Monday, 28 September 2020 06:56 Written by oasesnews
Donald Trump paid just 750 dollars in federal income tax in 2016, the year he won the U.S. presidential election, the New York Times wrote in an explosive investigative report late Sunday.
The president, a self-proclaimed billionaire, paid the same amount in 2017, and nothing at all in 10 of the 15 previous years largely because he lost so much more money than he made, the paper reported.
At a news conference held minutes after the newspaper published its report, Trump said it was “fake news” and claimed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) “does not treat me well.”
“It will all be revealed, I paid a lot of taxes, I paid a lot of state taxes too. but when you under audit, you don’t publish them.
“I’m going to release many things and people are going to be shocked,” he told reporters.
The Times has long sought to get hold of Trump’s tax returns but the president has refused to release them, though his predecessors have traditionally done so.
On Sunday the paper said it had got hold of more than two decades’ worth of returns, but that it did not include Trump’s personal returns for 2018 and 2019.
The revelations come just over a month before the U.S. is set to vote in a new presidential election, with polls suggesting Trump is in danger of losing to his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
The Times said its reporting showed that Trump, former star of the reality show “The Apprentice,” had been “more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.”
A 2019 investigation by the Times of Trump tax returns it managed to get hold of dating from 1985 to 1994 showed the president lost more money than almost any other individual US taxpayer in many years.It also suggested that his financial condition in 2015 lent “some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.”
In Sunday’s report, the Times said he was “a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise,” with 300 million dollars worth of debt for which he is personally responsible coming due within the next four years.
It said he was increasingly dependent on income from businesses such as his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, that put him in direct, or potential, conflicts of interest with his job as president.
It also said that most of his core businesses, including his golf courses and Washington hotel, reported “losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.”
In response to the Times investigation, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organisation said that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate.”
He said that over the past decade Trump had paid “tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government” although the Times said he appeared to be conflating personal taxes such as Social Security with income tax.
Despite hopes that the president’s tax records might shed some light on his ingratiating attitude towards Russia, the Times said they revealed nothing about his connections to the country that had not previously been reported.
The paper said it would publish further stories on Trump’s tax records in the coming weeks. (NAN)
The former First Lady was joined by her mother, Marian Robinson, and her brother, Craig Robinson to discuss topics including race and expectations of Black Americans for the season finale of her widely popular podcast on Wednesday, according to The Hill.
“When we were in the White House, we could’ve never gotten away with some of the stuff that’s going on now, not because of the public, but our community wouldn’t have accepted that. You worked, you did your best every day. You showed up,” Obama said, throwing light on the current protests in the country against racial discrimination and police brutality in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“The fact that there are people out there that treat us less than, when we’re working so hard to be better than, that’s where the pain comes from. That’s what these young people are so angry about,” she said. “The notion that people are out there wondering about these protests, it’s like, do you know how much it takes, that it takes to get up everyday, and be accused of being less than what you are?”
During their discussion, the family also recalled an episode during childhood when Craig was accused of stealing his own bike by the police. Craig was around 10 or 11 when he was stopped by the police around the South Side of Chicago while riding a new bright yellow 10-speed bike his parents had gifted to him.
Craig, who is currently the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, recalled that one of the officers grabbed the bike after accusing him of stealing it. Despite his pleas that the bike was his, one of the officers grabbed it and wouldn’t let it go.
“I was always taught that the police are your friends…and they’ll believe the truth, and I was tellin’ ‘em the truth and this guy would not believe me,” Robinson recounted.
“I was like ‘Oh, you got this all wrong, this is my bike. Don’t worry, this isn’t a stolen bike,’ and [the cop] would not believe me, and I was absolutely heartbroken. And I finally said to him, ‘Listen, you can take me to my house, and I will prove to you, this is my bike.’”
With the bike in the back of the police car, the officers drove Craig to his home, where his mom, Marian, made it known to them that they had made a serious mistake.
“I could tell [the cops] were trying to ask me questions that would trip me up,” Craig recalled. “If I wasn’t so sure that that bike was mine and showed any kind of reticence, I could see them taking me off to the police station, not calling mom until after I’ve been, you know, booked or whatever they do.”
