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Manhattan Institute one of eight conservative advocacy groups that filed amicus briefs urging the court to hear Moore v US
An influential thinktank closely linked to two billionaires who provided lavish travel gifts to conservative supreme court justices is behind a successful lobbying campaign to get the US high court to take on a case that could protect them and other billionaires from a possible future wealth tax.
The Manhattan Institute was one of eight conservative advocacy groups that filed amicus briefs urging the supreme court to take on Moore v US, a $15,000 tax case that Democrats have warned could permanently “lock in” the right of billionaires to opt out of paying fair taxes.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer is chairman of the Manhattan Institute and Kathy Crow, who is married to real estate mogul Harlan Crow, serves as a trustee of the group. Both have provided two of the justices – Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, respectively – with private travel gifts and have socialised with the judges on lavish vacations, according to reports in ProPublica and other media outlets.
The revelations have stoked serious accusations of ethical and legal violations by the two rightwing justices, who failed to disclose the travel and – in Thomas’s case – hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional gifts from the Crows, including property purchases and private tuition payments for Thomas’s grand nephew.
Uh, ya THINK?
I’m pretty much always aware that we’re governed by what really amounts to a self-reinforcing network of amoral psychopaths, but there are still times when that fact is driven home especially forcefully.
I couldn’t agree with you more - and you stated that so eloquently.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Both have provided two of the justices – Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, respectively – with private travel gifts and have socialised with the judges on lavish vacations, according to reports in ProPublica and other media outlets.
But Alito and Thomas’s dealings with the conservative billionaires have nevertheless raised questions about how the justices’ close ties might influence which cases are taken on by the court.
Charles Moore spent most of his career as a software engineer at Microsoft, where he met one of the future founders of KisanKraft, a company that provides low-cost tools to farmers in India.
The couple enlisted the help of the CEI and one of the most powerful and well-connected law firms in Washington, BakerHostetler, whose clients have included Boeing, ExxonMobil and Major League Baseball, and sued the US government.
He also authored a 2001 book titled Climate of Fear: Why we shouldn’t worry about global warming, which was published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank that also submitted an amicus brief in the Moore case.
The billionaires financing the litigation are the real parties of interest,” said Steven Rosenthal, senior fellow at Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
The original article contains 1,537 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Hey! Anybody looking for that “deep state”? (pointing) it’s right here!
For real, I fully agree.
