Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Exactly how much trouble is the Trump Foundation in?

cnn


Last Thursday, the attorney general of New York sued the Trump Foundation, alleging that the organization affiliated with the President of the United States and his family had broken a number of laws governing charitable groups. "As our investigation reveals, the Trump Foundation was little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his business to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality," said Barbara Underwood, the Empire State's AG.
The Trump Foundation dismissed the lawsuit as entirely politically motivated, noting that it had given out more money ($19 million) than it had even received in donations.
Where does the the truth lie? And just how normal -- or abnormal -- is the way in which the Trump Foundation operated? I reached out to Marc Owens, the former director of the exempt organizations division of the Internal Revenue Service, for answers.
    Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.
    Cillizza: Let's start simple: How odd is the way the Trump Foundation operates when compared to other similar-sized foundations?
    Owens: Whether the Trump Foundation is compared to similar-sized, i.e. small, family foundations or it is compared to foundations of any size and type, my answer is the same: the Trump Foundation may be unique in the variety and scope of its transgressions of state and federal law, as well as the visibility of the transgressions.
    Since the enactment of the private foundation excise taxes in the Tax Reform Act of 1969, the IRS has undertaken a variety of audit programs focused on federal tax law compliance. The results have not generally been made public, but some have, including a report released in 1990 of a statistically valid audit project of private foundations that involved a review of 882 organizations. The project, known as the "Grant-making Administrative Expenses Study," was required by Congress in the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, and the study was made public as a result. In a concluding observation, the study noted, "Overall, we found that private foundations are in substantial compliance with the provisions of the tax laws that apply to them." None of the 882 foundations in the study exhibited behavior even distantly close to that of Trump Foundation as detailed in the New York attorney general's petition.
    In fact, while my years at the IRS brought me into contact with many charities and foundations that had violated federal tax law, few approached the variety of the Trump Foundation's transgressions.
    Cillizza: What is being alleged here? And what is the most serious charge?
    Owens: The petition, because it was filed by the New York attorney general, focuses on state charity law violations, including violations of the duty of care, that is, a foundation's board has a duty to see that a foundation uses its funds for charitable purposes and not for private, personal benefit of board members.
    The most serious state charge is essentially the basket of violations of the duty of care as reflected in the purchase of paintings to decorate Trump resorts, the use of foundation funds to settle lawsuit disputes between the Trump Organization and various third parties, the use of foundation assets to support Donald Trump's political campaign and, finally, the misreporting of the preceding on the foundation's federal Form 990-PF return, which New York law also requires to be filed with the New York attorney general. It should be noted, however, that the facts described in the petition have analogs in federal tax law, where the same transgressions that are outlined in the petition could trigger civil tax penalty excise taxes, revocation of tax-exempt status and potentially the application of the "termination tax" under section 507 of the Internal Revenue Code which authorizes the IRS in cases of repeated, flagrant violation of the rules for foundation behavior, to levy a tax equivalent to 100% of the assets of the foundation. Of course, the New York attorney general has asked that the foundation be dissolved and its assets transferred to other charities. Finally, the filing of knowingly false or inaccurate Form 990 federal tax returns has triggered criminal sanctions in at least five or six cases in the last 10 years. The charges in those case included conspiracy to defraud the United States, the making false statements on tax returns and the aiding and abetting of the filing of a false tax return. The penalties can include substantial fines and jail time.
    Cillizza: What's the Trump defense?
    Owens: In my opinion, there are no effective defenses that Donald Trump and/or his foundation can deploy to either the attorney general's petition or to federal tax charges. About the best he can do is plead ignorance of the law (generally ineffective with the sort of allegations being made) and to try to shift the blame to his accountants and attorneys (which will be factually difficult given Trump's personal involvement in many of the actions. It's unlikely, for example, that one of Trump's attorneys or accountants said that it is fine to contribute to the Florida attorney general's PAC or to buy a painting of himself and hang it in one of his clubs.)

    A chasid can be harmed by his relation to his rebbe

    ציטוט מ "חסידות וקוממיות"
    "רבנו:
                   "האמת תורה דרכה".
             
