been judged, and for which those convicted were subsequently granted pardon, for the sake of peace and stability of the country.

When we talk about the crimes committed in 2018, during the coup attempt, they include murder and other crimes that caused dozens of deaths of Nicaraguans, about which it is worth remembering that, of the total of something over two hundred dead caused by the coup attempt, most of them were Sandinistas, of which, in turn, the majority died as a result of cold-blooded murders, after being kidnapped and subjected to torture, many of them documented by the perpetrators themselves in videos, circulated in social media, while in contrast, all the deaths in the opposition ranks were the result of street fighting, generally provoked by them.

But that atmosphere of instability and chaos lasted just three months (from April 18th to July 18th 2018), because the country very soon recovered tranquility and peace, thanks to the massive and organized participation of the people defending their nation and their revolution, as also happened during the war of aggression imposed on Nicaragua by Ronald Reagan’s government  in the 1980s, in which the Sandinista Revolution was also victorious, although in that case only after several years of intense struggle.

Turning now to the current situation, as is well known, at different times some of those recently detained by the Nicaraguan authorities had expressed presidential aspirations in the context of the upcoming elections to be held on November 7 of this year. Specifically, of the nineteen against whom an arrest warrant has been issued and of which there are seventeen under arrest, five had expressed that they wanted to run for the presidency, and two of them had submitted requests to the political party of their choice to do so, but there are six other presidential aspirants among the extreme right wing coup plotters, who are at liberty and for whom no arrest warrant has been issued and no indictment has been initiated; of them, there are also two who have submitted requests to be considered as presidential candidates by the political party of their choice. Not to mention the other sectors of the right wing that are likely participate in the elections.

The presence of presidential aspirants among those detained has led detractors of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government to argue, abandoning all logic, that the investigative processes and the arrests made out are irrational, given that they self-evidently harm the political image of the government. That is to say, according to these “analysts”, presidential aspirations should endow impunity and even worse, that the impunity should result from the government acting out of political convenience, obstructing the relevant institutions from fulfilling their role and applying the relevant legal norms, in strict compliance with the rule of law. In one opinion article, the writer even appeared scandalized because one of those implicated as a beneficiary of funding from the aforementioned agencies, who is not under arrest and was only called to testify before the Public Prosecutor’s Office, is a winner of the Cervantes Literature Prize, as if this were a license to commit crimes.

Yes, it is indeed the case, from the electoral perspective, that the application of the law to these individuals has a political cost for Sandinismo, but the institutions of the Nicaraguan State would be very wrong to act on the basis of political criteria derived from electoral calculations, since the country’s self-determination and sovereignty are imperative and are, moreover, inalienable principles of Sandinismo. This should serve as a lesson to the demagogues who spend their lives demanding that Nicaragua respect the rule of law and the subordination of institutions to the established legal order. This is, furthermore, the best demonstration that the reason for the arrests are not because the people concerned are political opponents or because they have aspirations to the presidency of the Republic.

Moreover, in all the opinion polls, including those conducted by the opposition, none of those detained even comes close to having the popular support of Sandinismo and in particular, the level of popular support for the President of the Republic, Comandante Daniel Ortega Saavedra, thus confirming that the arrests have been made using the strictest and most transparent application of the laws that govern the Nicaraguan State. And it is worth reiterating that these laws are very similar to those in force in the very same countries whose governments have condemned Nicaragua for the arrests.

A situation of particular concern in some sectors outside Nicaragua, in certain cases due to disinformation and in others due to lack of political awareness, has been that among the nineteen individuals against whom arrest warrants have been issued of whom seventeen have been detained, six of them belong to a political group created in the nineties by former Sandinistas, and among these six are three who held high positions in the Sandinista government of the 1980s and participated in the liberation war against the Somoza dictatorship.

First of all, it should be clear that none of that history should be a reason for impunity for anyone, but in the case of the former Sandinistas, the fact that they are no longer Sandinistas is not the reason for their arrest, since it does not constitute a crime, unlike treason which is one of the crimes for which they have been arrested, as is the case with the other people under arrest, all on the strictest legal basis. But there are things that very few people know among the ranks of the international Left outside Nicaragua, and this makes some people defend the individuals mentioned here as if they were the same revolutionaries they were earlier in their careers, and nothing is further from the truth.

