The Weak Rule of Law

Political prosecution - good, bad or

something else?

On Saturday, the president called Georgia election official Brad Raffensperger, and attempted to get him to “recalculate” the votes to give the election win to himself, not Biden. The votes in Georgia had already been counted three times and each time the president lost. In asking for such massive voter fraud, the president even threatened Raffensperger with some undefined “criminal offense” for failing to do what the president was telling him to do. The New York Times writes:

President Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the presidential election and vaguely threatened him with “a criminal offense” during an hourlong telephone call on Saturday, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

Mr. Trump, who has spent almost nine weeks making false conspiracy claims about his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., told Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, that he should recalculate the vote count so Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, would end up winning the state’s 16 electoral votes.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr. Trump said during the conversation, according to a recording first obtained by The Washington Post, which published it online Sunday. The New York Times also acquired a recording of Mr. Trump’s call.

Clearly, the president is attempting to commit enough voter fraud to change the election outcome in Georgia. Is voter fraud illegal?

Were laws broken?

In theory voter fraud is illegal. When average people are caught doing it, they are generally prosecuted. But as we have seen over the years, laws generally do not apply to politicians like they apply to normal people. The discouraging truth is that the rule of law is weak for white collar criminals, including the president.  Most white collar crime (~98% ?) is never prosecuted and even less results in criminal convictions. The main problem is that evidence of intent to commit a crime is rarely to be found. 

All modern criminals with a tenth-ounce of brain know not to create or keep written or electronic evidence of their crimes or to discuss crimes except via secure phone calls. With no evidence, there are few prosecutions and even fewer convictions. The last, best line of defense against the massive tide of white collar crime is prosecution for tax evasion. Tax documents are written records that must be filed and cannot be avoided.[1] 

The New York Times describes the issue:

The call by President Trump on Saturday to Georgia’s secretary of state raised the prospect that Mr. Trump may have violated laws that prohibit interference in federal or state elections, but lawyers said on Sunday that it would be difficult to pursue such a charge.

The recording of the conversation between Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, first reported by The Washington Post, led a number of election and criminal defense lawyers to conclude that by pressuring Mr. Raffensperger to “find” the votes he would need to reverse the election outcome in the state, Mr. Trump either broke the law or came close to it.

“It seems to me like what he did clearly violates Georgia statutes,” said Leigh Ann Webster, an Atlanta criminal defense lawyer, citing a state law that makes it illegal for anyone who “solicits, requests, commands, importunes or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage” in election fraud.

At the federal level, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” is breaking the law.

The president broke the law except for two factors. First, he is a white collar criminal and above the law. Second, he will claim he never intended to break the law. Here is how the GOP and defense attorneys spin this according to the NYT article:

Matthew T. Sanderson, a Republican election lawyer who has worked on several presidential campaigns — including those of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor — said that while it did appear that Mr. Trump was trying to intimidate Mr. Raffensperger, it was not clear that he violated the law.  

That is because while Mr. Trump clearly implied that Mr. Raffensperger might suffer legal consequences if he did not find additional votes for the president in Georgia, Mr. Trump stopped short of saying he would deliver on the threat himself against Mr. Raffensperger and his legal counsel, Ryan Germany, Mr. Sanderson said.

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said during the call, referring to his baseless assertions of widespread election fraud. “That’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.” (emphasis added)

Right there is the crime. Its rock solid defense is also in plain view: “It was not clear that he violated the law.” Biden has clearly signalled that he won't defend the rule of law regarding Trump and GOP crooks.[2] Trump is a GOP president, so the GOP as a partisan political power will defend him. Georgia is a GOP state that will not prosecute a GOP president. That's it. That is the whole story. 

Questions:

1. Should Trump be prosecuted for his crimes while in office and all other times, or should prosecution be avoided in the name of political comity to avoid endless partisan investigations and prosecutions of political enemies. That assumes that (1) neither party is capable of investigating and prosecuting its own crooks, and (2) there actually is rough parity in comity between the two parties.

2. Is it better to have few or no prosecutions of political crooks like Trump or to have endless partisan investigations to settle scores and try to gain political advantage and/or to deceive the public? Dark free speech (deceiving and manipulating the public) is legal and very popular among politicians, especially republicans.