             
             
              
             
             
             
             את תועלת ההתקשרות עם הצדיק, שהיא מיסודות החסידויות בנות זמננו, ביארנו לפי דברי הרבי מפיאסצנא (ראה להלן, עמ' 105), אמנם יש להסתייג ולומר כי בהתקשרות עם הצדיק אפשר שיהיה לאדם חס ושלום נזק, אם אינו ראוי, או שלא הכין עצמו כראוי, כדברי הרבי
                      מביאלא בספר החיים, ואלה מקצת דברי קודשו (מבשר טוב, ספר החיים, סה):
                   "והרי כמה בני אדם שבאים לצדיק ומתקלקלים יותר משהיו בביתם, ותולים האשמה בצדיק. ובאמת הם הגורמים לזה, מחמת שלא הכינו את עצמם
                      קודם בואם להצדיק. כי כל שלמות צריכה הכנה מקודם"." - חסידות וקוממיות מאת משה רבפוגל

    Tuesday, June 26, 2018

    Uprooting a Marriage Shows Halachic Incompetence

    chareidi
    By Yechiel Sever

    Another instance of falsely liberating an agunah from her state by a beis din that annulled the kiddushin retroactively through an afkinhu, something which is totally forbidden in these times per the ruling of our Torah leadership of current and past generations, raised a storm of acerbic protest in the world of Halacha and dayonus.
    A sharp protest was publicized in Yated Ne'eman in the wake of a severe breach made by a private beis din in which an agunah was attempted to be released from her state through the falsely applied, so called loophole of afkinhu.




    Thank you and ye'yasher kochakhaHa-Rav ha-Ga'on R. Daniel Eidensohn, for the kind compliment and for publicizing this article. Admittedly, the article I sent engages in hyperbole when it writes that nullification of kiddushin through mekach ta'ut is rejected by  "the Acharonim, all of whom unanimously maintain that it is altogether forbidden." This overlooks the opinion of R. Moshe Feinstein, Iggerot Mosheh, Even ha-Ezer I, nos. 79-80. Surely, R. Feinstein was also anAcharon. Nevertheless, the article's point appears cogent because there are limits on what R. Feinstein was willing to do - viz. nullify kiddushin in a case of major insanity, not simply OCD and PPD as is alleged to be the case for Reb Aharon Friedman(*) - and even R. Feinstein is challenged by R. Yom Tov ha-Levi Schwarz, Ma'aneh la-Iggerot, nos. 165 and 168, who points out that R. Feinstein seems to be contradicted by Teshuvot ha-Roshklal 43, no. 5 [R. Schwarz' book is freely available here: http://www.israel613.com/books/MEANE_IGROT-H.pdf  ]. The same remonstration against R. Feinstein is offered by R. J. David Bleich, Tradition 33:1 (Fall 1998), footnote 27. [Note, however, that R. Bleich renders three minor technical errors: (a) he fails to cite R. Schwarz as having previously challenged R. Feinstein; (b) he misreferences the relevant Rosh as Teshuvot ha-Roshklal42, no. 5, when he should have actually written klal 43, no. 5.; (c) in a typographical error, R. Bleich writes "Rosh did not rule that a get was necessary" instead of "Rosh did not rule that a get wasunnecessary." I have already taken the opportunity to bring these corrections to R. Bleich's attention.] 
    I do believe that Ms. Epstein is a tzaddeket gemurah and an anoosah since neither the RCA not the Agudath Israel of America have yet announced that she is still halakhically married to Reb Aharon Friedman. Arguably, then, she should not be asurah la-ba'al and therefore it is a mitzvah to encourage her to return to shelom bayit with her first (and only) husband Reb Aharon Friedman (as per the Gemara, Ketubot 63b, that a when a wife rebels against her husband, it is a mitzvah to announce in the synagogues a diplomatic encouragement for her to return to shelom bayit.) However, even the fact that she is anoosah will not help the baby born from her, since a mamzer is a mamzer, even if born be-oness, as Ha-Rav ha-Ga'on R. David Eidensohn has correctly observed on his illuminating website devoted to this problem. Therefore, I urge the Traditional Orthodox Rabbis of America to have pity on the unborn mamzer before such a mamzer is born, and immediately take up this cause. The Traditional Orthodox Rabbis of America should announce that Ms. Epstein is indeed tzaddeket gemurah, yet also that it is a mitzvah of shelom bayit - and also of preventing the birth of a mamzer - for her to immediately return to her husband Reb Aharon Friedman. 
    Thank you,
    Shalom C. Spira
    Montreal, Canada
    update