These former Sandinistas joined the right wing early in the 1990s, when, while still militants of the FSLN, they publicly renounced socialism, anti-imperialism, the popular struggle and the vanguard character of the FSLN. In the end, they were defeated internally in the FSLN’s Extraordinary Congress of May 1994 and they chose to abandon the FSLN and found a party in which they continued calling themselves Sandinistas, and which they also finally ended up renouncing, as was to be expected. Such that those people who continue to call them Sandinistas, if they are so fond of them, should respect them a little more and not call them something they themselves now reject. By the way, one of the individuals detained, of those who were linked to the Revolution and then took the path of the right, a while ago complained, using a good Nicaraguan term, that the name “Sandinista” caused her revulsion. So their admirers should think twice before continuing to describe them in that way.

It would take far too long and, anyway, is beyond the scope of this article to narrate here the history of this betrayal of Sandinismo. But it is worth mentioning some fundamental facts. Although these people were a minority in the FSLN Congress in 1994, since they were also a minority in the party’s rank and file, they were nevertheless a majority among those who had held senior government and party posts in the 1980s. They were also a majority among those who had been elected to the legislature in the 1990 elections, so they exploited these advantages and shortly after the defeat suffered by Sandinismo in those elections they appropriated the material patrimony of the FSLN, and then in 1995 proceeded to reform the Constitution via a pact with the right wing. As a result, they eliminated the right to free health care and education, legitimized the privatization of public services, created a second round of voting so as to prevent the FSLN from winning the elections and imposed limits on presidential re-election to prevent Comandante Daniel Ortega from running again as a candidate, and they even established the qualified vote to elect magistrates in the different institutions, with the hope that they themselves might be elected.

But after the disastrous electoral results of 1996 for the parties promoting those reforms, the only way to secure a qualified vote, a requirement imposed by those same parties to elect the positions in question, was an agreement between the two main parties of the time, the FSLN and the PLC, which the ex Sandinistas manipulated to accuse the FSLN of doing exactly what they themselves had already done when no law obliged them to do so, namely make a pact with the right wing, in their case for purposes harmful to the people’s interests. But nothing they did then compares to what the ex Sandinistas would end up doing in the elections of 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2016, when they supported candidates of Nicaragua’s most recalcitrant and fundamentalist right wing, which had the support of the United States. It is as if, for example, in Argentina, former guerrillas who had fought against the military dictatorships in that country had supported Macri in the presidential elections there, or as if in Chile they had supported Piñera, or in Brazil Bolsonaro.

The political parties that made the constitutional reforms of 1995, among them the ex Sandinistas recycled as an upstart right wing, consulted no one, not even even for the sake of appearances. In the following year’s elections, all together they did not even receive 10% of the vote, which made evident the illegitimate and spurious character of their reforms. All this in spite of the fact that by having control of the electoral power, they blocked, in a self-evidently arbitrary way, any candidate who hindered their plans in those elections, something they forget when they accuse Sandinismo of sectarian abuse of the State institutions, since from their point of view only the right wing are impartial and transparent, when it controls those institutions. A curious fact is that the ex Sandinistas in question were even allies of the FSLN as part of the National Convergence political alliance in the local elections of 2000 and 2004, and also in the national elections of 2001, until they ran again on their own account in the national elections of 2006.

But the final definitive validation of these ex Sandinistas as counterrevolutionaries with no possible redemption was the failed coup attempt in 2018, when they united with pro-imperialist forces and led the armed counterrevolutionary actions that took place between April and July of that year. These individuals, who in the 1990s had already renounced the red and black flag, in 2018 accompanied the neo-Somocista hordes that repeatedly burned that revolutionary symbol, as also happened with the desecration of monuments and even the tombs of Heroes and Martyrs of the Revolution. One more expression of the levels to which these people had already descended by then, was their participation in meetings with individuals like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Marco Rubio, from whom they received support, as the coup plotters did in general from Álvaro Uribe, with whom they proudly took pictures, and from Jair Bolsonaro, who, making a fool of himself in the way only he knows how to do, offered Brazilian territory to prosecute the Sandinistas.

The café lounge pseudo-Left, which loves to join in the declarations of the imperialist powers against the Sandinista government, has long reproached the ruling Sandinistas in Nicaragua for an alleged alliance with private business leaders and the Catholic Church. Regarding the former, in Nicaragua, since Sandinismo returned to government, the percentage of GDP produced by means of production under associative, cooperative, family and community ownership went from less than 40% to more than 50%, to the detriment of traditional private enterprise, which saw its economic importance decrease from more than 60% to less than 50% of GDP, and in the first nine of the fourteen years that Sandinismo has been in government since 2007, the minimum wage of workers increased ten times more than in the seventeen neoliberal years. This is hardly favorable to the interests of private capitalist enterprise.

