Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
If Trump were to simply ignore AG James' subpoena and drag things out, it would cost him around $3.6 million a year: that's chump change for a billionaire oligarch
Last Thursday New York's Attorney General Leticia James asked a state judge to fine Donald Trump $10,000-a-day until he complies with a subpoena from last December requiring him to turn over documents relating to the development of a fancy estate in upstate New York. The deadline had been March 3rd, but Trump is still procrastinating.
Ten thousand dollars a day seems like a lot of money to most of us, but consider Donald Trump's situation: he has billions, and access to billions more through friends he made when president.
The dictator of Saudi Arabia, for example, just apparently paid-off Trump's son-in-law to the tune of $2 billion, as documented by Judd Legum at Popular.info. Legum argues the money was given to Kushner for engineering a coverup of MBS's murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the transfer - against the wishes of Congress, which Trump vetoed - of millions in weaponry the Saudis could us in their brutal war against Yemen.
If Trump were to simply ignore AG James' subpoena and drag things out, it would cost him around $3.6 million a year: that's chump change for a billionaire oligarch like him. He wouldn't even notice it.
As Andrea Junker notes on Twitter:
I've said it once, and I'll say it a thousand times: If the penalty for breaking a law is a fine, then that law only exists for the poor.April 13th 2022
2,460 Retweets11,842 LikesFrom traffic tickets to civil penalties and fines, America generally runs a flat-rate system. And, just like a flat-tax system, a flat-rate-for-all-fines system inconveniences the middle class, deeply wounds the poor, and is meaningless to the morbidly rich.
Not every country counts fines this way. Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland and France all have systems where rich people pay higher fines than the poor or middle class; Finland's was first introduced in 1921.
Every now and then one of those fines catches American media's attention and provokes a few days of discussion, like when Finnish multimillionaire Reima Kuisla was hit with a roughly $60,000 fine for going 64 MPH in a 50 MPH speed zone.
But what are called "day fines" in Europe, scaled to a portion of a person's daily income, have never caught on here in America.
It's not that they'd be considered unconstitutional: in 2018 the University of Chicago Law Review published an in-depth analysis of the system of day fines and concluded that it would almost certainly pass the test of constitutionality, barring a corrupted court.
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