    תהיו 'שוואנצונעס' - לא 'באטשים' • שיטת הקודש שמנחיל הרבי מויז'ניץ

    BHOL
    הרוחות בעולם החסידות בכלל, ובחסידות ויז'ניץ בפרט, סערו בשבועיים האחרונים סביב שיחותיו הנוקבות של האדמו"ר מויז'ניץ הצעיר - אותן נשא בפני חסידיו, הן בארה"ב והן בישראל. בשיחות, שנמשכו שעתיים ויותר, לימד הרבי את חסידיו שיטה קדושה בכל הנוגע להתנהגות חסיד לרבו והמשמעויות של כך.

    לא היינו נזקקים לכתוב על כך ב'בחדרי חרדים', שכן דבריו של הרבי נאמרו בעיקרון בשיחות סגורות לחסידיו, כבדק בית בלבד. אך הקלטות מהשיחות דלפו היישר לרשתות החברתיות, ולקבוצות הנייעס העוקבות אחר הנעשה אצל הרבע'ס - כך שכל חסיד מחסידות כזו ואחרת התחרה עם חברו מי משיג ראשון את ההקלטה של הרבי, ומי שמע כל מילה.

    השיחות הפכו נחלת הכלל, כאשר כמה מילים ספציפיות מתוכן, כמו למשל 'באטשי' ו'שוונצע', הפכו ללקסיקון חרדי רב תפוצה. זאת, לצד השיר שאותו שר הרבי, עם המילים "די שיטה הקדושה פון די הייליגע ישועות משה, דהיינו שוואנצונעס" - שיר שאינו מושר רק בקרב חסידי ויז'ניץ, אלא עלה גם לרשימת השירים הפופולרית בחתונות בארה"ב. בה בעת, חסידי ויז'ניץ אף החלו כותבים את המילה 'שוואנצונעס' בכל מודעת ברכה לחסידים.
    "אין לו מה לחפש"
    בדרשה שנישאה בסעודת מלוה המלכה במוצאי השבת האחרונה, נודע ל'בחדרי חרדים' כי הרבי הורה לחסידיו בבירור לשיר את שיר ה'שוואנצונעס' לאחר שיעורי התורה ברבים, כשהוא מוסיף כי - "אם מישהו יוצא באמצע השיר, להגיד לו שאין לו יותר מה לחפש פה אצלנו".

    עוד סח הרבי בשיחתו, כי בשבוע שעבר ישב אברך ליטאי ב'בית תורה' - חדר סמוך לבית מדרש של ויזניץ - והגה בתורה. במהלך לימודו ענה האברך לשיחה טלפונית שקיבל במכשיר הסלולרי שהחזיק, כשהוא אומר במהלכה בין השאר את המשפט הבא: "אני לומד פה בבית עבודה זרה". אברכים ששמעו זאת, תפסו את הלה והעיפו אותו החוצה מבית המדרש. הרבי הוסיף ואמר: "נהניתי כששמעתי על כך. כך צריך לנהוג עם אנשים כאלה".

    בנוסף ביקש הרבי, על פי הדיווח שהגיע לידי 'בחדרי חרדים', כי כל מודעה הנתלית בבית מדרש כלשהו של החסידות, תישלח אליו להגהה. "כל דרשן שמגיע לנאום במוסדות שלי - שיתאמו איתי", דרש הרבי.

    כמו כן, אמר הרבי: "כשנכנסים אלי כל מיני אנשים ומתלוננים על כל מיני דברים שקורים בחסידות, ומציעים לי כל מיני הצעות - "לא משנה מי זה, גם דיין גם ראש הקהל, שלא יבואו אליי. מי שלא נאה לו יכול ללכת, אני לא אבכה אחריו".
    לא מתביישים
    חסידים עמם שוחחנו, מסבירים ל'בחדרי חרדים', כי כל החסידים מקבלים את הדברים באהבה רבה. "צריך להבין, הרבי הוא אבא שלנו לכל דבר, וכשהוא אומר את הדברים - גם אם הם נשמעים קשים, אנחנו מצייתים. הרבי רוצה שכך החסידות תיראה, וכך היא תהיה. כולנו חיילים של הרבי. בכל דבר אנחנו לא מתביישים". 



