The Downward Spiral of an Unwell Mind

Update: Many thanks to Tengrain for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Stay safe this Thanksgiving season and remember to avoid turkey drops around the Cincinnati metro...

As a follow-up to the earlier observations about the overwhelming Blue Wave election cycle a few weeks back, there's been more stories in a number of Beltway Media outlets about donald trump's overall behavior since then.

None of it looks good. (via Elyse Wanshel at HuffPost)

On Thursday’s episode of Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker’s podcast, the comedians compared the president to his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, while discussing Trump’s cognitive state.

“You think he’s getting dementia?” McCusker asked his co-host Gillis about Trump.

“I mean, I don’t know. He just seems a little slower than usual,” Gillis responded. “There’s speculation that T-Dog might be rocking Biden brains,” McCusker added.

“He’s definitely not at Biden brains yet,” Gillis replied. “But he’s circling the drain...”

The comedians’ remarks about Trump were prompted amid a longer conversation regarding the president telling Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey to be “quiet, piggy” onboard Air Force One earlier this week. Trump said this to Lucey after she asked him a question about the Jeffrey Epstein files...

Regarding trump's insulting behavior last Friday, Rachel Leingang at The Guardian noted how the response outpaced the mainstream media's tepid underplaying of it:

It wasn’t the first time – not even the hundredth time – the US president has attacked the media. And it’s hard for any storyline to break through the administration’s “flood the zone” strategy, much less one like this. Nothing seems to stick. But the “quiet, piggy” clip has taken off, several days after the admonishment occurred on Air Force One last Friday, and without much help from the media itself...

Trump is going through a string of losses: Democrats dominating in off-year elections, having to reverse course on the Epstein files, Republicans refusing to get rid of the filibuster to end the shutdown, a faltering economy. There’s a possibility that he’s losing his air of impenetrability, and his grip on the right could maybe, just maybe, be loosening.

The anger he displayed in the clip could be a sign of someone on the back foot, overreacting to a question Bloomberg correspondent Catherine Lucey was asking about why Trump was fighting against releasing the Epstein files “if there’s nothing incriminating in the files”. The files related to the child sexual abuser released so far by Congress show that Epstein communicated regularly, and derogatorily, about women with a host of prominent friends...

It's not so much that trump was losing control of keeping the Epstein scandal under a tighter wrap. It's not so much that trump is walking back some of his beloved tariffs as their impact on goods worsened the economy for most Americans. It's not so much that trump is angry with the legal system pushing back against his deportation agenda, against his eagerness to deploy troops into our own cities, and against his attempts to charge his perceived enemies - such as former FBI Director James Comey - that are falling apart due to prosecutorial screw-ups (serving his whims, no less). 

It's that there's this unsettling realization that everything in TrumpWorld (tm) is falling apart, and breaking into pieces faster than anyone thought it would (via Kyle Cheney at Politico):

But the extraordinary rebukes and headwinds the president is now facing — much of it from within his own party — are revealing a GOP beginning to reckon with a post-Trump future. That dynamic crystallized after voters surged to the polls to support Democratic candidates for statewide races in New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia and Pennsylvania, shattering expectations of close contests and signaling that even Trump can’t defy political gravity forever.

Trump has spent the days since recycling old grievances, berating members of his own party and choosing sides in a burgeoning intra-MAGA debate about antisemitism and bigotry within the GOP coalition...

A year ago, the idea that a Republican-led Congress would vote overwhelmingly in favor of anything Trump opposed would have been fanciful. Enter the Epstein files.

Trump’s coalition has long viewed the FBI’s trove of records related to the late convicted sex offender and disgraced international power broker to be a holy grail of sorts, one that could shed light on a grander sex trafficking conspiracy implicating world leaders and politicians. But Trump, a longtime associate of Epstein’s until they fell out more than a decade ago, spent the summer leaning on congressional Republicans to cease their search for records. Trump has denied wrongdoing and no evidence has suggested he took part in Epstein’s trafficking operation...

The problems with trump's denials are 1) There is too much physical and eyewitness evidence that showed trump and Epstein close enough for trump to be aware of - and revel in - the shocking number of young girls in those circles; 2) trump himself expressed far too often an "appreciation" for young women that included allegations he spied on Miss Teen contestants in their dressing rooms; and 3) the reality now established that Mr. "Grab 'Em By the Pussy" is a court-confirmed sexual predator with dozens of other sexual assault claims still out there.

That trump used the Epstein scandal in the 2024 campaign to attack Democrats was just another brazen Deflection strategy that the Far Right have perfected: Accuse the Democrats of committing those crimes you yourself are committing, and turn that weakness into a strength. But trump promised to "expose the truth" about Epstein's sex trafficking of girls to the one group - his own QAnon conspiracy base - he shouldn't have, and they wanted trump to fulfill that once he got back into the White House. Problem was, trump's solution wasn't to release more documents but rehash the ones already released and pretend that was it... which only made things look worse for him and his lackeys for "covering up".

trump's attempts to control that narrative - one that kept painting him and his Republican allies as "pro-Sex Offender" - kept failing, because once his gaslighting fails he's got nothing else to go by:

What happened next was perhaps the most stinging intra-party rebuke of Trump’s presidency. Trump tried and failed to pressure Republican lawmakers to pull the plug on a vote demanding the Justice Department turn over the full library of Epstein files. An intense pressure campaign against Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) in particular went nowhere.

The fallout also claimed the relationship of Trump and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose refusal to flinch led Trump to brand her a “traitor” and attempt to turn his coalition against her. Greene has responded by saying Trump’s attacks have endangered her life...

While trump's press people are defending him for "his honesty and transparency" nobody's going to forget how trump fought this for months. And no amount of scrubbing the files before release is going to hide the reality that trump and Epstein were two peas in the same vulgar pod.

Trump’s inability to cajole Congress into his preferred course of action on the Epstein files came at virtually the same time the president and his allies failed to move Indiana Republicans to redraw their congressional boundaries to net Republicans another seat in the 2026 midterms.

Trump had been pressing for a Hoosier redistricting measure for months, but state GOP leaders signaled they simply lacked the votes to make it a reality, drawing a threat from Trump to endorse some Republicans’ primary challengers. Countermeasures by Democrats in Virginia and California could make Trump’s nationwide push a wash.

It's not helping trump that the earlier successful attempt to gerrymander Texas - on trump's public orders - is falling apart in the courts as well. trump's inability to win in the courts is hurting him on other key issues like his beloved tariffs policy:

Trump has long proclaimed that wielding tariffs against foreign governments is the key to negotiating favorable trade deals. Never mind that business and Republican orthodoxy has long considered tariffs as a backdoor tax on Americans.

But the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of Trump’s approach, with justices he appointed sharply questioning whether the president can leverage emergency powers to tariff foreign governments at will. By all accounts, the argument was a drubbing for Trump’s side. And the president seemed to discover that reality when he vented at the court in a pair of Truth Social posts last week.

It’s folly to predict how the high court will rule, even when the justices send clear signals during the arguments. But Trump appears to be bracing for defeat that could have devastating consequences for his economic agenda. His administration has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of tariffs to the recent spate of trade deals he’s made around the world.

trump arguably can craft economic / trade deals across the globe without the threat or use of tariffs anyway. What's hurting him is how he worships the idea of tariffs: trump genuinely believes tariffs can work, and that he needs them as tools to bully / enforce his will upon others. Of any potential legal defeats trump is facing in the White House, this could well be the one that angers him the most.