Michelle then went on to describe how Black families have had to safely navigate potential encounters with police. “Nobody thinks about, you know, the fact that we all come from good families that are trying to teach values, but when you leave the safety of your home and go out into the street, where being Black is, is a crime in and of itself, we have all had to learn how to operate outside of our homes with a level of caution, and fear, because you never know,” she said.
Interestingly, the police officers who drove Craig home that fateful day were Black but Marian believes that their “discriminatory treatment was part of a culture among police.”
“…They were acting exactly the same as any other policeman,” she said. “It’s almost like, this is what they thought they were, how they were thought they were supposed to act.”
The government is extending the COVID health measures for a further six months, until the end of March, in its latest acknowledgement that pandemic assistance will be needed on various fronts for a longer period.
The extension, costing $2 billion, covers the telehealth services provided by doctors and a range of allied health professionals, home medicine delivery, and free COVID-19 pathology tests.
It also includes the cost of funding for further personal protective equipment for the national medical stockpile, GP-led respiratory clinics, half the cost of activities to respond to COVID-19 in hospitals, and continuation of the private hospital agreement to ensure access to beds.
Telehealth, which started in March, has proved highly popular with three out of every ten GP services at present done virtually. So far, over 30 million services have been provided to more than ten million patients, delivered by more than 77,000 practitioners. Some $1.55 billion has been paid in benefits.
Given the convenience and high usage of telehealth, the government will be under pressure to build it into the health system permanently.
Scott Morrison said telehealth and home delivery medicine services reduced the risk of exposure to COVID-19 in the community while supporting people in isolation.
“Importantly this also includes mental health services, delivered over the phone, by trained specialists and GPs,” he said.
The extension of the health funding comes as national cabinet meets on Friday, when it will discuss the increase in the cap — from 4,000 to 6,000 a week nationally – that the government has announced for people coming home from overseas.
Western Australia has been critical of the government for pre-empting the national cabinet with its announcement.
Morrison was adamant on Thursday the increased cap was a fait accompli, not a request to the states.
“The planes will land with people on them … It’s a decision. It’s not a proposal. The Commonwealth government has made a decision that those caps have been moved to those levels and planes will be able to fly to those ports carrying that many passengers a week,” he said.
Jane Halton, a former health department secretary who is on the government’s COVID-19 commission and has done an audit of quarantine arrangements around the country, will brief Friday’s meeting.
Meanwhile tensions remain over state border restrictions, especially in relation to the Queensland border. But with the Queensland election looming and the state government’s policy favoured by many voters, Morrison on Thursday was treading carefully.
“I’ve never said the Queensland border should be taken down,” he insisted. “What I’ve said is it should be managed sensibly. What I’ve said is it should be managed compassionately. What I’ve said is that they should explain to people what the rules for it are and the medical basis of it are,” he said.
“No doubt people in Queensland may feel that the borders are protecting their health situation. I understand that. But there’s also the impact that it is having more broadly on jobs and business and industry in Queensland.”
The 14-day quarantine rule operating in Queensland will mean neither Morrison nor Anthony Albanese will be able to campaign on the ground for the late October election.
Morrison said NSW and Victoria and South Australia were working to get their borders down.
“The border between New South Wales and Victoria is likely to come down before the one in New South Wales and Queensland,” he said.
Wednesday, 16 September 2020 01:55 Written by face2faceafrica
Eleanor Bumpurs would have been 102 years old this month if she were alive. But for being four months behind on her monthly rent of $98.65, the disabled elderly Black woman, remembered for her gloomy-looking 1981 photograph, was shotgunned to death by NYPD officers, an example of how Black folks have been vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence since time immemorial.
The 67-year-old’s killing indeed drew widespread media coverage and public outcry from Black leaders, who demanded changes in policing. The tragic death of the mother of seven and grandmother of 10 occurred on October 29, 1984, in her Bronx apartment as the police made efforts to evict her.