    letter from r nota about going to ערכאות based on secret psak w.o. hearing other side

    Monday, June 25, 2018

    The Masterpiece Cakeshop Case Proves America’s State Religion Is Leftism

    federalist


    The Masterpiece Cakeshop case the Supreme Court recently decided centered on the Christian faith of Jack Phillips, the bakery’s owner. From a different angle, however, the case was more fundamentally about a different religious faith, one many of America’s elites follow.
    That religion, secular progressivism, so dominates the most powerful institutions in American life that it may rightly be considered our de facto established religion. Thus, the hidden question at issue in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case is the extent to which our governments will be forced to tolerate competitors to our national progressivist religion.

    Yes, There Are Secular Religions

    “Religion” is not an easy concept to define. A religion may posit one god or many, or spirits but no gods, or perhaps even that the spirits and gods have only illusory existence. What unites these diverse belief systems under the umbrella of religion? All seek to understand humankind, the meaning and purpose of life and whether life may continue after death, the world around us, and the supernatural realm (including the existence and nature of God or the gods). Also, all seek to do so in a coherent or integrated way.
    Most Americans today view secularistic and atheistic belief systems as not being religious, but that categorization results more from the history of rhetoric than from a systematic analysis of ideas. In the late Middle Ages, those few Europeans who denied Christianity were viewed as denying religion. In the French Revolution, the secularistic revolutionaries were only too happy to agree with this assessment, since religion—i.e., Christianity—was blamed in part for the excesses of the ruling class. But this denial of the religious nature of secular beliefs does not hold up to scrutiny.
    Marxism provides a clear illustration. This belief system tries to make sense of humankind in terms that uncannily parallel Christianity. It tells of original innocence (primitive communism); of the fall into sin (private property); of the human condition since the fall (class struggle); of the conquest over sin (the proletarian revolution); and of the paradise to come (pure Communism). Marxism also tells us about the meaning of life, claiming that our purpose is merely to produce the means of satisfying our needs, and that society can be perfected in this purpose when we finally jettison property and class and achieve Communism.
    This is humanity’s earthly salvation, and there is no life after death. Not even the world around us and the supernatural realm escape Marxism’s all-encompassing scope. Dialectical materialism explains them both: only the material or natural world exists, and it operates according to a process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. There is no God.Finally, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw to it that each element of this system arguably makes sense with all the other elements. The system is coherent, even integrated. In sum, Marxism is quite simply a non-theistic religion.

    Progressivism Is Simply Evolved Marxism

    Progressivism spawned from Marxism and evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century. Although the progressivist belief system is less narrowly focused on economics than its parent was, we are right to see it as Marxism evolved.
    Progressivism maintains Marxism’s beliefs in the centrality of the struggles between oppressor and oppressed, the materialist nature of the world, the absence of God and an afterlife, and the necessity of revolution to save humanity through the evolution of the perfect human society in which outcomes are equal for everyone. Like its ideological parent, progressivism is a non-theistic religion.