It's that anger - that rage trump carries with a scowl and a sneer, always driven by slights imagined and real, the willingness to lash out in public without concern or civility, the open cruelty towards those he views (Women, Blacks, poor) his lessers - that's troubling. trump's never had much self-control over his Id, his narcissistic drive to humiliate others, even during his first tenure as President National Destroyer of Norms and the Rule of Law. Five years later, he's gotten older and gotten worse (via Tom Nichols at the Atlantic):

Presidents often lose control over their agenda, or the policy process, or pieces of legislation. Sometimes, they even lose control of their party. But Donald Trump seems to have lost control over the one thing every person, and especially those with immense power, should always maintain control over: himself. Yesterday the president called for the arrest and execution of elected American officials for the crime—as he sees it—of fidelity to the Constitution.

It would be easy merely to note, yet again, that the president is a depraved man and a menace to the American system of government. As remarkable as it is to say it, however, the outbursts of this past week are different, and were likely triggered by Trump’s panic over the release of files about his former friend, the dead sex offender Jeffery Epstein. No one should treat this new phase in the president’s aggression against democracy as just another episode in the Trump reality show...

The president was already showing strain before his attack on the legislators. Last Friday, he lashed out at a female journalist who asked about the Epstein files, calling her “piggy.” (Trump seems to revel in getting away with speaking to women as president in ways that would land him on the sidewalk back in Queens.) On Tuesday, as he sat next to the Saudi crown prince, a man credibly accused by U.S. intelligence of murdering an American journalist, he lashed out at yet another female reporter: He called Mary Bruce of ABC “insubordinate”—a rather telling choice of words—and threatened to use the FCC to attack her network. Tuesday, of course, was the day the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House by a vote of 427–1. The next day, it passed the Senate by unanimous consent, and a humiliated Trump signed the bill into law.

Yesterday, Trump seemed to lose the last bit of his grip on his emotions as he fired off a fusillade of Truth Social posts. (“Trump must not have slept well Wednesday night,” Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger of The Bulwark observed today.) “This is really bad,” the president wrote, “and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???”

“Lock them up” is a favorite Trump chant, but he did not end with this classic demand. He went on: “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand - We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.” The charge, according to the chief executive? “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He also reposted a comment that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

Anyone with a basic understanding of U.S. history would remember George Washington never hanged political opponents: when he was rebuffed by the Senate the one time he visited Congress, Washington merely stormed out and swore to never go back. But this is trump raging at us today: Terrible at history, and desperate to lie that other great figures in history would do what he'd want to do.

Trump’s posts risk putting the lives of American lawmakers in danger, and he almost certainly knows it. Many people who have publicly criticized the president have found themselves getting death threats from his most fervid followers. (Like many Trump-critical writers, I started getting them years ago.) As Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former MAGA doyenne from Georgia whom Trump has now marked as a heretic, wrote on X last week, “A hot bed of threats against me are being fueled and egged on by the most powerful man in the world.” Senator Elissa Slotkin revealed that she is now traveling with a security detail because of what she called “a huge spike” in threats that came to her office after Trump’s eruption yesterday.

This is the same trump who stirred up MAGA supporters to riot at the Capitol on January 6th, the event that trump and his lackeys would like to erase from history, but an act of violence that trump himself would love to revisit on the nation again and again.

A lot of this turns back on that earlier observation from the podcast bros openly wondering "is trump falling into dementia?" It's a serious concern, and it's one a lot of Biden supporters shouted back at the media when they went after Joe for his slowed delivery of speeches and lapse of memory. trump wasn't that much younger than Biden, and in spite of all the public announcements that trump is the "fittest smartest human being of all time" (uh, no) a lot of people could see by 2024 he'd gotten more unsteady on his feet and more prone to brain farts on stage.

There's been more speculation than usual in the past few months that there's serious health concerns: a questionable MRI exam six months after getting one; a missing weekend where trump came back with odd bruising on his hands; trump wandering away during a visit to Japan; falling asleep during an Oval Office presentation, during which someone else collapsed and trump failed to take notice of it at all.

Far be it to speculate or cast rumors, but there is too much growing evidence that trump's questionable lifelong habits - and time itself - is racing up to claim his ticket. It doesn't help that a number of actions trump is ordering on the hurry - such as bulldozing down the East Wing to build his own ballroom, or the insistence of getting a Peace Prize in spite of his bullying tactics, or the release of a new dollar coin (which historically never worked out for Americans) with HIS face on it - a blatant middle finger to the unwritten rule to avoid putting a living person on American money - are obvious clues that he wants to enjoy all of this - fake symbols of his "greatness" - before he no longer can.

You can feel a sense of panic, of things not going well behind the scenes, with this administration this time around. More than just the level of idiocy and ineptitude from the actions they've taken to break the Constitution and the nation for their own interests.

It doesn't help that as I'm typing this, trump's Defense Dept (fuck the name change, Pete) is staging naval and air maneuvers off the coast of Venezuela. They're making more public calls to strike drug cartel locations - not just Venezuela but also Mexico - as part of an "anti-terrorist" campaign that they can't prove. Like as though trump wants a military victory and another half-assed parade before his mind gives out altogether.

And nobody in a position to do anything about it - not the Democrats because they're out of power, but the Republicans in Congress and in the Cabinet - will lift a finger, because they dare not face the rage of a rabid MAGA base. They're perfectly content to let this farce play out, and carve out whatever they can get in the ensuing chaos.

Stay safe, America. Keep protesting in the streets against trump's war on anyone dark-skinned. But be ready for the craziness to hit DEFCON-1 sooner than expected.

In The Matter of Allegations Relating to Gaetz

Update: Io Saturnalia to Steve In Manhattan for tagging this article for Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. I hope everyone's safe and healthy and enjoying whatever there is of the holiday spirit. Except for Matt Gaetz. I hope he rots.

I need to get back into the blogging mindset, and what better way to get at it than to report on the nastiness of Florida's Worst Scuzzbucket (AKA Matt Gaetz)?

After all the storm and fury over the House Ethics' investigation into his misconduct with underage women - where the House voted to suppress the committee's report while trump was offering Gaetz control of the Justice Department, all of it rendered moot when Gaetz dropped out after a disastrous meeting with angry Senators poised to deny him the post - the committee decided to leak that report this week anyway.

Going by the summary, here are the things that Gaetz did that crossed a whole bunch of lines (skip to page two):

In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following:

• From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him.

• In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.

• During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.

• Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.

• In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.

• Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.

• Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.

Based on the above, the Committee concluded there was substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.

This is the stuff that the House Ethics committee uncovered in spite of a Justice Department's investigation into Gaetz's criminal behavior back in 2021 that ended up going nowhere. The DOJ argued at the time that they couldn't proceed to criminal charges on Gaetz because their witnesses were either unreliable on the stand or unwilling to testify. You can see that as well in the committee's work where most of the teenage girls claimed their Fifth Amendment rights to avoid self-incrimination, but even then the congresscritters and their staffs were able to put the pieces together that would have made a legitimate criminal case. Goddamn.

