I HAVE A CEMETERY QUESTION

 

Ivana rests "in the rough" at Donald's NJ golf property 

Question: With the burial of Donald Trump’s ex-wife at his golf property in New Jersey, has that property technically become a "cemetery"? Here's why I'm asking:

According to NJ law, "cemetery companies" are tax exempt.

Specifically, “Cemetery company” means any individual, corporation, partnership, association, or other public or private entity which owns, operates, controls, or manages land or places used or dedicated for use for burial of human remains or disposition of cremated human remains, including a crematory located on dedicated cemetery property.

Cemetery companies are prohibited from engaging in any of the following activities:

• Manufacture or sale of vaults, private mausoleums, monuments, markers, or bronze memorials

• Conduct of any funeral home or the business or profession of mortuary science

(I don’t see anything there about golfing).

Exemptions:

The Act relieves cemetery companies from the payment of:

• Real Property Taxes on lands dedicated to cemetery purposes;

• Income Taxes;

• Sales and Use Taxes; Rev. 5/17 Publication ANJ–22 About New Jersey Taxes: Cemeteries, Funerals and NJ Taxes

• Business Taxes; and 

• Inheritance Taxes. 

Cemetery property is exempt from sale for collection of judgments. Cemetery trust funds and trust income are exempt from tax and exempt from sale or seizure for collection of judgments against the cemetery company.

Data collected from the NJ State Division of Taxation.

 

CAPITULATION

 

With what he may have thought was a harmless and indifferent gesture, US President Joe Biden this past week issued a powerful message not only to Saudi Arabia but also to human rights advocates everywhere: When it comes to the choice between defense of human rights, free speech and democracy or cheap fuel for America’s gas-guzzling SUVs, we’ll take cheap gas.

Murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi

There can be little doubt that when Biden had to confront the inevitable photo op with the ruthless Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, it was an embarrassing moment. It looked way too much like what it was—humiliation, desperation, the flailing of a drowning man. 

After all, this was the guy whom Biden had promised in fiery campaign speeches a couple of years ago that he was going to hold to account and shun as “the pariah that he is.”  But with Putin’s war in Ukraine turning the oil market head over heels, and soaring gasoline prices at home fueling nearly double-digit inflation and inversely scuttling the president’s popularity ratings on all fronts, the question Biden probably asked himself was, as the BBC’s veteran worldwide correspondent John Simpson quipped, “Who has a lot of oil? Exactly!”  

While the president would share a warm handshake with Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, he made sure that it was clear that MBS only merited a quick fist-bump. One wonders if this was supposed to allay the concerns of the liberals who had voted for him or to have prompted the international community and human rights activists to say, “Ha, see there, fist-bump. I guess Biden showed him!” Because if that was supposed to be the message, it didn’t take. The word that more likely seems to have been the first to come to mind was “capitulation” rather than scorn.

The politically costly fist-bump

In the lead-up to this unfortunate meeting, Biden’s West Wing had indicated he might not meet at all with MBS and would instead only officially meet with the king. But too many foreign affairs experts made it clear that if that was the plan, he might as well stay home, because the cock who currently rules the roost in Saudi Arabia is the crown prince. The king, they pointed out, is a mere figurehead for life, with no real power to decide anything. If you want to talk to the Saudis, you can’t avoid talking to MBS, because Saudi Arabia is a one-man show.

Which is precisely the point about the murder of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi. Nothing of consequence happens in the Saudi regime without the knowledge and complicity of MBS. To believe the official story of the Saudi government that the murder was committed by rogue outliers without the crown prince’s knowledge is to believe in fairytales—especially since the grisly assassination took place within the premises of a Saudi diplomatic mission.

For anyone who might need to refresh their memory regarding this major international incident, here’s a brief summary of the facts. Jamal Khashoggi was a high-profile Saudi dissident, journalist and author, who had long campaigned against the bloody regime, not as a radical, but as a moderate who was willing to advocate gradual democratic improvement without pushing for the overthrow of the Saudi government. Prior to his work as a columnist for the Washington Post’s Middle East Eye section, Khashoggi had served briefly as the editor of Al Watan, a Saudi newspaper that he sought to mold into a platform for progressives seeking respect for human rights and a more democratic opening. He was a particularly strong advocate of equal rights for women in his country. But his trenchant opposition to the regime’s domestic policies caused him to be sacked.

No fist-bump for the Saudi king.

After the Saudi regime banned him from Twitter in 2017 for his criticism of the brutal policies supported by the king and crown prince, Khashoggi had reason to believe that his life was in danger and in September of that year, he left Saudi Arabia for self-imposed exile in the US. While in exile, besides working for the Washington Post, he also became general manager and editor-in-chief at the Al-Arab News Channel, and continued to be a powerful voice for democratic change in his native country.

He was, additionally, a staunch critic of the war on Yemen waged by Saudi Arabia with US backing, which had fostered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Of that war, he once wrote: “The longer this cruel war lasts in Yemen, the more permanent the damage will be. The people of Yemen will be busy fighting poverty, cholera and water scarcity and rebuilding their country. The crown prince must bring an end to the violence…Saudi Arabia's crown prince must restore dignity to his country by ending Yemen's cruel war.”

