David Cay Johnston on Justice

"Thes... go to the very nature of... America and whether we are a nation of laws... whether elected office is for public service or it permits profiteering."

"In just a third of a century, the widespread liquidity that nourished the economy—reliable streams of cash going to workers and owners alike—has... dried up."

"Of each dollar people earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5¢... the greatest share of income pie since 1929, just before the collapsed into the Great Depression."

"While at my last paper, I won a for exposing so many tax dodges and loopholes that a prominent tax lawyer called me the "de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States."

"Legislatures passed these laws, presidents and governors signed them and the courts have endorsed them. In many cases they effectively gut state constitutional provisions and laws banning gifts to business."

"Trump's private and Justice Department lawyers narrowly define emolument. ...nything short of an flat-out bribe is legal ...so long as the transaction is run through one of the ...companies owned by the president."

"Those organizations that were focused on the New Testament and the idea that you have an obligation to your fellow man and to provide people with a means to interface with government... That's just shriveled away like unions have. ...hat's risen in their place? Corporate America."

"If... immortal, amoral and greed-driven people walked the earth, we would have to rewrite our laws governing property. ...ur new class of immortals could just keep accumulating wealth and power forever. In time they would probably own every... asset on earth worth having. ... immortal being is the modern corporation."

"ssuming that all the... interest on the federal debt is paid, just from the individual income tax, all the income taxes that you pay from January through the end of April, just go to pay interest on the national debt; and since 86% of federal tax revenues come from labor ; that means that we explicitly have a policy now to tax labor to transfer to capital."

"Prior to our Constitutional Bill of Rights... the historic problem for the inconvenient individual was predation by the state. If the king doesn't like you, throw him in, the king wants your daughter when she's a virgin and you don't want to hand her over, cut the guy's throat."

"Lawsuits accusing Trump of violating the Constitution'ss have been filed by attorneys general from sixteen states and by 196 senators and representatives,... a bipartisan ethics watchdog organization called... and a growing list of business owners who compete with Trump hotels and restaurants."

"egislatures have rewritten basic business laws, some whose principles date back thousands of years. Too often the goal has been to thwart competition, artificially inflate prices, hold down wages by decimating unions, reduce worker benefits and... restrict or bar access to the courts by those aggrieved."

"Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas insist that they are "originalists,"... interpreting our Consitution as a document fixed in time. No honest originalist could... have signed on to Citizens United, but intellectually corrupt justices who worship corporatism, disdain the poor and enjoy the perks of power..."

"Usury laws that protected consumers against rapacious lenders existed until 1978. Now they are gone because of a Supreme Court decision. ...ur government has set forth onerous new rules that reward those who prey on the poor. ...These lenders, or their fronts, can now charge rates and impose penalties that were illegal, even criminal, a generation ago."

", which did not pay taxes , owned... and people paid close to $1 billion in their electric rates to cover its taxes. Money that never got to the government... by tax shelters and other devices. When I wrote a story on this on the front page of The New York Times, the wrote a letter... they didn't say this wasn't true. They just said we're doing what the law allows."

"George Will had a column in The Washington Post this week in which he said that the proof that the failed after 50 years was people trusted the government under LBJ and now they don't any more. ... would argue... the facts show just the opposite. People don't trust the government anymore because they recognize it does not work in their interest, it works against their interest..."

"Unlike individuals, who must take responsibility for their conduct, corporations' legal responsibility... has benefited from limits to that responsibility established by law. The rationale... is that people who... build a business would not take the same risks if failure meant they would lose... their houses, cars... and everything else. ...hey can go about their corporate business, creating enterprises and generating wealth."

"As taxpayers we gave one of Warren Buffet's companies, in 2006, an interest-free loan of $665 million dollars, and he only has to pay half of it back 28 years from now. ...Imagine ...you bought a house in 1980 at the price in 1980. Up until now you haven't made any payments on the house, and this year you have to pay half in the... dollars you agreed to back then, no adjustment for inflation. Do you think that alone might make you a wealthy man?"