One of the horrifying elements of these reports is how much of Gaetz's misconduct was openly known. Not so much the prostitution, but his eagerness to sex women far younger than his own age range and his often drunken (now allegedly drugged) state of mind. Stories were rife about fellow legislators at both the state house and congressional levels how Gaetz would brag about and share pictures of his sexual exploits in the public forums. For all that his fellow congresscritters were bothered by his vulgarity, none of them cared enough to stop him until his business buddy Joel Greenberg got caught and revealed the nastier stuff hiding under the Florida GOP's foundations. 

While a solid number of our Republican elected officials DO care about their own personal conduct and ethics, they do happily turn a blind eye to a lot of this bad behavior because of two reasons: Some of them fear "rocking the boat" and disrupting their party's access to power; and Some of them honestly don't see the harm of sexually exploiting / abusing young women - even underage - because their own conservative philosophy - that women and the young are not part of their elite status and thus exploitable by their laws - allows it.

Granted, Democrats in power get caught in their own sex scandals and misconduct towards young women as well, but on this scale? With this level of disdain and disregard that Gaetz kept displaying towards his targets? You can feel from just reading the report the contempt he had, the lack of emotional connection to most of the girls he manhandled.

When you expand your view to examine the sexual misconduct we've seen over the years, you should notice that when it comes to Republican sex scandals there's an open display of misogyny and toxic masculinity driving most of that behavior. It's at a point where a more nonpartisan government would require full drug testing and ID checks of women under 40 at every Republican-based country club and convention gatherings just to make sure they're not violating laws.

And we STILL haven't seen a full accounting of Jeffrey Epstein's Client List containing the names of Men Of Power - both Republican and Democrat and CEO billionaire alike - who "flew the Lolita Express" engaging in sexual misconduct with seriously underaged girls.

Do us a huge favor, Joe Biden: Just before you leave office this January 20th 2025 PLEASE release the Epstein Client List (redacting the names of victims ONLY) not only to the general public but to every law enforcement agency on the planet.

Women remain abused as long as Men of Power retain that power to abuse them. THIS NEEDS TO END.

And ship Gaetz to the nearest prison for breaking drug use and statutory rape laws, please and thanks this Saturnalia season.

The Little Risks in Indicting trump

I went home with the waitress, the way I always do/
How was I to know, she was with the Russians, too?/

I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk/
Send lawyers guns and money, dad, get me out of this!
- "Lawyers Guns and Money," Warren Zevon

So we'll just get straight to the facts.

Here's what the Manhattan District Attorney filed against donald trump in court this Tuesday April 4th. It ended up as 34 separate counts of Falsifying Business Records, bumped up to felony charges linked to "other crimes" which were implied to be related either to trump's tax records or to his 2016 Presidential campaign (that a straight-up Conspiracy charge wasn't added to the indictment threw a couple of observers off).

Here's a little bit of what Emptywheel describes from what she's read:

Alvin Bragg just explained the case. The argument is that in 2015 and 2016, Michael Cohen, David Pecker, Trump, and others agreed to conduct the catch-and-kill program to help Trump win. That violated three crimes, per Bragg:

• New York State laws prohibiting the promotion of a candidate by false means
• Federal campaign finance laws
• Document falsification by American Media Inc (National Enquirer)

He alleges each invoice and check were an attempt to cover up those 2016 crimes...

There's been interest in how serious a matter this case will be for trump, considering the three other criminal investigations into his misdeeds. For some legal experts, this case is a minor thing and probably not even going to work. Ian Millhiser at Vox is worried the legal theory DA Bragg is using falls under 'dubious' at best:

The actual felony counts arise out of allegedly false entries that Trump made in various business records in order to make the payment to Daniels appear to be ordinary legal expenses paid to Cohen.

But Bragg built his case on an exceedingly uncertain legal theory. Even if Trump did the things he’s accused of, it’s not clear Bragg can legally charge Trump for them, at least under the felony version of New York’s false records law.

As Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office who played a significant role in the Trump investigation prior to his resignation in 2022, wrote in a recent book, a key legal question that will determine whether Trump can be charged under the felony version of New York’s false records law has never been resolved by any appellate court in the state of New York.

The felony statute requires Bragg to prove that Trump falsified records to cover up a crime. Bragg has evidence that Trump acted to cover up a federal crime, but it is not clear that Bragg is allowed to point to a federal crime in order to charge Trump under the New York state law...

And even if Bragg’s legal team convinces New York’s own courts that this prosecution may move forward, there is also a very real danger that the Supreme Court of the United States, with its GOP-appointed supermajority, could decide that it needs to weigh in on whether Trump should be shielded from this prosecution.

The Supreme Court has long held, under a doctrine known as the “rule of lenity,” that “fair warning should be given to the world, in language that the common world will understand, of what the law intends to do if a certain line is passed.” Thus, when the meaning of a criminal statute is unclear, the Constitution sometimes requires that statute to be read narrowly because an unclear criminal law did not give potential defendants “fair warning” that their conduct was illegal...

Bragg, in other words, has built one of the most controversial and high-profile criminal cases in American history upon the most uncertain of foundations. And that foundation could crumble into dust if the courts reject his legal arguments on a genuinely ambiguous question of law...

On the other side of the legal argument, Quinta Jurecic at the Atlantic views the case as bad for trump and thinks trump's behavior from 2016 onward could establish grounds for a jury to convict: 

Bragg consistently framed the charges in his press conference as efforts to hold Trump accountable for lies to the public. The statement of facts alleges that Trump and his team set the hush-money payments in motion to better his chances in the 2016 election: “The Defendant did not want this information to become public because he was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy,” the district attorney writes of McDougal’s account of an affair. Trump schemed with Cohen to pay off Daniels after news broke in early October 2016 of the Access Hollywood tape, further endangering his campaign. As sketched by Bragg, this was a coordinated effort to deny American voters relevant information in advance of the election. According to the statement of facts, Trump initially suggested to Cohen “that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public.”

Trump did not just purchase silence ahead of the 2016 vote. He worked while he was in office to complete the cover-up. When The Wall Street Journal first began reporting about the payments to Daniels and McDougal in 2018, Trump lied repeatedly to the American public and claimed that he had no knowledge of the matter. Before that, as Bragg sets out and as Cohen admitted in his plea deal with the Southern District of New York, Trump repaid Cohen with a series of checks in 2017, after Trump had sworn the oath of office. According to Bragg, the two finalized the arrangements for repayment in a February 2017 meeting held in the Oval Office itself.

Even Jurecic admits Bragg needs to bring more facts to establish directly how the laws were broken. But she sees enough already to think Bragg has a solid criminal case to bring against trump. She also doesn't see any of this affecting the other - more damaging - criminal cases trump faces in Georgia and Washington DC. Even if Bragg misses his shot, Fulton County DA Fani Willis and Special Counsel Jack Smith won't.

So while the Manhattan indictments are nice, we still as a nation have a ways to go before we see justice done with all of trump's sins.

John Cole at Balloon Juice said it best yesterday, and you need to read his quotes in full (this is the part that nails it):

It’s tiring because of the awful shit I am going to have to listen to like “If they can do this to Trump they can do this to anyone!!!one!!!1ELEVEN” No fucking shit. They already do this to everyone else. Are you unaware of the carceral nature of the United States? Are you unaware that every prosecutor in the country chooses to threaten accused with horrible penalties from a jury trial to get them to plead to something lesser? Are you unaware that Michael fucking Cohen did jail time for this already? Are you this blissfully fucking ignorant that the reason we are JUST NOW indicting Trump is because his money and stature and position as President shielded him from earlier prosecution? Are you unaware he was the fucking unindicted co-conspirator in the Cohen case? Trump isn’t being targeted because he is Trump. He was PROTECTED until now because he was Trump. Fucking hell...

