Our President doesn't have Christian ethics at all, not even on Sundayy.
As for ugly Americans. They don't have to be rich. The blind people with whom I
traveled on the Evergreen trip to Spain were not wealthy, not in the terms you
mean. But in that department store in Madrid, they complained loudly that no
one was speaking English and that all of the menu items in the cafeteria were
in Spanish. These blind working people, (the ones who'd worked, had been
employed in government jobs or by agencies for the blind, believed that the
world should be set up to accommodate them.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2019 10:49 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: A New Level of Grifting by the President
A coworker of my dad's turned to me and said, "I don't mix my business ethics
with my Christian ethics".
So for six days each week he was influenced by his business ethics, but set
them aside on Sunday, donning his Christian ethics. At least Sunday morning up
until kick off, when he grabbed a cold Bud and kicked back.
Back in the late fifties or early sixties there was a book titled "The Ugly
American". It basically described Americans as seen by the people of the
world. It was not a pretty picture, but it seemed not to describe the people I
hung out with. Then it dawned on me, the author was describing the Americans
who had the wealth to travel abroad. These Americans did not stay in simple
hotels, or shop at the common shops. These were the Americans who sneered
contemptuously at their Working Class American brothers and sisters. These
Ugly Americans were ugly at home, just as much as they were ugly abroad.
But in our wildest dreams we never believed that one of them would become
president!
Carl Jarvis
On 9/6/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A New Level of Grifting by the President By Jeffrey Toobin, The New
Yorker
06 September 19
Before Donald Trump became President, some purportedly knowledgeable
students of the Constitution had never even heard of the emoluments clause.
(Me, for example.) This heretofore obscure provision of Article I had
its origin in the distant mists of American history, when
representatives of the young republic were seen as vulnerable to
temptations offered by the wealthy grandees of Europe. As a result,
the Framers decided to ban American officials from receiving any gifts
or money-that is, emoluments-from foreign governments. It was a simple
rule, easy to comply with, and the clause generated few controversies
and even fewer court cases for more than two centuries.
But Trump brought the emoluments clause to life. After he refused to
divest his real-estate holdings upon becoming President, his hotels
became a magnet for foreign visitors seeking to curry favor with his
Administration. A former Trump Organization official recently
estimated that foreign governments spent more than a million dollars
at Trump's businesses in 2018, mostly at the Trump International Hotel
in Washington, D.C. (Since Trump was inaugurated, Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait have been good customers there.) But the money flowing from
foreign governments to the President's businesses could soar if he
makes good on his apparent plan, which he announced last month, to
host next year's G-7 meeting at his Doral golf resort, in Florida.
If the deal comes to fruition, the conference would mark a new level
of grifting by the President, and it appears consistent with a new
brazenness in his efforts to profit from his office. (Zach Everson's
newsletter follows issues relating to Trump's use of the Presidency
for financial gain.)
Some of Trump's efforts may have run afoul of an even more obscure
provision of the Constitution: the so-called domestic emoluments
clause. This section of Article II states that the President "shall
not receive" any emolument, other than his fixed salary, from "the
United States, or any of them."
Again, the idea behind this provision is similar to the one underlying
the foreign clause: the Framers didn't want any part of the
government, or any state, trying to influence the President by
funnelling money to him. This is precisely the problem with
Vice-President Mike Pence's recent trip to Ireland, where he wasted
many hours and untold thousands of dollars of government money, to
stay at a Trump golf resort that was nearly two hundred miles away
from his meetings with Irish leaders, including the Prime Minister,
Leo Varadkar, in Dublin. (The Administration's explanations for how
Pence came to stay at the hotel have been unconvincing, to say the
least.) Can anyone seriously doubt that the reason Pence stayed at
Trump's hotel was to please the boss, at the taxpayers' expense? And
that's precisely the ill that the constitutional provision was
designed to prevent.
Since practically the day that Trump took office, his political
opponents have taken to the courts to protest what they characterize
as his violations of the emoluments clauses. The cases have generally
gone poorly for the President's adversaries, although none has been
definitively resolved. A panel of the Fourth Circuit threw out an
emoluments case brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and the
District of Columbia, on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked the
legal standing to sue. A similar case in a New York federal court met
the same fate. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., held that a group
of members of Congress, led by Senator Richard Blumenthal, of
Connecticut, did have standing to bring an emoluments case, but the
Trump Administration has appealed, and that case is stalled, too.
Another possibility for resolution of the emoluments issues, of
course, is for Congress to use it as a basis for impeachment. As with
other potential grounds for impeachment, such as obstruction of
justice, it awaits a determination by the Democratic leadership in
Congress about whether to pursue it.
In all, the emoluments issue represents a good illustration of
Kinsley's law, named for the journalist Michael Kinsley, who observed
that the scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. What society
chooses not to punish tells you the most about the prevailing moral
standards of any age.
According to an estimate by the Center for Responsive Politics,
various domestic political groups and committees have spent nearly
twenty million dollars on events at Trump's properties.
Unlike government expenditures, there's no question that these
payments are legal. But in a country that purports to demand that its
politicians work for the public interest, not for their private gain,
Trump's behavior is an outrage. At this point, it seems unlikely that
the courts, or even the Congress, will do anything about it. The only
hope for a check on Trump, and for his removal, is the voters.
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
Email This Page