Months before Bumpurs’ death, her rent payment history was good but that didn’t stop authorities from starting eviction proceedings against her when she was only one month behind. Records showed that the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA) had emergency rent funds for seniors facing eviction, but Bumpurs was denied such funds.
Rather, the HRA brought in a psychiatrist, who spoke with her for a short period before advising that she should be evicted and hospitalized over what he deemed to be psychosis.
On October 29, the day of her eviction, the city marshal came to evict Bumpurs but when she refused to answer the door, the police were called. Housing authority workers requested NYPD assistance to evict her after telling it that Bumpurs “was emotionally disturbed, had threatened to throw boiling lye, and was using a knife to resist eviction.”
A team of a half dozen officers from the Emergency Services Unit (ESU), wearing masks and carrying shields and a long iron restraining bar as well as a shotgun, broke down her door and forcibly entered her apartment, a 1985 Unity Newspaper reported. The team found inside the apartment Bumpurs, 275 pounds, naked, and allegedly holding a 10-inch kitchen knife. They then attempted to subdue Bumpurs, but in the struggle to do so, one officer shot Bumpurs twice with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Here’s how the Unity Newspaper reported it: “As she tried to dodge the restraining bar, Stephen Sullivan fired his shotgun at Mrs. Bumpurs. Though the blast destroyed her hand (and with it, a knife she was allegedly holding), Sullivan fired a second and fatal blast at her chest.”
That wasn’t the end of Bumpurs’ woes as reports said the police carried her out of the building still naked and when her family came back to her apartment weeks after her death, they found part of her finger.
Soon, Bumpurs’ killing sparked local and national outrage. Demonstrations, marches, and candlelight vigils that were organized to protest her murder and the rising police violence in the city, led in the pursuit of legal justice for Bumpurs.
Investigations did commence in her case but concluded that her eviction was justified because she was behind on rent. Sullivan was later indicted on manslaughter charges and acquitted.
The city in the end paid the Bumpurs family $200,000 to settle a civil suit but not without grassroots organizing led by Mary Bumpers, the daughter of the deceased. Mary, alongside Veronica Perry, whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed by the police, led a grassroots initiative in New York City to fight police violence in Black communities in the 1980s.
At the end of the day, the NYPD “changed its guidelines to require a senior officer to be on hand before police confront an emotionally disturbed person,” according to a report. The police also began to carry less-lethal weapons, including tasers, and since then, they are only supposed to use deadly force if there is an immediate threat to someone’s life.
But what do we see today? It’s unfortunate that circumstances surrounding Bumpurs’ death still achingly linger on, as evident in the excessive police use of deadly force and racial discrimination in the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, among others.
But Black communities have shown in the wake of recent protests that they will never rest until they see the end of police killings of Black people in the United States.
A man of God has been caught on CCTV shooting his wife dead over a disagreement in the US.
Pastor Ofori and wife, Babara Tommey
A popular US-based Ghanaian pastor, Sylvester Ofori has found himself in serious trouble after shooting his wife Barbara Tommey dead.
According to reports, the tragic incident happened the 27-year-old woman’s workplace at the Navy Federal Credit Union, near the Mall at Millenia in Orlando, on Tuesday 8th September 2020.
Barbara was shot by Sylvester, near the business’ front doors on the 4600 block of Gardens Park Boulevard just before 9 a.m., an Orlando Police Department spokesperson said.
Tommey was pronounced dead at Orlando Regional Medical Center shortly after she was rushed there for medical attention.
Ofori, 35, was taken into custody at his apartment Tuesday evening, the OPD spokesperson said. He is being held at the Orange County Jail without bond on a charge of first-degree murder with a firearm.
During a press conference Tuesday morning, Chief Orlando Rolón said the shooting was captured on CCTV.
“You can tell that she was surprised by what was happening,” he said.
The Navy Federal Credit Union released a statement on the shooting.
The statement reads:
“This morning, a team member was fatally injured during an act of violence outside our Millenia branch, by a man she knew, according to the police.
“Our thoughts are with our team member’s family. Our number one priority is keeping both our members and team members safe. We will ensure all team members at the branch are provided with the support they need during this time. Any further information can be provided by the Orlando Police Department.”