Let justice be done.

What Would Ye Have The Ladies Do, O Sexists?

I hadn't commented on it much, but the ongoing sexual harassment scandal involving Governor Andrew Cuomo is coming to an end. He's resigning to avoid a likely impeachment process (via NPR): 

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced he will resign from office following a scathing report from the state's attorney general concluding that the third-term Democrat sexually harassed 11 women, and in one instance, sought to retaliate against one of his accusers who went public with her allegations.

"Wasting energy on distractions is the last thing that state government should be doing, and I cannot be the cause of that," Cuomo, 63, said in remarks from the capital of Albany on Tuesday...

In a nice touch, the Lt. Governor is a woman Kathy Hochul who will replace him as New York's first female Governor.

Hochul, who served one term in Congress before being tapped by Cuomo to be his running mate in 2014, said in a statement she agreed with the governor's decision to step down.

"It is the right thing to do and in the best interest of New Yorkers," she said. "As someone who has served at all levels of government and is next in the line of succession, I am prepared to lead as New York State's 57th Governor..."

Cuomo's departure from office, which will take effect in 14 days, represents a remarkable turn of events from just over a year ago, when the governor was seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party for his administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Yet even that performance is now under a cloud of scrutiny, as a separate investigation by the attorney general found that the number of nursing home deaths disclosed by the state was far worse than officials disclosed.

But it was the allegations of harassment that precipitated the once unthinkable prospect of Cuomo's resignation. The 165-page report released last week followed a months-long investigation into Cuomo's actions and outlined what New York Attorney General Letitia James called violations of both state and federal law. Prosecutors said their findings substantiated allegations from several women — allegations that included unwanted and nonconsensual touching, groping and kissing and sexual comments...

Another thing to note is how Cuomo handled the whole situation: Pursuing a policy of shaming his victims or attacking any accusers to bully his way through the scandal. "Deny deny deny" with a helpful dosage of "Attack attack attack."

But that's the common mindset, isn't it, of the hypocritical bastards who play their way to the top tier of politics or finance or anything to do with power. It's rare, hasn't it been, to see someone seize the reins of power who hasn't been a son-of-a-bitch towards those he (usually a he) views as his lessers (usually women).

I've noted it here often enough: The hypocrisy of sexism in high office. Cuomo is not even the first New York Governor I'm commenting about. There have been many others - across both major parties here in the United States - that it all starts to blend into each other as an ongoing crisis of leadership. A failure to be better men towards women, a failure of justice where fully one-half of our population suffers in the hallways and back rooms of power.

When you look at how men of power mistreat and attack the women in their circles, you should also pay attention to how women's pay in this country remains sickeningly unequal, you should also pay attention to how our legal system refuses to honor or defend rape victims far too often, you should also pay attention to how our culture continues to belittle and devalue anything women say or need.

Kicking Cuomo to the curb is one step towards holding men accountable for the bad behavior we've been showing women for millennia. But our nation has a long way to go and many steps to make - EQUAL PAY for Women! Take rape crimes seriously! - before women are going to be any safer in our workplaces and schools and homes.

In the meantime: Keep punching back, women.

Got Myself Back Into Twitter Jail

I punched a man in Retweet just to watch him die...

Apparently, trying to encourage sportswriter/ESPN celebrity Katie Nolan to hunt down a misogynistic  tweeter and punch him is a line too far for the modern Twitter sensibility.

Right now, I've been banned for 6 days, meaning I can read tweets but can't reply or retweet them, or post new tweets of me own. I *can* Direct Message people if I need to, but it's not stuff that will be out there for the social media consumption.

But this is okay. This is a price to pay for being on social media. Sometimes, you cross a line and you gotta answer for breaking that rule. I get that. It's not like I need to tweet every minute of the day.

(knee starts twitching)

My entire life isn't on Twitter, or Facebook, hell I'm halfway off FB I barely do any social stuff there now, it's just working the library's Page to promote our events and all.

(slight agitation with the eyes blinking a little more than they should)

I can quit at any time! Sure! I don't need Twitter! (twitching becomes more pronounced) I can just go back to the Usenet chats! Where's my link to alt.tv.x-files! I'm totally fine with this! SIX DAYS WITHOUT TWEETING WILL BE A SWEET VACATION FOR ME! I CAN ACTUALLY GET SOME WORK DONE, LIKE VACUUMING THE LIVING ROOM OR SOMETHING! WHO EVEN NEEDS TO TWEET ANYMORE, I MEAN trump's BEEN BANNED FOR LIFE! I AM SO GOOD WITH THIS, I PROBABLY... PROBABLY...

(sees a tweet from Matt Gaetz) OH SWEET JESUS I NEED TO REPLY TO THIS SO BAD! LEMME IN! LEMME IN! I PROMISE I'LL BEHAVE! 

(begins banging the jail bars) ATTICA! ATTICA!!!!!!!

Further Proof Republicans Can't Understand Statutory (w/ Update)

You know, for a guy who's trying to be on hiatus, I'm not staying away from this blog all that much.

I did say I would pop back in from time to time, if the news be worthy enough of comment, and while YES there is something else I need to blog on that's a serious matter, the schadenfreude of commenting on stuff like this is too easy to pass up:

Such as yet another hypocritical Republican elected official getting investigated for sexual misconduct of a VERY scandalous nature. Per the New York Times, but I have to quote it through Yahoo! News because I'm a cheap bastard:

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is under investigation by the Department of Justice for a sexual relationship he allegedly had with a 17-year-old girl, the New York Times reported Tuesday. 

The investigation was started in the final months of the Trump administration under then-Attorney General William Barr, the Times reported. The agency is looking into whether Gaetz, a close ally of the former president, violated federal sex trafficking laws by paying for the young woman to travel with him outside of Florida. 

Gaetz has yet to be charged with a crime. 

Earlier Tuesday, Axios reported that Gaetz, who is 38, had told associates he was considering not seeking reelection so that he could pursue a job opportunity with the staunchly conservative network Newsmax...

I dunno if jumping from Congress to a media job is going to save him, because what Gaetz did at the time - apparently two years ago when he met the young woman - violated Florida Statutes 794.05:

794.05 Unlawful sexual activity with certain minors.—

(1) A person 24 years of age or older who engages in sexual activity with a person 16 or 17 years of age commits a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084...

To be serving in the House of Representatives, you HAVE to be over 25 (Gaetz was 36 at the time this allegedly happened). The girl in question was 17 when this allegedly happened. The girl's ability to give consent doesn't apply: Statutory is statutory. Gaetz is facing a serious felony charge that would involve jail time (up to 15 years), and no media outlet is going to let him broadcast from Cell Block Six.

And somebody like Gaetz who is SUPPOSED to know the laws - federal and state and otherwise - should have known better.

But no, he did not (allegedly). He didn't even care (allegedly). Gaetz, a big bullying blowhard for the Far Right talk shows, likely thought the laws never apply to HIM (considering his history of getting out of legal jams...).

