Category Archives: ethics

Political Donations Received and Returned

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FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried made a number of political donations to Republican and Progressive-Democrat candidates in the 2022 election cycle. FTX has gone into bankruptcy, and Bankman-Fried has related legal problems.

Just the News cited OpenSecrets.org for the following data:

In the House:

65 Democrats received average contributions of $3,758 from FTX
73 House Republicans received average contributions of $3,300

In the Senate side:

24 Democrats received an average of $5,796
20 Republicans received $6,695

Back to the House:

8 Democrats returned their contributions
12 Republicans returned their contributions

The Senate:

2 Democrats returned their contributions
4 Republicans returned their contributions

Here are the percentage figures, since the raw numbers without context could be misleading. In the House:

8 of 65 Democrats returned—12%
12 of 73 Republicans returned—16%

In the Senate:

2 of 24 Democrats returned—17%
4 of 20 Republicans returned—20%

It really is all about the Benjamins. For Progressive-Democrats.

Go figure.

Punishing Success

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Los Angeles has decided that the successful are too successful, and they must be knocked down. To that end, the city’s government has decided to tax the sales proceeds of the wealthy’s homes at 4% on homes sold for $5-$10 million and at 5.5% on homes sold for more than $10 million. This is on top of the real estate brokers’ ordinary 6% fee, and it’s paid by the buyer. Not that that will have any impact on the seller’s ability to sell at a fair price, or anything.

LA isn’t alone in this “mansion tax” move, either. Other jurisdictions, mostly at the State level (it won’t be long before California broadens LA’s move), are doing this, also. They’re all Progressive-Democrat-run, too, all but one of them exclusively so.

  • Connecticut: 2.25% on properties surpassing $2.5 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • District of Columbia: 1.45% on properties sold for $400,000 or more. Progressive-Democrat Governor, City Council
  • Hawaii: Marginal rates ranging from 10% to 20% for estates valued over $5.49 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • New Jersey: 1% on real estate transactions exceeding $1 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • New York: 1% to 3.9% on residential acquisitions of $1 million or more. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • Vermont: 16% on properties valued over $5 million. Republican Governor, Progressive-Democrat Senate, House
  • Washington: Graduated rates starting at 1.28% for properties sold at a minimum of $500,000. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House

And, to repeat,

  • Los Angeles: 4% on homes sold for more than $5-$10 million and 5.5% on homes sold for more than $10 million. Progressive-Democrat Mayor, City Council

This is behavior of the green-eyed jealous politicians of the Progressive-Democratic Party: seizing the produce of success and redistributing it for their own political gain. It’s also just one more incentive for the successful to leave these jurisdictions altogether.

Whine, Whine, Whine

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Chicago’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson has joined the Whiners’ Chorus. Now he’s accusing Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott of “attacking” the United States itself.

We have a governor—a governor—an elected official in the state of Texas, that is placing families on buses without shoes, cold, wet, tired, hungry, afraid, traumatized. And then they come to the city of Chicago where we have homelessness, we have mental health clinics that have been shut down and closed, you have people who are seeking employment.

Leave aside, as Johnson does, the fact that these illegal aliens are volunteers to travel—at Texas’ expense, mind you—to Chicago, and to New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere throughout our nation. Nor are they particularly tired, or cold, or hungry, or traumatized—they’re fed before they get on the bus, and they’re fed on the bus, which itself is warm and the seats sleepable.

The larger, overarching, fact is that Johnson and his cronies in those other cities—Progressive-Democrat Mayors Eric Adams, Karen Bass, et al., are actively inviting, calling come one, come all, those illegal aliens into their cities by loudly proclaiming them to be sanctuary for all illegal aliens. Even at that, the numbers of illegal aliens that these sanctuary cities receive over a period of months is what Texas’ (and Arizona’s) border towns—not even cities, many of them—receive in the course of a day or two to a week.

If Johnson and his were serious about their cities’ claimed level of ability to deal with what they have, with the influx of illegals overlaid, they’d take at least a first step and stop being sanctuaries and instead help get the for illegals deported.

Johnson, in particular, seems to have joined the Let’s Go Brandon chorale.

Eric Adams Has Given Away the Left’s Game

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New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams says he’s down with raising New Yorker’s already sky high taxes along with firing city employees, including cops—[Asked “where the layoffs would begin,” Adams only repeated, “Everything’s on the table”]—and he’s blaming the Federal government for his budget failures. His statement on that last is the tell-all:

Our insurance policy was the federal government. They’re not paying us[.]

It doesn’t get any clearer than this.

Medical Marijuana

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Amid the long and still growing controversy and disconnect between States’ handling of marijuana—viz., State level legalization of marijuana sales both for recreational and medicinal purposes—and Federal law maintaining marijuana trafficking as illegal, one aspect of that controversy keeps getting overlooked.

States often rationalize their legalization of marijuana with the claim that medicinal marijuana is good. This overlooks the fact that marijuana has no more medicinal value than does the opium poppy. There is a growing body of anecdotes that indicate that there can be medicinal value from some of the chemicals in marijuana, just as there is established medical value in some of the chemicals, viz., morphine and codeine, in the opium poppy.

There also, though, is a growing body of evidence that uncontrolled use of marijuana is physiologically and mentally damaging to the users as they become increasingly dependent—emotionally as well as physiologically—on the plant’s drugs. Further, chronic use of the plant appears to lead to damage to still-developing brains (which development continues into a person’s mid-twenties) and to slower developing damage to mature brains.

What really needs to happen is research into marijuana to identify the chemicals and combinations of chemicals in marijuana, if any, that do have medicinal value. Once that research has been done, and specific chemicals’/chemical combinations’ medical value established, then marijuana growing should be licensed just as is opium poppy growing for the medicinal value of some of its chemicals. The marijuana chemicals/combinations with medical value then should be marketable as prescription drugs for particular medical uses, just as poppies’ prescription-required drugs, are.