Footnotes: 

1. Bipartisan congresses have neutered the ability of the IRS to prosecute tax evasion (illegal cheating) by slashing the budget needed to investigate and prosecute tax cheats. Protecting tax cheats is a bipartisan sport, but the GOP is more enthusiastic and aggressive about blocking attempts to allow the IRS to enforce tax law. That pro-corruption trick costs taxpayers about $700 billion/year, although the IRS feebly asserts that the number is closer to about $400 billion/year. As usual, honest taxpayers are, as Trump would say, suckers, losers and disgusting people.

2. Regarding Biden's tolerance of Trump crimes: “He's going to be more oriented toward fixing the problems and moving forward than prosecuting them.” Biden wants to avoid divisive investigations. Therefore, all the GOP has to do is to make clear they will see any investigations deeply divisive and that will be the end of it. Biden will crumple into a heap of spineless goo. In this regard, Biden is exactly like Obama, who let lots of crooks off without any prosecutions, including every single criminal involved in the massive financial and housing meltdowns. Politicians in the democratic and republican parties are fully in accords with protecting white collar criminals. 

The sleight of hand “logic” used to protect political crooks dates back to president Ford. One source describes the weak rule of law situation like this:

Presidents have historically gone out of their way to avoid using the power of the office to pursue their political rivals. When President George H.W. Bush pardoned six Reagan White House officials who were involved in the Iran-contra affair, he warned of “a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences.” Bush was sparing members of his own party. President Obama created what is perhaps an even more relevant precedent for Biden by choosing not to prosecute members of the George W. Bush administration who had authorized the unlawful torture of detainees; his nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, used the very same phrase — the criminalization of policy differences — when the issue came up during a 2009 congressional hearing. Over the summer, I asked David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, what he thought would happen to Trump if he lost the election. “My gut is that you’re very unlikely to see a federal prosecution,” he told me. “For me, the real accountability will be on Nov. 3, if he is sent packing from the White House.” It was a sentiment that I heard from a lot of legal thinkers and former government officials in the months leading up to the election: The visions of Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit were more fantasy than reality. His true moment of reckoning would happen at the ballot box. (emphasis added)

There you have it. Crimes by bipartisan politicians are merely “policy differences” even if the policy amounted to actual criminal acts. Did the president try to commit massive voter fraud in his phone call to Raffensperger, or was that just a policy thing? One thing is certain: America's two-party system protects political crooks, including politicians, candidates, crooked partisan pundits, campaign donors and campaign workers.

This is what politics would look like if the law was enforced by partisans,

or does it already look like that? Will this kind of lying and sleaze 

end after Trump is gone because politicians will regain their moral compasses?

About That Russian Cyberattack: “This is looking much, much worse than I first feared”

The president's inspired entrepreneurial leadership  has inspired a wave of 

entrepreneurship across the moderately damp land, 

in the wet sea and in the drier air

Another big failure of the Trump administration has been, and still is, its failure to even detect, much less block, a massive months-long Russian cyberattack that is still ongoing. US officials are still struggling to understand the scope and strategic goal of this monster. 

Being in his usual emergency ops mode, our president is valiantly ignoring it, blaming the Chinese (or Obama or Hillary, etc.) and playing golf, pardoning murderers, thug cronies and various crooks in his last acts of pay-to-play politics. In other words, our treasonous president is generally being his usual happy-go-lucky immoral, incompetent, corrupt self. And, GOP leadership isn't any better. The New York Times writes: 

Three weeks after the intrusion came to light, American officials are still trying to understand whether what the Russians pulled off was simply an espionage operation inside the systems of the American bureaucracy or something more sinister, inserting “backdoor” access into government agencies, major corporations, the electric grid and laboratories developing and transporting new generations of nuclear weapons.

At a minimum it has set off alarms about the vulnerability of government and private sector networks in the United States to attack and raised questions about how and why the nation’s cyberdefenses failed so spectacularly.

Those questions have taken on particular urgency given that the breach was not detected by any of the government agencies that share responsibility for cyberdefense — the military’s Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, both of which are run by General Nakasone, and the Department of Homeland Security — but by a private cybersecurity company, FireEye.