Back to the Times report (this link may end up behind a paywall):

The three people said that the examination of Mr. Gaetz, 38, is part of a broader investigation into a political ally of his, a local official in Florida named Joel Greenberg, who was indicted last summer on an array of charges, including sex trafficking of a child and financially supporting people in exchange for sex, at least one of whom was an underage girl...

So there seems to be (allegedly) a Republican-led sex trafficking ring operating in Florida, of which Gaetz became a target of investigation involving the charges against Greenberg. There is a likelihood of other Florida-based officials being caught in the same orbit.

And that's the thing, isn't it. The hypocrisy of a Republican Party that parades around as God's chosen, screaming at everyone else for our heathen ways, even as they themselves commit sins both sacrilegious and secular. Yes, we catch Democrats in the act of treating young women in abusive and degrading ways, but they don't go around throwing stones at other glass houses, planting the Ten Commandments in our front yards while violating at least six of those Commandments behind closed doors.

The schadenfreude of watching another holier-than-thou Republican confront their sins (allegedly) would be fun to enjoy, except for the fact these Republicans are abusing their powers in office to make the rest of us suffer for their own sick amusement.

Gods help us.

(Note: And yes, I *do* watch Letterkenny for the memes.)

Update 4/2: As all sex-and-money scandals unfold, so too is this one, ensnaring a number of other Republicans and revealing just how deep the rot goes. As Betty Cracker puts it over at Balloon-Juice:

Man, this Gaetz-Greenberg scandal has everything. Snot-nosed rich boys who use their daddies’ money and connections to buy office – check. Arrogant Trump-humping douchebags who think their power enables them to act with impunity – check. Abject morons who leave a trail of literal receipts behind to incriminate themselves – check...

It's even getting worse than what Betty Cracker covers. TPM is reporting how Gaetz was constantly showing off nude photos of his sexual conquests on the floor of the U.S. House. That even then-Speaker Paul Ryan had to call Gaetz to his office to remind him about decorum and behavior in Congress. 

This is something from last year in the Orlando Weekly, for God's sake, reported in 2020 but overshadowed by the pandemic: Gaetz may be part of a gang of Florida elected officials as far back as 2013 who were "scoring points" going after women employees or co-workers at the state legislature. Jesus. The last time I heard about this type of behavior it involved a rape-gang of high schoolers.

The bad behavior has always been there. It's been his family's wealth, his political ambitions, and his white male Frat Boy (tm) Privilege that's allowed him to be this bad for so long.

And now think about all the other white male Frat Boys (tm) we know out there in their 30s and 40s who never grew up and still act like this, running around in the halls of power between Wall Street and K Street.

It's always been this bad. The same entitled assholes running around shilling fear and rage on the talking head shows while raping and pillaging behind the curtains because nobody will stop them until it's too late. When the hell are we really going to clean this shit out of the top floors?

Someone Else's Problems

How did we get to this, a weekend of COVID panic among the Republican elite?

Some of this was tied into their overall philosophy of cruelty, as Adam Serwer pointed out in his must-read article "The Cruelty Is the Point" a few years ago.

It's tied into the stuff I wrote chastising the Republicans for their lack of empathy, long before trump ever showed up on the playing field:

We're getting reports now of Republican congresscritters are getting "coached" into how they should show empathy to the unemployed.  Like compassion and sympathy and empathy are things to fake before a camera crew, rather than a genuine expression from the heart.  Do the Republicans even have genuine expressions from the heart for those struggling to find good jobs at good wages?...

We're coming off a 2012 election where the winning Republican candidate out of the primaries was a rich guy who had no sympathy for what he viewed was 47 percent of the American population, and dismissed them as "takers" and moochers.  And in the primaries, dear God, the other candidates were worse.

The Republican voters - some of whom are genuinely nice in the real world, and hug puppies and feed unicorns whenever possible - have a problem: the Republican Party they're stuck with has the habit of talking and acting like assholes.  There's no other way to describe this behavior...

Well, actually there is a way to describe this behavior.

It's a world-view called "Someone Else's Problem."

You see, as long as the problem in question - the severe climate, the burning forests, the failing schools, the millions on food stamps, a pandemic of great lethality compared to the regular flu, stuff like that - does not directly affect the person whose philosophy is "Someone Else's Problem," it doesn't matter to that person. They aren't bothered by the problem, so they can't BE bothered by the problem at all. And they'll let someone else fix that problem, because it IS someone else's problem after all.

It's also known as Bystander Effect, Buck Passing, and a form of Cognitive Bias.

And the Republican Party - especially with trump at the helm - suffer Cognitive Bias to an unhealthy extreme.

But as my 2014 blogging against Republican failures at empathy prove, this isn't just a trump problem, it's a Republican problem, and it's something we've seen for decades now. This list of arguments, for example, how many times have we heard Republicans and conservatives throw out these lines over the years?

"It's the poor people's fault they're poor. They don't save money or work hard enough. And they're all immoral, getting high on drugs while squeezing out babies they can't feed. If they can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps working those three part-time jobs, they should go work a fourth. And in the next issue of Forbes, we'll be reading a glowing biography of a twenty-something who got to be a billionaire straight out of high school rehab when his parents took care of the startup fees for his successful IPO."

"Don't talk to me about student debt, it's their fault they chose to go with $75,000 worth of loans for a worthless Humanities degree. If young people can't afford college they should go straight into the workforce. Oh by the way all the good-paying jobs will require college degrees."

"Colleges shouldn't enroll minorities who didn't earn their way in. It's their problem if they can't pass the SATs or afford the prestigious Ivy Leagues. Pay no attention to that billion-dollar new College of Ethical Studies building that was just donated to Yale/Harvard by that new student's rich parents."

"Housing is not a problem for me. I can get a great four-car garage McMansion in a gated community with a great rate from my bank. So why should I care about all these Black families who get evicted from homes because their overextended mortgages? What's this 'Redlining' you keep screaming at me?"

"It's your fault if you're unemployed, should have worked harder even if the business closed, forced mass layoffs, or went bankrupt. Work harder to find the next job, and there's all these jobs listed all the time so just get one. So what if Target or Wal-Mart won't hire you if you're overqualified? So what if the job description requires skills you don't have? Just lie on the application and bluff your way in. And don't expect more than $200 a week to pay for expenses while you rush around job-hunting and all. I don't want to pay MY taxes to let you loaf about using unemployment benefits to pay your bills."

That's just the ones I can recall off the top of my head, especially the ones I had to fight against in real life.

Now imagine that same kind of contrarian bullshit out of trump and the Republicans when it came to this pandemic.

"Oh, well, I spoke to the Chinese leader and he said it was all under control, so I don't have to worry." - this is a rough summary of what trump actually said. The implication here is that trump believed it was under control and so didn't care to get the U.S. pandemic response up and running in any way. It also explains how quickly trump and other Republicans resorted to accusing China of screwing up and labeling COVID as "the Chinese Flu."

"Let the state governors fight the pandemic." - trump and his handlers saw the pandemic be more of a problem at the state and local levels and decided rather than fighting the pandemic as a national problem, left it all to the state governors... that they could then blame later for mishandling the crisis.

"Why should we wear masks when the problem is everybody else being sick?" - And yeah, we've seen where this Far Right talking point goes...