    Sunday, June 24, 2018

    Liberal Jews are destroying their own religion

    NY POST



    American Judaism is broken.
    When two of the Jewish community’s most celebrated writers, Michael Chabon and his wife Ayelet Waldman, write an open letter stating that: “Any Jew, anywhere, who does not act to oppose President Donald Trump and his administration acts in favor of anti-Semitism; any Jew who does not condemn the president, directly and by name, for his racism, white supremacism, intolerance and Jew hatred, condones all of those things,” you don’t have to look far to see why.
    American Judaism is broken because the Jewish left broke it.
    A tiresome fixation on “tikkun olam,” which literally means “repair of the world,” has allowed Judaism to fall into disrepair.
    The phrase “tikkun olam” was quietly lifted out of context from a Jewish prayer before the Second World War to mean social justice. It was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by radicals like Michael Lerner, who founded the extreme left-wing magazine, Tikkun.
    Since then, we have been led to believe that the purpose of the Jews in the world is to campaign for higher taxes, sexual permissiveness, reduced military spending, illegal immigration, opposition to fracking, the banishment of religion from the public square and every other liberal cause under the sun — all in the name of God.
    But the truth is that tikkun olam and its leftist politics have no basis in Judaism. Tikkun olam is not Judaism at all but a distinct religion, whose adherents, it might be said, have culturally appropriated this ancient faith. This religion of tikkun olam commands the allegiance of most non-Orthodox Jews (and some Orthodox ones), who make up the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish community. The dogma of this religion is appealingly simple: Judaism is tikkun olam, which is social justice, which is liberalism. The Jews are called upon to do no less — and no more — than cultivate a liberal paradise in America.
    In this, liberal Jews have often had the hypocritical backing of the celebrity corps — literati, Hollywood executives, academics, politicians and financiers — who say one thing in public while, in several cases, doing unspeakable things in private.
    But above all, this liberalism — this tikkun olam — teaches that the Jewish People is an outdated and chauvinistic relic, with no need for a nation-state of its own in its ancient homeland. Consequently, Jewish social justice activists help to defame Israel and weaken America’s bond with the Jewish State.

    Have Undocumented Immigrants Killed 63,000 American Citizens Since 11 September 2001?

    snopes


    On 22 June 2018, in the middle of a family separation crisis caused by the Trump administration’s botched “zero tolerance” policy, United States President Donald Trump himself recycled a claim that undocumented immigrants committed an abnormally large number of homicides in the United States.
    “Sixty-three thousand Americans since 9/11 have been killed by illegal aliens,” the president said. “This isn’t a problem that’s going away, it’s getting bigger.”
    Not only is there no evidence for his claim, it would require a seemingly superhuman murder spree by the nation’s roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants.
    The event was held amid a cascade of public outcry against internment camps established by the government for undocumented children, which prompted the Trump administration to quickly change course and order undocumented families to be held together — while seeking the ability to do so indefinitely. But while the president accused reporters of failing to cover this alleged rash of homicides, the numbers do not support this claim.
    According to data provided for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 260,743 homicides in the United States from 2002 through 2016 (the most recent year available.) It thus seems mathematically impossible that undocumented immigrants, who make up roughly 3 percent of the population, would have committed just under a quarter of all homicides in the United States during that time period. The bogus figure appears to have originated in a May 2006 post by Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa complaining about the “Day Without An Immigrant” campaign calling attention to the contributions of immigrants to U.S. community.
    Without undocumented immigrants, he said, no one would smuggle drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border, and non-immigrants would be safer:
    The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.
    A rate of 33 “deaths” per day for the roughly 4.5 years between the 9/11 attacks and the publication of King’s unsubstantiated claim would come out to 48,180 deaths in total, a rate that would far surpass the 63,000 number by 2018 — if it was legitimate.
    Three years later, in 2009, King (who has a history of racist public statements) misrepresented a report from the Government Accountability Office, claiming that 25,064 undocumented immigrants had been arrested for homicides between 2004 and 2008. In fact, the statistic covered the time period between August 1955 and April 2010, a difference of nearly 51 years. The first, fraudulent timeframe would work out to about 17 arrests per day; the real timeframe works out to approximately 1.25 arrests of undocumented people for homicide per day, or 456 arrests per year.
    If we multiply that figure by eighteen just to be generous (11 September 2001 to 22 June 2018), we get a final figure of about 8,218 arrests, as opposed to the faulty metric, which yields a total of around 112,790 homicide arrests in the same timeframe. (We will, for now, ignore the fact that arrests are not the same as convictions, and note that we did not factor in leap days.) So the numbers in the claim fall flat on both the amount of murders committed and the arrests and convictions made in those murders.
    In March 2018 an Arizona woman, Mary Ann Mendoza, reportedly related to the president the claim that “63,000” United States citizens had been killed by undocumented immigrants. Mendoza’s son was killed in 2014 by an undocumented drunk driver.

    Wednesday, June 20, 2018

    trump and his supporters view child separation as a deterrent to illegal immigrants and blackmail to opponents of $6 Bil wall - threaten torture instead


    Since Trump has admitted he hates separating children and is only using it as a deterrent or blackmail against hes opponents

    he needs to be informed it isn't accomplishing either and he needs to up the pressure - perhaps torture or branding or amputation or perhaps hiring pedophiles as border guards