A former Internal Revenue Service contractor, who leaked tax information about Donald Trump and other wealthy individuals to news organizations, got his job to intentionally to spread the confidential records, according to Justice Department prosecutors.
Charles Edward Littlejohn, 38, of Washington, pleaded guilty in October to unauthorized disclosure of tax return and return information. U.S. District Judge Ana Reye scheduled sentencing for Jan. 29. Prosecutors recommended Tuesday he receive the maximum sentence of five years in prison.
“After applying to work as an IRS consultant with the intention of accessing and disclosing tax returns, Defendant weaponized his access to unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal, political agenda, believing that he was above the law,” wrote prosecutors Corey Amundson, chief of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, Jennifer Clarke and Jonathan Jacobson.
Replace it with one where people have a say and not a ruling class?
You want everyone to vote on every issue? Because outside of that, we’ve already got that system you talk about.
There’s enough anarchist/communist/leftist literature out there discussing these issues, they’re not new
And those systems have flaws in them as well. It’s not like rich and powerful means “Oh no, I cannot learn to exploit a new system!”
And the idea that you can vote your way out of this mess is adorable, naive, but adorable
See there’s not an “out”, that’s where you’ve got it wrong. There’s never a point where people stop pushing back on rich and powerful. That’s literally the human condition, it’s forever, always, until the heat death of the universe, an uphill. There is no top of the hill. There is no “out”. Democracy is not a spectator sport, it requires all of us to continually and forever until the last of us is gone, fight the indoctrination with education, fight the power grabs with justice, and fight greed with humility.
At no point do we make progress by breaking laws and further showing how irrelevant that sheet of paper we call the Constitution is and rewriting it to be communist or foregoing it to be anarchist do not make it where suddenly human proclivities cease existing. You cannot do off with the evil side of human nature by adopting some magical means to live one’s life and govern one’s society. It is only with an enteral effort or the cessation of humanity itself that it can placed in check.
No you have all of this completely wrong. There is never “out”.
I want everyone to have the ability to vote on every issue if they want too.
You cannot have rich and powerful people under such a system because the means for them to posses such status do not exist.
There is zero biological imperative that rich and powerful people must exist, that’s purely a social construct. Humans are inherently cooperative.
And yes at every point you make progress by breaking laws. What would LGBT rights look like without the Stonewall riots? What would worker rights look like without anarchists kidnapping CEOs and fighting pinkertons, what would black rights look like without a civil war and groups like the black panthers violence.
Our world got to where it is through shedding the blood of tyrants, not asking them nicely.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
You cannot have rich and powerful people under such a system because the means for them to posses such status do not exist
Disinformation.
There is zero biological imperative that rich and powerful people must exist
There is a finite set of things and a means to obtain significant portions of those finite things.
Humans are inherently cooperative
Humans are complex.
Our world got to where it is through shedding the blood of tyrants, not asking them nicely
Let me ask you, all that blood shed previously. Did it work? Are we winning right now? You mentioned the US Civil War, ask yourself, did the slaves actually get free? Did the blacks actually get rights? Did the people who started the war face justice?
Also, all that those moments in history where there was shedding of blood. You do understand, if we had that today, you and I are pretty much assured to not make it. You do understand that? If we went to bloodshed, a lot of the people on this forum are highly likely the be part of the dead. You know in the Declaration of Independence there’s a line:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed
And reason why is because they knew, that overthrowing the government means most people die and the rich and power continue on. You do kind of notice how a lot of the folks who signed that document were also very rich and very powerful people and very not dead at the end of the Revolutionary war?
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Which is why I’m curious about you quoting Thomas Jefferson in his letter to John Adam’s son-in-law. For me a real quote is:
It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.
You seem very well spoken but clearly convicted in seeing the shining and just world you may have thought you were building towards go dark and twisted the way the History books noted should be history.
That’s a presumption on my part of course and I’ll never truly know, but it rings right.
But this is a topic where your enthusiasm for the recovery of a dream that never was is making you say some seriously ignorant takes, in the dehumanize others for my point sort of way.
There is a small cadre of lovely good old people who don’t realize the realities being lived in those they have spent their lives seeing as allies–or at least being non-antagonistic towards.
A terrifying thing to see people who were there or learned first hand from those who were living through the bloody acquisition of the rights of marginalized group after marginalized group.
And how even those rights that were bled for are being eroded, within the same lifetime.
If they still can recognize such a simple reality, that recognition comes with a price that is often decided as not worth paying for those people, for whatever reasons they tell themselves.
I fear you may have with all the best intentions, gelled there as one of those people.
But my God. I have never in my life of being of color and all of the hardships and obstacles that’s brought the thought:
“Hmmm, did my ancestors really get freedom? Was the Civil War worth it, for our country’s Unity? Wouldn’t it be better to still remain chattel while trying to think of how to solve this all amicably”.
The ignorance is so staggering I can’t manage to be offended.