"We don't have to worry about large gatherings, or social distancing, or any of that stuff when we host our political events. We're safe. COVID is not our fault and not our problem." - trump and his fellow Republicans kept behaving and talking as though they were above it all, never had to worry about the spread of the coronavirus, because their circle of friends were all healthy and tested every day. So they held trump's rallies in Oklahoma and Arizona and Michigan and other places and they're turning into COVID hotspots as we speak. It's why trump and the Republican Senate leadership held their coming-out party - in violation of local emergency orders against large gatherings - for Amy Coney Barett's SCOTUS nomination not just in the Rose Garden but also indoors for long hours about two weeks ago (right about the time span it takes for the virus' symptoms to crop up).

It's why the Republican leadership is suddenly testing Positive for COVID, and it's why trump has spent the weekend at Walter Reed Hospital undergoing a hyper-level treatment for his illness.

Because, guess what, COVID isn't Someone Else's Problem after all.

The Nation Plans Accordingly...

I hear always the admonishment of my friends:

"Bolt her in, constrain her!"
But who will guard the guardians? 
The wife plans accordingly and begins with them.

-- Juvenal, Satire VI

I've been struggling the past few days to get into words what it is I want to say about the current protests and community uprisings against police brutality, tying it in with the remembrances of Tank Man and the need for protesting injustice under all circumstances.

In the meantime, this article - written by an ex-cop under the pseudonym A.Cab (the newest acronym for All Cops Are Bastards) about the systemic bias, rage, racism, sexism, and bullying in law enforcement - on Medium has turned into the must-read thing of the moment: 

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.

But enough is enough...

If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.

We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)… shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community. As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years...

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it...

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force: “I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity...

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this onto your brain forever: if a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

Do not talk to cops and never, ever believe them. Do not “try to be helpful” with cops. Do not assume they are trying to catch someone else instead of you. Do not assume what they are doing is “important” or even legal. Under no circumstances assume any police officer is acting in good faith.

Also, and this is important, do not talk to cops...

Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people...

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started...

This is where, in a sane and just world, instead of sending out more cops we need to be sending out more social workers. But gee, who wants to spend a billion dollar budget on social workers...? Back to the anonymous op-ed:

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.

Instead of wasting time with minor tweaks, I recommend exploring the following ideas:

No more qualified immunity. Police officers should be personally liable for all decisions they make in the line of duty.
No more civil asset forfeiture. Did you know that every year, citizens like you lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined? The police can steal your stuff without charging you with a crime and it makes some police departments very rich.
Break the power of police unions. Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.
Require malpractice insurance. Doctors must pay for insurance in case they botch a surgery, police officers should do the same for botching a police raid or other use of force. If human decency won’t motivate police to respect human life, perhaps hitting their wallet might.
Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops. Thousands of police departments own assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, and stuff you’d see in a warzone. Police officers have grants and huge budgets to spend on guns, ammo, body armor, and combat training. 99% of calls for service require no armed response, yet when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice. Cities are not safer when unaccountable bullies have a monopoly on state violence and the equipment to execute that monopoly.
One final idea: consider abolishing the police...

As for all the calls (like this one) to "abolish the police" sounds like extreme demolition, but in the context that the op-ed writer is telling us, it's more along the lines of extreme reform. That things need to be broken down in order to rebuild something without the stain and sins of the previous shape of things. The current system, there's almost nothing good to salvage. The entire setup has to go, and a new, more humane and less violent system put in place. This requires not a revolution but determination.

A lot of this were warning signs back during Ferguson. I went back to look at what I wrote then. When the anonymous cop writes about "No More Civil Asset Forfeiture," that was one of the biggest takeaways we got from the official reports about those dark months. The way that department operated - fining the hell out of poor residents in order to raise their own revenues - created what I called an extortion racket the police couldn't give up. We had a legal system that relied on bad police behavior to the point our prosecutors and judges were accomplices after the fact. In Ferguson, much like what we've had in our cities this month, we had cops carrying firepower equal to most standing armies all to shoot and maim unarmed civilians. I still remember that quote from an actual Iraqi veteran: "We rolled lighter than that in an actual war zone."

SIX YEARS AGO, we had all these warning signs, and we've done nothing since then but let the local and county law enforcement get worse.

The need for accountability out of our guardians has always been high. The failure of our nation to hold them accountable has always been a great tragedy. Too many people have been killed and harmed already.

Who polices the police? We should, otherwise like the wife of Juvenal's satire we need to plan ourselves accordingly.

Trespass

So there'd been stories about Roy Moore told around his hometown of how he'd stalk teenage girls at the local shopping mall back in the late 1970s.

When I was branch manager at Centennial Park Library, I had to issue a handful of trespass orders on unruly teens who hung out in the area, hassling library users and stuff.

It's a huge process. You have to call in the cops, file the trespass, file an incident report for the county gov't, and then when the banned person showed up calling the sheriff's office to hurry over and confront the violator about that trespass.

Most of the ones who got trespassed stayed away. There was one who kept violating it but sneaking off - the library was in the middle of a neighborhood, so it was easy - before the cops showed. They finally got him, and enforced the trespass order complete with arresting him and dragging him off in handcuffs.

It turned out they had that teen on more than just trespass. He'd been a suspect in local break-ins and acts of vandalism (there were other things, but I can't verify those charges), bad enough to where they were holding him without bail. The last time I saw the kid, this was 2008 maybe, it was in a courtroom on a preliminary hearing about his charges (I was called in to provide witness. I found out the prosecutor's office had triple-charged the teen on that trespass, so I told them it was just the one charge, but that probably didn't help him considering the more serious stuff he was facing).

I'm rehashing all of this today because of recent news about Senate candidate Roy Moore: how an investigating reporter dug up story after story about how Moore back in 1979 had been banned from a shopping mall because he was there all the time trying to pick up teenage girls (this was when he was in his 30s!). To get banned from any place to where the police were notified and scanning for you is a big fucking deal. That Moore kept doing this - that he kept showing up even after the ban trying to pick up girls - highlights how obsessed he was chasing after them, and how problematic it had to be if a sizable number of witnesses STILL REMEMBER HE DID THIS STUFF 30 YEARS AGO.

Remember, kids: a Sexual Predator does not stop at one victim, or four, or forty. He keeps going until someone actually stops him and he goes to jail. And even then, he'll likely keep trying, because it's all he knows to do.

That he stalked a shopping mall while he was employed as a District Attorney - even after being warned, even after being banned - points to the horrifying truth that Moore could not be trusted to uphold the laws of his state. Moore placed himself above the law.

How easy do you think it is for a bastard like that to place himself above God?

Such trespass should not be accepted by the faithful or skeptic alike. What the hell, Alabama. What the hell, Republicans.

This is insane.

Tales Of Corruption: May 2015 Edition

Two separate corruption cases in the news, one common theme.

First, the ongoing scandal that is FIFA:

FIFA, the notoriously corrupt and yet seemingly invincible governing body of world soccer, has finally landed itself an indictment that some would say is worthy of its reputation. The charges against a handful of senior FIFA officials include money laundering, racketeering, bribery and fraud. In short, the federal lawsuit alleges what millions of soccer fans have suspected all along: that FIFA officials have been using the organization's massive influence to line their pocketbooks.

