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Donald Trump launched into a new tack in his battle with the NFL on Tuesday morning, demanding the league’s “massive tax breaks” be taken away if its players keep protesting during the national anthem. “Why is the NFL getting massive tax breaks while at the same time disrespecting our Anthem, Flag and Country? Change tax law!” Trump tweeted. In another tweet, posted late on Monday evening, Trump had praised Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones for stating that he would not tolerate kneeling while the “Star-Spangled Banner” plays before NFL games. It’s all part of the long-running dispute Trump has been engaged in with the NFL since he told a rally in Alabama on September 22 that NFL players should be “fired” if they knelt during the anthem. The practice has caught on since it was started by Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, at the start of the 2016-17 regular season in protest at police brutality against black people in the U.S. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell called Trump’s comments “divisive,” while Trump has continued to retaliate by taking jabs at the league’s television ratings. On Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence left the game between the Indianapolis Colts and San Francisco 49ers at Lucas Oil Stadium early after around 12 49ers players kneeled for the anthem. Trump said in a tweet later on Sunday evening that he had asked Pence to walk out if more protests occurred. Trump’s latest angle of attack represents a fresh direction for the president; before Tuesday, he had never criticized the league for its tax affairs. And perhaps that should have remained the case. While the league has attracted criticism for using public money for new stadiums—a March 2017 ESPN article said new stadiums and renovations to old ones since 1997 cost the taxpayers $6.7 billion, including the Oakland Raiders’ upcoming transition to Las Vegas, which will come in at almost $1 billion—it has moved in recent years to close up one tax loophole. As fact-checking website Snopes.com explained, the NFL’s tax-exempt status prior to 2015 applied only to the league central office, which handles the administrative side of the game. The 32 teams themselves, private organizations, all pay tax as normal. Anyway, in 2015, the league office voluntarily gave up its tax-exempt status. If Trump was making a point about using taxpayers’ money for shiny new billion-dollar arenas, he might have a point. The NFL may have many questions to answer, but its teams do pay taxes. As The New York Times pointed out, any change to the way the NFL pays tax would be “more about symbolism than impact.” Trump, of course, spent in the region of $250,000 flying Pence to Indianapolis on Sunday, apparently to make a political statement. As Business Insider noted, he also stands accused of wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars for that incident. The president’s latest attack on the NFL was not an entirely successful one. |
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This article first appeared on the American Enterprise Institute site. On September 14 Russia will begin what is likely to be its largest post-Cold War military exercise. Zapad (or West) will take place across the Belarusian border with NATO members Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now Although Russian military and civilian authorities insist that there is nothing for the West to worry about, the confluence of Moscow’s past actions, its current foreign policy, the state of Russia-West relations, the domestic political imperatives of the Putin regime, and its relations with Aleksandr Lukashenko’s Belarus warrants careful watching of the drill. To begin with, there is a lack of clarity about the scope of the Zapad maneuvers, which are to last six days and nights. Russia insists the troops deployed will not exceed 13,000, thus effectively closing the drill to on-the-ground observation by Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) members. Yet, as in the previous Zapad exercises held in 2009 and 2013, the exercises are likely to be accompanied by a host of simultaneously held “snap exercises” (there were eleven such drills in 2016). Today, too, the pre-drill deployments point to far larger contingents over a greater territory than those officially announced. According to Belarusian defense officials, the personnel involved is deployed from the Kola Peninsula near Finland to Kaliningrad, the home of Russia’s most modern Iskander-M short-range missile launching system, which could be armed with both conventional and nuclear warheads. The March 17 2014 caption reads: Armed soldiers without identifying insignia keep guard outside of a Ukrainian military base in the town of Perevevalne near the Crimean city of Simferopol on March 17, 2014 in Perevevalne, Ukraine. Voters on the autonomous Ukrainian peninsular of Crimea voted overwhelmingly yesterday to secede from their country and join Russia. Spencer Platt/Getty The Baltic and Northern Fleets are expected to participate as well, and so is the 1st Guards Tank Army. As a result, US officials expect the total number of troops to reach anywhere from 70,000–100,000, including non-combat troops deployed far from NATO borders. Facing them, along with Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish defense forces, are a total of 4,000 troops in four NATO “ tripwire ” battalion-sized battle groups from Britain, Canada, Germany, and the US. The opaqueness surrounding the drills heightens concerns about Russia’s intention. On two occasions in the past seven years Russian military drills turned out to be forward battle deployments: the Kavkaz exercise in 2008, which became a prelude to the brief war on Georgia, and the large-scale “snap” drill along the Ukrainian border in February 2014, which was followed by the occupation of Crimea. Happening as it is at a time of the worst West-Russia relations since the end of the Cold War — in the aftermath of the diplomatic tit-for-tats between Moscow and Washington, the imposition of new sanctions on Russia by the US Congress, and after NATO has doubled the number of times it has scrambled fighters to respond to Russian aircraft along NATO’s borders from just over 400 in 2015 to nearly 800 in 2016 — the use of Zapad to poke at the NATO’s Eastern flank cannot be excluded. Promising a renewal of the patriotic fervor (and thus his personal popularity), such brinksmanship with the West may also be tempting to Putin in the run-up to the presidential re-election campaign at a time of a stagnant economy and widespread revulsion over government corruption. Finally, Moscow’s growing irritation with the foreign policy of the Belarussian president Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has been trying to navigate between Russia and the EU, and even more so, Putin’s fear of a Minsk version of the Kiev pro-Western Maidan revolution, have had Belarus experts worrying about Russia attempting a regime change. Filled with a considerable potential for unpleasant surprises, “West” is yet another test of the West’s readiness to deal with Russia when the strategic initiative is almost entirely of Moscow’s making. Leon Aron is a resident scholar and the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Tags: remote-access, m2m-connectivity, iiot, industrial-networking, industrial-wireless, m2m-iot |