When it first came to power in 1979, Sandinismo offered private enterprise a framework of understanding and consensus for the sake of the country’s stability, but since at that time solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution was in vogue, the characteristic snobbery of the café lounge Left did not allow it to accuse Sandinismo at that time of seeking alliances with business people, who in the end back then did not accept the offer of coexistence, as they did when Sandinismo returned to power in 2007. Then, for some years, big business had no other option but pragmatism. However, after some time, at the first opportunity that presented itself and as is to be expected when there are contradictions between antagonistic interests, private business lashed out against the Sandinista government and, together with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, was among the most aggressive sectors during the 2018 coup attempt, curiously enough with the support of all those people outside Nicaragua who accused Sandinismo of being allied with them.

As for the alleged alliance of the FSLN with the Catholic hierarchy, this is a kind of worldwide urban myth. There has not been a single day since Sandinismo returned to government in 2007, as there was not before, of course, in which Nicaragua’s Catholic Church leaders have not uttered all kinds of attacks against Sandinismo. The myth of this false alliance stems from the rapprochement that Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo made with Sandinismo during the last years of his life, but that rapprochement cost him precisely the support of the Vatican, so that as soon as he gave the first signs of reconciliation with Sandinismo, Cardinal Obando fell foul of Nicaragua’s Catholic Church hierarchy. There are also sectors on the Left whose problem is simply not having the infallible compass of anti-imperialism. That is to say, when one lacks direct knowledge of the situation of a country, it is enough to see which side the Empire and its disinformation media are on in order to at least have the ability to give the benefit of the doubt .

In Nicaragua the term “puchito” is popularly used as a synonym for little, and partly for that reason the coup leaders are known as “los puchos”, but the use of the term “pucho” in this case, has a connotation that is applicable beyond a quantitative sense, to allude to those who have no vocation for power, despite the fact that they have exercised it for so long. In Nicaragua, the bourgeoisie seems to have lost its instinct for power as a social class, an unusual phenomenon, but symptomatic of a true revolution.

At the world level, however, unfortunately, there is also an abundance of what one might call the “pucho Left”, that is, those self-styled Leftist sectors, which are stumbling around disoriented in the world or even in their respective national situations, without a compass to guide them, not just because they are a minority, but because they have not matured enough politically or worse, because they have started rotting away at some point in their erratic wandering. That Left which instead of denouncing imperialist interference, instead of attacking the common enemy of those who are supposed to fight for systemic change at a global level, and that in addition, despite their own impotent inaction, presume to judge who is revolutionary and who is not, or which revolution is a true one and which revolution is not, should make their own revolution so as to be able to preach by example and earn the moral authority to speak in the way they do.

But the coup right wing in Nicaragua is also puchito because it has no life of its own. It is a right wing on life-support provided by its imperialist owners. And it is not the fault of Sandinismo that the puchito right wing is led by confessed traitors to the nation, who would also be in jail in any self-respecting country. They are money launderers and even drug traffickers, like some others who were arrested some years earlier, not for the other crimes they had also committed, about which some of them even publicly boasted in messages broadcast in widely disseminated videos, and for which they had already been pardoned before, but in these other cases for common crimes very appropriate to their questionable moral condition, although now they seek to present themselves as political prisoners.

Finally, the strength of the coup-mongering right wing in Nicaragua is evident when, despite its most visible spokesmen being arrested for their misdeeds, not for their presidential aspirations or for simply being opposition, the most absolute calm prevails in the country. Life continues its course in the most serene atmosphere of peace imaginable, and not even the self same puchos interrupt their normal routine or even their recreational activities. If the arrested criminals were really political leaders, the situation would be very different. In 2018, when the coup plotters followed the orders of the interventionist imperialist agencies, they manipulated many people via psychological warfare using it as a component of the new coup d’état format designed by their imperial owners. Back then they wasted no time asking for permission to take to the streets.

But while it is easier to manipulate people than it is to convince him they are being manipulated, when they do finally become aware of the deception they have suffered then it is very difficult to manipulate them again. And that is what happens when the new psychological warfare coup formats fail. They will never again snatch from the Nicaraguan people the peace that has cost them so much nor the only true peace of social justice and freedom it makes possible.