It's not enough to note how long this has been a problem: for decades, FIFA has been raking in millions and then billions of questionable money using the bidding wars between nations to host World Cup games, making decisions less on quality and availability and more on how much the host nation is willing to sell out.  The recent turmoil in Brazil - where FIFA profited at the expense of the impoverished nation - is the latest set of newsworthy reports to follow.  The fate of all those quickly, poorly built stadiums highlights the waste FIFA insisted on (and still does) when creating locations for their games.

FIFA had gotten to where they could dictate to host nations laws to make their organization more powerful and profitable.  They refused any transparency in their internal affairs.  Any dissent inside and outside stifled as the men in power remained in power (until their individual bad habits got to be too much even for FIFA to hide under the rug).

And for decades no-one fought it, no-one questioned it.  Because of national pride: soccer (international football) crazy nations could not say No, could not question the demands, out of fear of retribution or embarrassment.  Nations still pandered for the opportunity to be host country every four years.  Teams pined for the opportunity to win on the field.  Fans still traveled to rickety stadiums in poor urban (and in Brazil's case rural) zones and spent money to FIFA's delight.

Is it any surprise an organization would turn corrupt so fast, so deep?

The news punditry seems to be caught between awe and surprise that any charges at the level of FIFA's top offices were ever brought.  But we shouldn't be: sooner or later this much corruption collapses on itself.  The sin of pride by other nations got swamped by the pride and arrogance of the men who stayed in power too long.  Sepp Blatter has been in charge of FIFA since 1998, pretty much a turning point in how corrupt that organization became, and remains the most obvious problem in that organization that hadn't been arrested (yet).  Let this Slate article document the atrocities (of which I'll list a few):

...listing the seemingly unending litany of corruption allegations against the organization Blatter has run since 1998 and has been an official at since 1975.  ...with this just-ended World Cup and the police allegations of an illegal ticket sales scheme by FIFA’s ticketing and hospitality partner, a company in which Blatter’s nephew has a minority stake. Blatter presided over the decision to hand the £342 million contract to his nephew’s company back in 2007, and it wasn’t the first time he was alleged to have funneled cash to that particular family member...

...In 2002, Blatter was accused by FIFA’s then secretary general and erstwhile ally Michel Zen-Ruffinen of losing the organization $500 million through financial mismanagement, corruption, and cronyism. Zen-Ruffinen also testified that Blatter had paid a FIFA referee named Lucien Bouchardeau $25,000 and promised him $25,000 more for information on a Somali soccer official, Farah Addo, who had accused Blatter of bribery in his first election bid...

...FIFA’s corruption has direct consequences in the real world. In South Africa, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on white elephant stadiums that have rarely been used following the 2010 World Cup in a country where more than half of its children were living in poverty as of 2012. Multiple local officials in that country were reported to have been murdered, allegedly for whistle-blowing or other involvement in stadium fraud.
In Brazil, a $300 million, 40,000-plus seat stadium was built in the middle of the Amazon rainforest where potential post-Cup audiences of that size just don’t exist. That’s probably one reason why a majority of Brazilians opposed hosting this World Cup, saying the more than $11 billion price tag could be better spent on public services...

And we haven't even gotten to the part where everything tipped against FIFA, when the stench of greed became too noxious to bear: the awarding of the World Cups for 2018 and 2022 to Russia and Qatar.  While Russia is a prominent nation with enough major cities to effectively host games, it's also one of the better-documented kleptocracies on the planet with a list of human rights abuses and current border issues with Ukraine.

And Qatar has been a disaster since Day One.  There were open questions about having a nation right on the equator hosting summer games in high heat environments, with each new question poorly answered than the last.  The games have to be moved to winter months, conflicting with other nations' scheduled football seasons.  Qatar simply does not have the infrastructure - the major cities of hotels, restaurants, transit service, communication hubs - needed to host so many games at once, and some places designated as locales don't even exist on the maps.

And in order to build these non-existent places to house insanely expensive stadiums, Qatar has resorted to a criminally bloody system of exported workers working overtime and in hostile conditions to the point of exhaustion and DEATH.  From Vox's report:

Working conditions are, in many cases, horrendous. Multiple reports from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the International Trade Union Confederation, and even a contractor employed by the Qatari government have come to basically the same conclusion: migrant workers frequently don't get paid for months at a time, are prevented from leaving the company or the country, and are forced to work in impossibly hot weather and conditions that virtually guarantee some will die.

In one migrant worker labor camp Amnesty researchers visited, "sewage was leaking from the ground — apparently from the camp's septic tank — and flowing down into the street, where it had collected in a large stagnant pool. Piles of rubbish were mounting up at the camp, apparently because the company had not paid for them to be collected, and the piles of rubbish attracted swarms of insects."

There was no electricity or running water. When Amnesty informed the Qatari authorities of this, they provided a small generator — and then took it away three days later.

And the death toll is already beyond the measure of other comparable mass projects:

From the Washington Post

Construction work should not be a death sentence.  And yet FIFA - which is supposed to oversee these projects and ensure the host nations are obeying laws and worker safety - has done nothing about it.  If the organization is feeling like it has few friends at the moment, it's because this corruption has a body count other nations can no longer ignore.  It's gotten to where even FIFA's headquarters home Switzerland is investigating charges of bribery involving the Russia and Qatar bids.

That's the current status of one scandal.  The second scandal just erupted today, although it has its roots back more than a decade by now.  Former Speaker of the U.S. House Dennis Hastert - the Least Powerful Republican With an Actual Title of the last twenty years - has been charged with lying to investigators and hiding evidence regarding a complex extortion/blackmail scheme.  To David Graham's Atlantic article:

But reading between the lines of the indictment against Hastert suggests a darker story than political corruption. In or about 2010, according to the indictment, Hastert—a former high-school teacher and coach—met with an unnamed individual from Yorkville, Hastert’s hometown. They “discussed past misconduct by defendant against Individual A that had occurred years earlier.” In effect, Hastert fell victim to blackmail, the indictment alleges: He “agreed to provide Individual A $3.5 million in order to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A.” (Since leaving the House, Hastert has become a highly paid lobbyist.)

Guessing games about who Individual A is should dot the blogosphere / twitterverse for the next two days.  And who's got $3.5 million to throw around like that to pay off a blackmail demand?!  Oh, right.  Insider Lobbyists.

Hastert then allegedly began withdrawing cash from his bank accounts to pay to the individual. But federal laws require financial institutions to report transactions greater than $10,000, and Hastert made a series of them. In April 2012, the indictment alleges, employees of Hastert’s bank questioned him about the withdrawals, and he promptly reduced his withdrawals to smaller amounts, to escape the requirement. Authorities were already watching, however, and they began investigating Hastert for structuring currency transactions to evade federal requirements—itself a crime.

"Can't get away with nothing" is probably what Hastert was thinking when he tried to hide transactions that were illegal to hide in the first place.  So why was Hastert acting like that in the first place?  Committing acts of desperation that were bound to draw attention and investigation?

Because he thought he could get away with it.  He was an ex-Speaker with political and financial connections up the wazoo.  He thought he could lie to investigators and have his own identity protect him from further inquiry.  Because power got to his head long ago, and with that power came pride and arrogance and recklessness.  It may not be on the scale of evil and corruption that FIFA leader Sepp Blatter is still committing at this moment, but it still reeks of damage and hypocrisy.