Pastor Sylvester has reportedly been abusing his wife for a long time. Due to the abuse, Barbara was persuaded by her family to leave him. But Sylvester tracked her to her workplace yesterday and shot her 7 times.
A woman named Lisa, who witnessed the shooting, said: “I’m shaken up right now, I’m still shaken up.”
She said she saw Barbara come outside to move her car before she was shot.
“The next thing I knew, he raised his hand with the gun in it, and he shot her,” she said.
“The guy was walking behind her. I don’t know if she knew he was there or not. I started running and as I’m running, I hear three or four more shots.”
Lisa spoke highly of the deceased woman.
She said: “She was always very nice when I came into the bank. She’s very nice, very nice.”
The speech from the throne is only weeks away. Moments like these — pandemics, depressions, wars — are historical turning points, often marking a time period when fundamental change toward social and economic equality become possible.
Unlike the apparently failed state south of the border that seems to be trudging toward a dystopian future, the federal government has implemented a commendable, if imperfect, plan to protect Canadians’ health and safety, support unemployed workers and help struggling businesses in this time of pandemic-induced shock.
Longer term, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to rebuild the economy, address inequality and take bold action on the climate emergency. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has written:
“Rising income inequality and a hollowed-out middle class are the dominant social and political challenge facing our generation.”
Will they follow through on these promises? Or will they appease the people who derive their power from wealth — or plutocrats, as Freeland called them in her book of the same name — and ultimately acquiesce to the parameters they set on what kind of change is acceptable?
So far there has been no mention of a wealth tax or an increase in the income tax rate for the wealthiest Canadians, the rebuilding of the badly frayed social safety net or the expansion of universal health care, notably via universal public pharmacare. Nor have there been any bold measures to decarbonize the economy that align with the government’s net-zero 2050 target.
Debt, deficit drumbeats
Corporate mouthpieces are beating the austerity drums, warning about rampant debt and deficits. The Business Council of Canada is urging the government to set clear fiscal targets and rein in spending to control the debt.
The Fitch credit rating agency — which in 2007 disastrously rated sub-prime mortgage bonds as Triple A, a contributing factor to the global financial crisis — has downgraded Canada’s credit rating due to the “deterioration of Canada’s public finances.” It’s also given a nod to Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole’s pledge to balance the budget.
It should continue to do so — notwithstanding the rising deficits and debt ratio — in order to rebuild a fragmented economy and social state and lead the green transition. Japan has been doing this for years, with the Bank of Japan owning the bulk of government debt.
Income and wealth inequality have risen to unprecedented levels over the past four decades. The pandemic has laid bare the consequences of this new gilded age.
Tax brackets have been reduced from 17 to four. More importantly, the bulk of the wealthiest Canadians’ incomes are not from wages, but from their share holdings, which are taxed as capital gains at very low levels and only kick in when shares are sold.
Median household income in Canada has remained flat since 1982, while the average income of the richest one per cent has increased dramatically, doubling between 1982 and 2010 and widening further over the last decade.
According to recent estimates by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the top one per cent of Canadian families hold 25 per cent of total family wealth.
The bottom 40 per cent of families hold basically no wealth, while the 1,000 richest families have some $325 billion in combined wealth. This contrasts with the total $3 billion combined wealth held by 12.8 million Canadian families. True to form, the five richest billionaires in Canada saw their wealth increase by nine per cent in the first three months of the pandemic.
Tax avoidance
The system has created massive opportunities for tax avoidance by the richest Canadians and large corporations. Canadian corporate assets in the leading 12 offshore tax havens reached $381 billion in 2019.
The inequality gap will most definitely continue to rise over the next 10 years without a wealth or estate tax on the richest Canadians, without increasing the income and capital gains tax rate on the richest Canadians and without closing tax loopholes.
Climate emergency
In his new book, A Good War, Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, urban studies professor Seth Klein laments the new climate denialism that involves governments and industry leaders verbally accepting climate science but denying what the reality means for policy. Governments promise action but practise appeasement of corporate interests, delivering “underwhelming and contradictory policies.”