On October 2, 2018, the fifty-nine-year-old journalist was happily planning his upcoming marriage to then thirty-six-year-old Hatice Cengiz of Turkey. On that date, Khashoggi went to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul to request some documentation he would need for his marriage. CCTV footage recorded him entering the embassy, but he was never recorded coming out. Later investigation revealed that the journalist had been brutally murdered inside the premises of the diplomatic mission and his body dismembered and removed to another location.

After releasing a series of thin and conflicting stories to try to cover up the heinous crime, the Saudi government eventually admitted that the murder had occurred but has maintained ever since that it was carried out without the crown prince’s involvement or knowledge. This, despite the fact that in 2017, MBS had told another Saudi journalist that Khashoggi's work was tarnishing his image, and that he would go after Khashoggi “with a bullet.”

Less than two months before his murder, Khashoggi wrote, “Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince…is signaling that any open opposition to Saudi domestic policies...is intolerable." As an example of this repressive policy, he pointed to government measures “…as egregious as the punitive arrests of reform-seeking Saudi women.” He wrote that “while MBS is right to free Saudi Arabia from ultra-conservative religious forces, he is wrong to advance a new radicalism that, while seemingly more liberal and appealing to the West, is just as intolerant of dissent.” Khashoggi went on to write: “MBS's rash actions are deepening tensions and undermining the security of the Gulf States and the region as a whole.”

Following careful investigation, the CIA has concluded that there is no doubt that Khashoggi’s assassination was on orders from MBS and that the crown prince had reached across international borders to carry it out, sending a hit squad of more than a dozen agents to murder the journalist in Turkey and make his body disappear. This is consistent with the fact that no few of the regime’s other opponents have simply disappeared without a trace.

Despite President Biden’s initial promises to hold MBS and Saudi Arabia to account for the murder and for the generally ruthless policies of the regime, and in spite of repeated calls from human rights advocates and liberal politicians for the severing of diplomatic ties with the Saudi regime, this past week’s meeting with the crown prince rendered his good intentions moot. Furthermore, that single meeting overshadowed Biden’s entire Middle East tour, eclipsing everything else, which, even without the MBS factor, didn’t go well.

To wit, besides fist-bumping his way into one of the still most burning human rights controversies of today, sparking the outrage of every human rights group at home and abroad that was looking to this administration to restore the basic decency unceremoniously trashed during the Trump presidency, he failed to get anything significant in return. There is no real evidence to suggest that Saudi Arabia has the installed capacity to significantly increase its production, or that, like the rest of the international oil cartel, it would be willing to do anything that might spark a drastic decrease in the price of oil. And the trip rendered no immediate solution to high fuel prices in the rest of the region either.

While Biden managed to give the appearance of inching bitter enemies Saudi Arabia and Israel somewhat closer together, there’s no reason to believe that MBS will risk major conservative opposition at home to appease Washington and Tel Aviv, nor is there any guarantee that the right-wing Netanyahu camp won’t return to power in Israel and undo any progress made. Furthermore, while he did his best to appear tough on Iran, he simultaneously said that his administration still believed that diplomacy was the answer and made clear his commitment to piecing the Iran nuclear accord achieved under the Obama administration back together. While that was sure to please those of us who believe that the way to deal with Iran is by bringing it back into the concert of nations, it is a policy that is unlikely to garner any support whatsoever after the mid-term elections when Democrats may very well lose their tenuous hold on Congress.

To add insult to injury, while he was touring the Middle East, Biden was once again blindsided by West Virginia senator and Democratic outlier Joe Manchin, who again threw the president’s domestic policy plans into utter chaos.

So what could the US president possibly have to gain from capitulating to MBS? The answer is “nothing,” and his advisers should have made him aware of that fact. Because by fist-bumping with a ruthless murderer, the only thing the president has earned is the contempt of the international human rights community and the further erosion of his support among liberal Democrats.

FOURTH OF JULY REFLECTIONS

 

I wanted to wish all of my fellow Americans a happy Fourth of July yesterday…but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Couldn’t muster any happiness about what’s happening in my native country today. It’s all just too grim.

Maybe it’s the weather. Here in Patagonia, it’s raining and snowing, cold and dark. It’s more fitting of the state of my nation—once the beacon of democracy, the temple of individual rights—than a sunny day full of brass bands, fireworks, picnics and beer.

But then again, if we give any thought at all to the actual significance of the Fourth of July, we Americans—at least every small-d democrat among us—should have been in mourning yesterday. Not for our origins, which were noble, but for what we’ve lost along the way, and especially what we’ve lost in the last five and a half years.