Just as it is true that happiness can only be achieved when certain ethical values prevail and which overall in society can only predominate as the product and fundamental content of its revolutionary transformation. That kind of change is the only one from which the new Nicaragua under construction could emerge and from which it is emerging, with Sandinismo at the forefront, in permanent rebellion and victorious resistance against the world power of imperialism. And that itself is part of a long tradition of struggle dating from even before the mid-nineteenth century, when Nicaraguan and Central American forces defeated the filibuster troops sponsored by southern United States slave-owners; passing through the expulsion of the occupying US troops by General Augusto C. Sandino in the 1930’s; the overthrow in 1979 of the Somoza dictatorship imposed by the United States after the assassination of Sandino; the victory against the war of aggression imposed by the US government in the 1980s, and then against the neoliberalism imposed by electoral blackmail in the 1990s and following years, and finally against the attempted coup d’état in 2018. The tradition includes all the new victories that are being added in this struggle, one of whose fundamental objectives is, as Carlos Fonseca, whose birthday is commemorated today, declared: “A change of system, the overthrow of the exploiting classes and the victory of the exploited classes”.

In other words, the Sandinista government is popular rebellion in power, fighting from the government against the age-old system imposed by the oppressor classes; and as Ricardo Morales Avilés said, for this struggle to bear fruit “so many things must be changed … first power, property, ourselves, and then… fresh air and maize for everyone; fresh air and flowers for all”. This is what Sandinista Nicaragua is committed to achieving, today more dignified and victorious than ever.

WHY DO THE MEDIA HATE DANIEL ORTEGA? By Gerry Condon,

https://popularresistance.org/why-do-the-media-hate-daniel-ortega/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Is The U.S. Meddling In The Nicaraguan Election?

When Kamala Harris finally traveled to the U.S./Mexico border last week, she met several young women asylum seekers.  The vice president likely saw Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans who were fleeing from violence and extreme poverty.  But she probably did not see any Nicaraguan asylum seekers, who are few and far between.

Nicaragua and Honduras are considered the two poorest nations in Latin America.  Honduras is a corrupt, failed, violent country, whose government is backed by the U.S.  Nicaragua has free healthcare and education, and is considered the safest country in Central America.

Since Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Front won the Nicaraguan election in 2006, they have made remarkable gains, dramatically reducing poverty and extreme poverty.  The Nicaraguan people have something that those escaping from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala do not have – hope for the future and peace in the present.

I first traveled to Nicaragua in the fall of 1983 with military veterans concerned that the U.S. was fomenting a Vietnam War in Central America. Four years after the Nicaraguan people rose up and sent the Somoza dictatorship packing, there was another war raging  – a war of terrorist violence against rural communities.  Nicaragua’s “Contras” were armed and trained by the CIA, and they later famously smuggled large amounts of cocaine into the United States.  As popular pressure moved the U.S. Congress to cut off funding for the Contras, Ronald Reagan, Elliott Abrams and Ollie North were implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal.  Drugs for money and weapons.  Fifty thousand Nicaraguans were killed.

The U.S./Contra War Led To The 1990 Electoral Defeat For Sandinistas

By 1990, the U.S./Contra war and harsh economic sanctions had created a climate where Nicaraguans were effectively blackmailed into voting against the Sandinista government.  In Latin America, the Empire is not subtle.  The U.S. Ambassador held a press conference in Managua and told Nicaraguans how to vote. If they vote for the Sandinistas, he said, there will be more war and economic sanctions. The U.S. had selected the candidate, Violeta Chamorro, had pressured the opposition parties to unite behind her, and had funded much of her campaign. Violeta Chamorro won the election.

Even though the election had been rigged against them, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Front accepted their electoral defeat, and implemented the first peaceful transfer of power in Nicaraguan history. For seventeen years the Sandinistas remained in the opposition, while a series of corrupt neoliberal governments undid all their programs for the poor. Then in 2006, Daniel Ortega was elected president once more.

Since the Sandinistas regained power in 2007, Nicaragua has experienced remarkable progress. Free healthcare for all.  Schools and colleges built in rural areas.  Direct support to poor farmers. Dramatic reduction in poverty. Food sovereignty – they grow almost all the food that they eat.  Women’s equal participation in all aspects of government and the economy.  Really good highways connecting the entire country and its markets. It is now only a 6-hour drive from Managua to the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, with its Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous peoples, and unique autonomous regions.

Several recent polls show the Ortega government retaining widespread support and easily defeating even a united opposition ticket. They have nothing to fear at the ballot box.

But wait!  The U.S. media – and Human Rights Watch – are now screaming that President Ortega is arresting the opposition’s presidential candidates!  Can this be true? Actually, this is a very misleading accusation.  It is true that around 17 people have been arrested by Nicaraguan authorities. Several arrestees had political ambitions, but none had declared to run for president.  And none of the 14 parties registered for the November 7 election had chosen any of these people to be their candidates. These non-candidates were arrested for money-laundering, for failing to account for receipt of major foreign funding, for calling for economic sanctions against Nicaragua, and for collaborating with hostile foreign powers. We will see the evidence once they have their day in court.