Mark Carney — formerly the Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, and now a special envoy for climate action for the United Nations — has warned that climate is approaching a tipping point that could precipitate global financial and economic collapse, to say nothing of a planetary apocalypse. Carney is now serving as an adviser to the Trudeau government.
A recent United Nations Environment Program report estimated Canada’s emissions in 2030 would be 15 per cent above its Paris accord reduction target of 30 per cent over 2005 levels. That’s part of a growing global disconnect between rising temperature trends and commitments by governments to cut emissions.
Trudeau vowed Canada would exceed its 2030 commitment on the way to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. He promised that concrete actions, including legally binding five-year targets, would be revealed before the next UN climate summit in November.
Canadians want a wealth tax
Canada needs an ambitious social and economic plan that will hopefully present itself in the upcoming throne speech.
A recent Abacus survey found 74 per cent of Canadians believe the government should introduce a wealth tax of one to two per cent of the very rich.
It also found 72 per cent of Canadians supported a universal public pharmacare program. The Liberal government has waffled for decades on pharmacare and continues to do so, even in the face of recommendations from its own advisory panel on the need for it.
On climate, the Abacus poll found that the transition to a low-carbon economy was “extremely or very important” to 53 per cent of Canadians and “important” to another 20 per cent.
Will the public be heeded in the throne speech and the government’s subsequent fiscal update? Will there be a pledge for transformative change or will the plutocracy be appeased once again?
Tilting the scales towards change requires a broad-based, engaged movement. Canadians must mobilize.
It’s starting to sound trite, but COVID-19 has radically changed the way many people live and work. Six months into this pandemic, these changes are producing interesting conversations about the potential of an urban exodus to suburban, small-town and rural places, driven by changing perceptions and priorities.
The comparative affordability and space offered by rural and small-town communities continues to be attractive. Some people are deciding to make full-time homes out of their seasonal properties, while others are looking at their options outside the city, now that working from home — or anywhere — feels more permanent.
Leaving the city requires people to replace urban resources with individual reserves: a guaranteed salary, the ability to work from home and the social and economic capital to support relocation.
Urban sociologist Junia Howell has noted that “crisis doesn’t just reveal inequality, it makes it worse.” While environmental and economic disasters are different than a pandemic, they share the same quality of worsening outcomes for vulnerable communities.
Decision-makers and advocates can sometimes glorify human resilience, rather than addressing the processes that require people to build resilience in the first place. Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute has thoroughly critiqued this phenomenon in New Orleans as the region cycles through disaster events and recovery initiatives.
COVID-19 has encouraged me to rethink the way I frame my work to be more critical of why ideas of rural resiliency can feel so appealing. In this way, as American author Rebecca Solnit has observed, “gentrification is just the fin above the water.” We should look carefully at what lurks beneath before we become overly enthusiastic about pandemic-driven interest in relocating to rural communities.
Rural pull, urban push
The key question becomes: who is this for?
We tend to focus primarily on cities in discussions about the complex nature of urban-rural migration. Everywhere else is peripheral. This tells us a lot about the position and perspectives of the people shaping decisions about rural futures: whether you are at the centre of the story or on its edges depends entirely on who is narrating.
It also reveals that people still choose to move to communities with the infrastructure and amenities that support their lifestyle aspirations and that allow them relatively easy proximity to their current urban networks. This makes more remote rural communities or those with less robust social and physical infrastructure (particularly broadband) unlikely to benefit.
Investing purposefully
Rural communities deserve our commitment and investment in their futures. However, there is a distinct difference in the way people devote their time, resources and care to a community depending on how invested they are in its future.
If more people want to call rural Canada home, it could go a long way towards addressing these challenges, but only if this shift is matched by policies and investments that support these transitions. However, most celebrated models of successful rural development are urbanization in disguise.
Rural communities need adaptive, place-based investments that ensure they are not just attractive to potential new residents, but healthy and supportive communities for the people already living there and future generations still to come. Shifting our priorities to purposeful investments in supporting vibrant, inclusive, prosperous and uniquely rural communities will make all of our futures brighter, no matter which dot on the map we call home.
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