I would like to say—have wanted to say since January 20, 2020—not to worry. That things can only get better. But that appears to be a fatuous lie. Indeed, in terms of freedom, civil rights and justice, we are abysmally worse off than we were just last month. With the far-right in Congress throwing their full support behind an insurrection that—let’s stop pussyfooting around and call it like it is—sought to overthrow the government of the United States and perpetuate the reign of an autocrat who had clearly lost a free and fair election, and with that self-same autocrat refusing for the first time in US history to leave office peacefully after his election defeat, the Supreme Court was the last bastion standing against this indubitable war on democracy and what used to be known as “The American Way”. But in the last days of June before the Fourth of July recess, that ship clearly sailed as well.

Events in that democratic bloodbath at the Supreme Court in the fateful last days in June included a judicial restructuring that very apparently sought to bolster the ambitions of one segment of the population while debilitating the rights of another. In the process, the power of the Court—like the GOP before it—was unmistakably usurped by the far right, effectively sidelining the normally moderating influence of the chief justice. That institution’s erstwhile principles of respect for settled judicial precedent when it favors individual freedoms, as well as for legally acquired rights, were cavalierly tossed out the window.

This was the intended mission that former President Donald Trump—and the major party that he managed in a few short years to take over through a veritable political reign of terror—hoped the three justices they named to the Court would take up. They haven’t been disappointed. And those newly appointed justices have found an echo for their extreme beliefs in senior Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who was previously a sort of judicial lone wolf in his far-right opinions.

In the latter days of June, and in practically one fell swoop, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down one of the most essential of women’s civil rights—the right to autonomy over their own bodies and their own destiny. This was a hard-fought right that had been federal law in the United States for very nearly a half-century.

With the exception of the right to vote, which women didn’t enjoy for the first time until 1920, and which was a mere first small step in their equal rights struggle that continues today, Roe v Wade was arguably the most consequential decision in favor or women’s rights in the history of the United States. It eschewed the political and religious strictures that had been imposed on women since the nation’s founding (a sort of Christian “sharia law” that precluded a woman’s right to corporeal autonomy), and upheld the right of women to invoke the principle of “my body, my choice.”

Coco Das, an organizer with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, put it succinctly when she told The Guardian, “This decision not only goes against the will of the people—the majority of people support abortion rights, legal abortion—it goes against modern progress, the progress of history.” Das describe the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v Wade as being “based on biblical literalism, a fundamentalist Christian fanatical movement.” As I said before, the equivalent of Christian “sharia law”. She added that the Court’s so-called “conservative” majority are “really trying to transform (American) society to one that’s dominated on the basis of white supremacy, male supremacy, Christian supremacy. It’s very dangerous. Without the right to abortion, women can’t be free, and if women aren’t free, nobody’s free.”

But the Court didn’t stop there in its June onslaught in favor of the extreme right. Its far-right justices also ruled in majority decisions against states’ rights when it comes to arms control, against environmental protection, against Native tribal law, and against the founding constitutional principle of separation of Church and State.  

The Court ruled to disallow a 1911 New York state gun law that imposed strict restrictions on carrying firearms outside the home. The decision, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, came halfway through a year in which the US has suffered a record three hundred nine mass shooting incidents in which two hundred twenty people have died. In his opinion, echoed by the “conservative” Court majority, Justice Thomas posited that New York laws that recognized people’s right to keep guns in their homes, but restricted the right to carry them freely in the street without good cause violated the “right to bear arms” embodied in the Second Amendment.

The Court also voted in favor of a former high school football coach who was suspended for praying with athletes on the field after games, a practice which imposes religious manifestations on secular public school activities and flies in the face of a sixty-year-old precedent indicating that imposing prayer of any kind on public school children violates their First Amendment right to freedom of religion. The justices also rejected a Maine law that prohibited religious schools from drawing tuition aid from public funds. In her dissent against this measure, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.” 

And finally, the Court also in June moved against a long-held precedent of tribal law on Native land and curbed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to pursue major polluters. The rightist majority decided that, from now on, state prosecutors will be able to pursue criminal cases for crimes perpetrated by non-Native persons against Native persons on tribal land—a decision which, according to Cherokee Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr, signifies that “the US Supreme Court (has) ruled against legal precedent and (against) the basic principles of congressional authority and Indian law.” The next day, the Court decided to support litigation brought by West Virginia that insisted the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be restricted in its regulation of planet-heating gasses from the energy industry.

Regarding this last measure, former New York Mayor and current special envoy to the UN Michael Bloomberg said, “The decision to side with polluters over the public will cost American lives and cause an enormous amount of preventable suffering, with the biggest burden falling on low-income communities and communities of color.” 

Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization’s center on Global Health Law made a realistic assessment of the current situation in the US when he said, “We’re absolutely in a constitutional crisis. And our democracy is now one of the most fragile democracies among our peer nations. We haven’t fallen over the cliff—we still abide by the rule of law, more or less, and still have elections, more or less—but the terms of our democracy have really been eviscerated by the Supreme Court.”

This is not a conspiracy theory. The lines of what’s happening have been sharply drawn. Never, since the Civil War, has the United States been so deeply divided, or so in danger of democratic dissolution. To my mind, then, this year’s Fourth of July was the saddest in all of my seventy-two years. I’m fervently hoping that better, more democratic times lie ahead, but I won’t hold my breath while I wait.