And, if past performance is any indication of future stupid, culpable players in the private sector will get off with a golden parachute and generally evade responsibility. The company that is believed to be the Russian attack point, the Texas company SolarWinds, relied on software that was produced in Eastern Europe. The NYT comments on SolarWinds' acts of stupid:

SolarWinds, the company that the hackers used as a conduit for their attacks, had a history of lackluster security for its products, making it an easy target, according to current and former employees and government investigators. Its chief executive, Kevin B. Thompson, who is leaving his job after 11 years, has sidestepped the question of whether his company should have detected the intrusion. Some of the compromised SolarWinds software was engineered in Eastern Europe, and American investigators are now examining whether the incursion originated there, where Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted. (emphasis added -- attaboy Kevin, sidestep those pesky questions and keep distributing cheap Russian hacker software) 

Publicly, officials have said they do not believe the hackers from Russia’s S.V.R. pierced classified systems containing sensitive communications and plans. But privately, officials say they still do not have a clear picture of what might have been stolen. 

They said they worried about delicate but unclassified data the hackers might have taken from victims like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, including Black Start, the detailed technical blueprints for how the United States plans to restore power in the event of a cataclysmic blackout. 

All Thompson needs to do is discretely, or blatantly, donate to the president's fund that is fighting to subvert the 2020 election, the Sleaze, Lies & Cash for Trump PAC, and he can get a pre-emptive pardon for whatever bad acts or stupid failures to act he was involved in. One has gotta admire captains of industry like that. What a bunch of brave patriots. Looks like maybe we're gonna have to redo the plans for good ole operation Black Start.[1] 

One can tentatively put the cost of this failure at about $1.5 trillion. The president and GOP should be made to pay for the damages since it was their incompetence and stupid that allowed this to happen. Also, Kevin the patriot should also chip in a few million from his hoard. [2]

Honestly, January 20, 2021 cannot come soon enough. 

Footnote:

1. Fortunately, I just ordered some flashlights, so the neighborhood will be in good shape once the lights go out.

2. I know, I know. This was Obama's fault, and made much worse by Hillary and her cabal of baby-eating cannibal pedophiles. LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP! 

HOW SIMILAR ARE THE FAR-LEFT AND THE FAR-RIGHT?

 Do the far-left and the far-right ever seem hopelessly similar to you? As odd as this question may sound at first, Horseshoe Theory suggests that the political spectrum is not a straight line with ideologies moving across a line from left to right, but rather a horseshoe, with its farthest outliers bending in toward each other and sharing a number of beliefs. In recent years, violent clashes between the far-left and far-right, at UC Berkeley, in Charlottesville, North Carolina, in Portland, Oregon, and most recently during the George Floyd protests, have challenged society to take a look at the actions of both extremes and ask: To what extent does similarity in action mean similarity in character?

The Far-Left and the Far-Right Are Two Peas in a Pod

 

Victim complex.

People on the outermost poles of the political spectrum, meaning on both the far-left and the far-right, often view themselves as aggrieved parties. Interestingly, one study found that having faced adversity – namely violence, loss of a loved one, or experiencing illness or disability – is indeed a predictor of extreme political views; the more adversity people faced, the more likely they were to lean to the far right or far left in their ideologies. Experiencing adversity may explain the rhetoric of victimization that permeates the far-left as well as the far-right. White Nationalists complain of cultural and economic obliteration at the hands of multicultural movements and affirmative action, while proponents of the far-left demand restitution for the silencing of minority groups via discriminatory legislation, the recent rise in popularity of white nationalists, police brutality and micro-aggressions.

 

By any means necessary.

Militancy pervades the ranks of the far-left and the far-right. More than idolizing violent purveyors of their ideologies (think far-right’s Hitler to the far-left’s Che Guevara), many far-right and far-left movements are vehement in their rejection of non-violence and employ it regularly. Right-wing groups are said to have carried out 150 attacks on US soil – from shooting to bombings – since 1993. Similar crimes have been perpetrated by militant offshoots of left-wing groups, beginning with the 1960’s Weathermen and continuing until today with the Antifa movement.

 

An idle mind is the devil’s playground.

Scientists have connected boredom to the adoption of extreme political stances, calling youth, wealth, and education the most common risk factors of extremism. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, it could be argued that without families to support or even necessarily the need to support themselves, the average college student has more free time than others to develop defined political views. As such, it is hardly surprising that constituents on the far-right and far-left are overwhelmingly educated and even well-off (a trend that held even for the Hezbollah fighters of the 1980s and 90s).

The Far-Left and Far-Right Are as Different as Night and Day.

 

Different hard-wiring.

