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.
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.
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
Let me quote you something:
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
— Judge Learned Hand (1944)
The fight of a right is indeed one thing, but it does not win the hearts of people. An injustice revealed at a cost of another injustice does not win the hearts of people. The US Civil War won us the 13th amendment but it did not win the hearts of the people. Law is a piece of paper and means only that which people extend to it and no more. Law protects the people to the extent that law is enforced by the people and no less.
Out of the Civil War came share cropping, Jim Crow laws, and disenfranchisement of those who were formerly enslaved. The evil didn’t abate, it evolved. It was not the blood shed there that gave salvation, it was the blood there that began the march.
Wouldn’t it be better to still remain chattel while trying to think of how to solve this all amicably
Absolutely not, but at the same time it’s foolish to think it was settled. And that’s the point I am making, no win is absolute, but every loss is an erosion. This “win” that the other person believes it to be is not such. It is a win if you are of the mindset that the crimes or Trump require a person who took an oath to uphold the law in bad faith was justified.
In your life you’ve likely wanted this world to be different, to be equal. But that can only be found not by law onto others but by mindset by others. And if law requires equality and the minds of people have not change, no sheet of paper can protect us unless we have faith in that sheet of paper. No document can prevent evil unless we maintain faith in the people who have sworn an oath to do such.
Is that not the problem we see? People who wear uniforms who swear to serve and protect in constant violation of that? People who have taken oath to hold those in violation of that promise who fail to uphold their end of the bargain?
I would say, people taken it upon themselves to believe that ends justify the means is the root of the problem, not the solution. That is why I ask do we believe we got the win in the Civil War? With the 19th Amendment? And the answer is what I’ve said to the other person.
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.
The events I speak about are not a conclusion of things, but the start of things. They are not wins, they events that direct us. Change us and show our resolve to continue. Evil sinks back because they believe we are resolute and when we show that we are not, then our struggle becomes more difficult.
And to quote:
What I fear about many of these observances is that they tend to enact historical closures. They are represented as historical high points on a road to an ultimately triumphant democracy
— Angela Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities)
In short, the idea that “freedom” continues with the shedding of blood is incorrect or in the best of light, short sighted. Freedom is maintained in the minds and hearts of the people and when ephemeral wins come at the cost of holding no faith to an oath to protect and uphold the law. Then it is no real win, it is an erosion. There are too many examples of how bad faith poisoned the US in the Reconstruction Era that followed the US Civil War. Of how bad faith fueled hate groups to win the hearts and minds of the people at that time.
Perhaps that won’t be the case with this revelation. I honestly hope you all are correct and I am incorrect, to me that would be best for me to be incorrect on this event. I would want nothing more. But any weakness in our resolve to be a nation of laws is a strength to authoritarianism. Any action of bad faith courts more of the like and makes repulsion that more difficult.
I have read all of your comment reply. I don’t agree with all of it, but I have read it and I appreciate your time in writing it.
The extra nuance you took to further clarify your point so that your strongly emotive comparisons were not misconstrued as ignorance was a particularly welcome touch.
As to a retort of any kind; Within the framework of the world you describe, you are correct and I would almost be swayed.
I just can’t bring myself to believe it can still be true, that it isn’t simply the idealism of an age gone by.
If bad faith in kind breeds more bad faith and our own good faith is weaponized against the public good, then what?
If it is erosion, then I personally can only hope that the good intentions on the road to hell will also erode the structures from underneath evil as well as the good.
It is short sighted, but just what else am I supposed to see beyond the cliff we’re hurtling towards?