"Trump bought the Doral with $104.8 million he borrowed from... infamous for laundering money for Russian oligarchs. ...When Trump took office, the Doral was under a foreclosure order. Trump, as he often does, refused to pay contractors in full. ...Most contractors just walk away when Trump refuses to pay... because Trump will spend far more to litigate than the amount in dispute to discourage contractors and small business owners he cheats from suing for what they are due."

"Workers may toil their entire lives, communities may tax themselves to create infrastructure a corporation needs, and vendors may invest their entire fortune to supply the corporation—but none of these parties, Friedman said, has significant legal rights or moral claims. he idea... was not supported by the development of the law, the regulation of business and the advancement of civilization over thousands of years. But... Friedman's ahistorical thinking has come to dominate..."

"The way that the Trump administration is cutting regulations... It's just "Go ahead and pollute. Take the toxic residue from burning coal, and instead of drying it out and putting it in a place where it's unlikely to cause harm, continue to put it into slurries and then toxic ponds next to rivers where we get drinking water." That's not benefiting us. That's simply jacking up the profits of these companies, which by the way, get paid rates under rate regulation, to pay for these costs of cleaning up their mess."

"We are... seeing... failure to enforce the law. I have written for 15 years about a way that real estate in partnerships cheat. It's easy to spot but you have to do the work... The guy who figured it out was given all sorts of awards by the IRS. No one will do it. The governor of New York, who should be in the forefront... because it costs the state as much as $700 million in a peak year, refuses to do this, and... his administration has... literally lied, claiming repeatedly that they're looking for this, but there's no court case of any kind."

"There is a movement to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment. When the US Supreme Court clerk, who was the former president of a railroad, announced that the corporations are people for purposes of defending their property... That makes sense, because a corporation is property. But Chief Justice Rehnquist, in a dissent in a case called Bellotti vs. ...Bank of Boston, was clearly opposed to the idea of giving political rights to corporations. We are now on the verge, in the Hobby Lobby case, of giving religious rights to corporations. Who's a corporation prey to, Mammon? So we've very much veered off from what was intended."

"We decided in 1980 to go down a different path when we elected Ronald Reagan. We have gotten the results that Mr. Reagan said, if you listen to him carefully in 1980, we would get, which is that those people that are wealth holders would realize the income from that wealth, and they have. Their actual tax rates, for people at the very top, are 60% lower than what they paid in the 1960s. But at the same time, by getting rid of unions... by having these "free trade deals," which are really deals to drive down the cost of labor; we have driven down the wages and the salaries of the vast majority of Americans... We have also weakened these environmental laws... that were pretty good. So we've put in place a whole mechanism in which we favor profit over labor. ...When you look at the data you can see it ...Returns to labor in the Federal Reserve data go and returns to capital have been rising, and since 2009 it's like looking at one of those jet fighters going straight up."

"he Democrats, who have not paid attention to their knitting for 40 years, while the Republicans have been building bench strength, passing laws to suppress votes, coming up with laws to throw out votes after they're cast, as we saw in Michigan. The Democrats have to run candidates who are viable. I was sent a news clip by a friend... a couple of interviews of people who want to run for office as Democrats... they were young and they were earnest and... then they got asked questions... hey immediately fell apart because they didn't know anything. They were just like Donald Trump. ...You've got to find and develop real candidates."

"Since the corporate income tax began in 1909, Congress has imposed a penalty tax, currently 15 percent, on excess cash and near-cash... Without such, a corporation could... become a huge tax shelter, withdrawing resources from the economy instead of investing in new plant...equipment... jobs and paying dividends... But President Reagan signed a law that... so long as the money was owned by offshore subsidiaries, American companies could hold unlimited amounts of cash. ...ompanies now siphon profits out of the United States under the guise of... tax deductible expenses..."

"The purposes of our country were written down for us in the Preamble of the Constitution, the justice, the general Welfare with a capital "W", common defense, domestic tranquility, liberties... Nothing in the Preamble talks about getting rich. That's a byproduct of these other things. But we have gotten a distorted view of what's happening, and we also... are now at the point where we have 33 years of evidence that Reaganism produces actually exactly what Ronald Reagan said in 1980, if you listen carefully... It's made the rich richer. Now it's doing it at the expense of the 90%."