Violent Coup Attempt In 2018

There is a powerful backdrop to current events in Nicaragua.  In April to July 2018 there was an attempted coup in Nicaragua – widespread, coordinated violence, apparently taking the Ortega government by surprise.  Barricades blocked many roads, bringing commerce to a halt. A sophisticated social media campaign brought people into the streets with lies about the police killing students. Government buildings were torched.  Over 200 people died in street violence over several weeks. Half or more of the dead were Sandinistas, including 24 police. Videos were posted online of Sandinistas being tortured and even burned alive at the barricades. The U.S. media claimed that “nonviolent protester” were under attack by Nicaraguan police.

Daniel Ortega deflated the attempted coup by showing great restraint.  He pulled the police back to their barracks.  He kept the Army out of the fray.  He negotiated with opposition leaders. And he granted amnesty to those who had joined in these violent events. Ortega is now praised for having the wisdom not to overreact – not to cause further violence and chaos. Nonetheless, western media prefers to paint Ortega as an “authoritarian dictator” who violently represses dissent and jails his political adversaries.  That is the narrative we will hear over and over.

Much of the corporate media appears content to be propagandists for U.S. foreign policy.  At least they have become accustomed to that role.  Unfortunately, this is also true for elements within the human rights organizations.  Their accusations of human rights abuses too often coincide with the State Department regime change propaganda.

Long History Of U.S. Intervention In Nicaragua

For well over a century, the United States has been invading Nicaragua, has occupied it with Marines, has supported the violent 40-year Somoza dictatorship, has organized a counter-revolutionary army, has funded opposition organizations and media, and has hyperactively intervened in the internal affairs of the Nicaraguan people.

Some historians say the potential for a Nicaraguan Canal, which would compete with the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal, has been major factor in the U.S. obsession with Nicaragua. What else would explain it?  Or does Nicaragua present the “threat of a good example.”

So yes, of course, the United States government is intervening in the Nicaraguan election. Their plan for doing so is detailed in a leaked USAID document. Contingencies include the sudden transfer or power under chaotic circumstances.

U.S. sanctions on Nicaragua will be intensified by the RENACER Act, which recently passed in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  It is difficult for Congressional representatives to vote against a sanctions bill when they are hearing the same horrible story from every media source. They need to be provided with accurate information and alternative perspectives.  So do all of us.  Even people who follow foreign affairs closely can be disoriented and confused by the barrage of disinformation coming from every direction.

Despite majority support for the Sandinista Front, there is intense polarization in Nicaragua. Most of the media is owned by the opposition and is virulently anti-Ortega. The attempted coup opened up old wounds, and was a heavy blow to the economy as well.

Demonize The Leader – Destroy The “Threat Of A Good Example”

The oldest trick in the imperial regime change book is to “demonize” the leader of the government you wish to overthrow.  Like with Assad in Syria, for example.  Now we must believe that Daniel Ortega, whose government has improved the lives of tens of thousands of poor Nicaraguans, is a terrible villain who must somehow be removed.

We in the U.S. need become more media literate – more skeptical of Big Media. Why would we believe the Washington Post, the New York Times, CBS, CNN, or Fox News – the same media that told us there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq?” The corporate media routinely justifies U.S. intervention and cheerleads for U.S. wars.

In July 2019 I traveled to Nicaragua with a delegation from Veterans For Peace. We visited with healthcare workers and with a women-run cooperative farm.  We heard emotional testimony from families of police who had been killed in the attempted coup of 2018 and from mayors whose towns had been under attack.  We met with veterans – the highly respected “historical combatants,” who ultimately took the lead in dismantling the barricades.

On July 19 – Nicaragua’s Independence Day – we joined 400,000 jubilant Nicaraguans who were rejoicing in the main square in Managua. They had traveled from all over Nicaragua to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista victory over the U.S.-backed dictator Somoza. (Anybody see a pattern here?)

I love the heroic, handsome, poetic and fun-loving Nicaraguan people.  I am in awe of their unique and hopeful revolution. Casting a little light into the shadows of regime change propaganda is the least that I can do to show my appreciation.

Gerry Condon, former president of Veterans For Peace, has been visiting Nicaragua since 1983. For up-to-date news and views about Nicaragua, he recommends NicaNotes at www.afgj.org.