Let justice be done.  It would be nice to think Sepp Blatter will lose Friday's election for the Presidency - his incumbency has gone longer than FDR's - in the wake of the arrests and public outcry over Qatar, but that organization's system is so rigged in his favor I doubt it.  If he wins, he still faces the possibility the EUFA - the European leagues and the most prestigious part of the world football organization - will threaten to leave, destroying FIFA's very existence (A World Cup without Germany or Italy is no World Cup).  More likely is that the recently arrested are in position to turn testimony in exchange for saving their skins, any one of them close enough to Blatter to hopefully reveal a key link to justify slapping handcuffs on the corrupt SOB.

As for Hastert, it's got to come out just what the hell he was paying Individual A to keep secret.  Whoever it is has got to be on the run or planning his own deal to avoid charges of blackmail.  Either way, Hastert is toast: it's merely a question if the sin he's hiding is his own... or someone else's.

American Income, American Injustice

This is, by the by, the 700th post here on this blog (under different names).  Big Hello to all the Crooks and Liars people following Mike's Blog Round-Up link!  Thank you for stopping by, and please check out the rest of this blog.  Also, I have a separate blog at WittyLibrarian And The Book With the Blue Cover, at which I have a current memorial for Sir Terry Pratchett.)

The federal investigation into the dealings of the Ferguson Police Force, not just in the Michael Brown shooting but a litany of complaints against an out-of-control agency, brought up some horrifying revelations.  Ta-Nehisi Coates aptly titled his article about it "The Gangsters of Ferguson," and for good reason:

(from the DOJ report) Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community. Further, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes. Ferguson’s own data establish clear racial disparities that adversely impact African Americans. The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities...

Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue...

There's a word for this: Extortion.

Extortion... is a criminal offense of obtaining money, property, or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense...

Thing is, Organized Crime never had it so good or easy as corrupt cops and city employees, who extort through excessive fines and asset seizures using the threat of jail and the threat of police brutality to get their money.  The Mafia ain't got sh-t on a police force that basically fines the hell out of its own citizenry.

And why is this happening?  Why are the police and city governments so eager to shakedown their own communities like a bunch of street thug enforcers and their capos?

Let's ask Chad Stanton over at the Washington Monthly:

...What exacerbated such practices is the maniacal hold of anti-tax fervor that has trickled down from the federal level to the state and local level. With conservative domination of many statehouses, its clear to any ambitious politician that wants to advance in the Republican Party that their fealty to the ideal of “no new taxes” has to be iron-clad.

This lock-step discipline on taxes has become a principle unto itself. From the beginning, its support has come as a result of racializing social safety net programs. What we see is a feedback loop occurring post “formal” Jim Crow. Black people are seen as “stealing” the hard earned taxes of white people, who then support politicians pledging to never raise taxes. Revenue is still needed to run the government, however, so we see budgets for programs that benefit everyone slashed. At the municipal level, cities target black communities to make up the gap.

This targeting is then justified by the same logic that was used to rail against taxes in the first place, as we see in the report. Several officials cite African Americans’ lack of “personal responsibility” as justification for targeting them for revenue.

As long as America is under the grip of this circular logic, there will be many cities operating the way Ferguson did...

It's a wonderful cycle, isn't it?  The anti-tax crowd pushes hard to cut income and corporate taxes at the federal and state level that could otherwise fund our cities and counties and states.  The county and city governments, forced to find other sources of revenue yet unable to even consider raising their own taxes lest the anti-tax forces throw them out of office, have to rely on fees and fines to cover the costs of running their low-level government services.  As most cities are home to large groups of ethnic minorities, these cities view the minorities not as people but as statistics.  And meanwhile, those same anti-tax agitators (yes, I'm pointing a finger at you, Fox Not-News crowd) rail their base against those ethnic minorities as an ongoing social and economic threat, making it easier to ignore their suffering.

There's another word, phrase actually, that can be used here: Indentured Servitude.  Ferguson PD and other departments like them across the nation use violence and the threat of ruin to force a persecuted group - a poor minority like Blacks or Hispanics - to fork over money.  In order to recoup those losses, those minorities are forced to work harder or place themselves further into debt, only to have the PD show up and take more money.

I wrote awhile back about the police department in Waldo, FL shutting down.  It's a small, dot-on-the-map town in the northeast corner of Alachua County.  If you lived in Gainesville (GO GATORS) and had to drive to Jacksonville, you'd know about this place... because Waldo was one of the most infamous speed traps in American history.  Waldo was so small and so poor a community that the police force couldn't rely on the locals for shakedowns fines, so they went with a ludicrous speed trap instead that netted the unwary drivers from out-of-state or from parts of Florida that hadn't heard of them.  My dad got nailed driving through there once, he even knew about it and even he couldn't avoid getting caught in the speed trap.

I was caught once in a speed trap on I-4 one weekend morning, with a group of co-workers leaving a night shift job.  Our driver was accused of being 20 MPH over the speed limit, but she was driving off an expressway ramp onto the interstate having just left the toll booth and there was no way she had accelerated that quickly to the spot the cops pulled us over.  The Orange County deputy claimed an overhead plane was using some form of radar to track us, which was hard to believe because there were no planes overhead (it was a clear morning sky).  As he issued the ticket he bragged that he "always showed up in court to enforce the ticket" and essentially tried intimidating the entire minivan.  Meanwhile a small division of cop cars were swerving backwards on the interstate to reset themselves to catch more "speedsters," driving more recklessly than any civilians they were hoping to ticket.

We all openly questioned the validity of what those county cops were doing.  I argued the Waldo example, that the county was making some damn ticket quota to grind money out of the local drivers.  "It's worse than that," one of the ladies in the back seat told me.  "The cops are also looking for any undocumented workers they can pull in for immigration arrests.  If they do that, it's like a bonus."

These are just two examples of abusive, money-obsessed police actions I've been aware of my whole life over decades of having lived here in Florida.  How do you think this is like for a Black woman living in Ferguson having to cope with this sh-t five times a week? Via Coates' article:

...In one March 2012 email, the Captain of the Patrol Division reported directly to the City Manager that court collections in February 2012 reached $235,000, and that this was the first month collections ever exceeded $200,000. The Captain noted that “[t]he [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today. Since 9:30 this morning there hasn't been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times.” The City Manager enthusiastically reported the Captain’s email to the City Council and congratulated both police department and court staff on their “great work.”

How fares a society when we look at the institutions sworn to uphold the law and protect the citizenry... and see only bullies and shakedown artists?  Out of all the "good cops" we are repeatedly told are out there doing the hard honest work, why are the bad cops who make the Corleones look like saints the ones representing the entire profession?

And this is part of the problems we've been having with asset forfeiture, a program that's been in violation of the very concept of the Fourth Amendment (and even the Eighth and Fourteenth).

Here's the real problem: our cities and counties are tapped out of revenue sources.  Without many states able or eager to raise revenues through a progressive taxation plan - indeed with many of those states eager to cut taxes even further as part of the Far Right agenda of "kill government, let the free market overcharge us" - these cities and counties are going to raid their own communities through abusive tactics.  If we want to end these tactics, we're going to have to as a nation recognize that taxation exists for a reason and that using taxes to pay for public services is a just and fair practice.

Otherwise, the price we're going to pay for all these tax cuts for the rich and powerful will be our communities falling apart.