Psychologist have determined that liberal and conservative brains literally function quite differently. For example, an examination of the possessions of liberal and conservative college students revealed that the former had more books and travel-memorabilia, while the latter had more items relating to cleaning and organization. This investigation suggested key differences in liberal and conservative mindsets – with one leaning toward the discovery of new experiences and the other emphasizing self-discipline and order. This hard-wiring gives rise to dramatically different value systems – systems that view the basic ideas like fairness, equality, and even right and wrong in radically different terms.

 

History is in the eye of the beholder.

The far-right and the far-left have dramatically different interpretations of the past – interpretations which dictate their political stances and calls to action. The far-right expresses nostalgia for the past and actively works to preserve their history, regardless of what that might mean in today’s context. For right-wing Southerners, like the members of Save Southern Heritage, this means protecting statues of famous Confederates, and decrying the removal of the Confederate flag from public buildings or the removal of Confederate monuments. Conversely, the far-left (and in this case, many liberals) associates the past with its ills – slavery, sexism, and other injustices. History and its institutions are not to be preserved and cherished, but rather, an embarking point from which to begin reform.

 

Superficial similarities.

When two groups utilize similar tactics, it does not necessarily mean that the groups are one and the same. The Antifa and white nationalist movements exemplify key ideological differences that should not be overlooked. While Antifa and white nationalist movements both express distaste for the government (and even a will to overthrow it), their reasons for these sentiments are rather opposite. Antifa, whose members also frequently identify as anarchists, view government as an instrument of inequality, while white nationalists express hostility toward government because they believe it facilitates equality – a notion that offends those whose identity is built upon a defined racial hierarchy.

 

The Bottom Line: Both the far-left and the far-right have a victim-like mentality and employ militant strategies, yet each group has contrasting views on history and personal values. What do you think? Do overlapping tactics and stances in the far-right and far-left amount to a hegemonic portrait of extreme personalities, or is each extremely distinct?

https://www.theperspective.com/debates/politics/similar-far-left-far-right/

Trump's Radical Right Saboteur

Russell Vought - GOP radical right extremist

& rabid religious bigot

In the coming months, memories will start to fade. But some obscure things are worth mention before that process gets underway. The Washington Post writes in an opinion piece:

If, in the new year, pandemic vaccines aren’t available as promised, Americans can’t return to work because economic relief isn’t delivered or an adversary successfully attacks the United States because national security agencies couldn’t pay for new defenses, a hefty share of the blame should be placed on a man you’ve probably never heard of: One Russell Thurlow Vought.

As President Trump’s budget director, he conspicuously failed in his stated goal of controlling the debt. Despite his efforts, the debt increased by $6 trillion on his two-year watch as director of the Office of Management and Budget, the biggest jump in history.

But what Russ Vought is very good at is sabotage. He’s sabotaging national security, the pandemic response and the economic recovery — all to make things more difficult for the incoming Biden administration. That he’s also sabotaging the country seems not to matter to Vought, who has spent nearly two decades as a right-wing bomb thrower.

He has blocked civil servants at OMB from cooperating with the Biden transition, denying President-elect Joe Biden the policy analysis and budget-preparation assistance given to previous presidents-elect, including Barack Obama and Trump himself.

Thursday afternoon, Vought released a bombastic letter accusing the Biden transition of making “false statements” about OMB’s uncooperativeness — and then essentially confirming that it would not cooperate: “What we have not done and will not do is use current OMB staff to write the [Biden transition’s] legislative policy proposals to dismantle this Administration’s work. . . . Redirecting staff and resources to draft your team’s budget proposals is not an OMB transition responsibility. Our system of government has one President and one Administration at a time.”

Vought’s 2017 nomination to be OMB deputy director (he later served 18 months as acting director and has served five as director) was nearly undone over a 2016 article in which he wrote: “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, his Son, and they stand condemned.”

Vought spent seven years on the vanguard of conservative extremism as a senior official at Heritage Action, the political wing of the Heritage Foundation. The group fought GOP leadership and pushed lawmakers into unyielding positions.

During that time, Vought wrote a series of rambling posts for RedState.com arguing that “incrementalism doesn’t work for the right,” that Republicans “are fundamentally in their DNA unwilling to fight” and that Republicans needed to have “a willingness” to shut the government down. He exhorted Republicans to “embrace the sort of brinkmanship that shows they are playing to win.” He railed against a 2012 infrastructure bill as “communism.”

Lying, incoherent radical right authoritarians like this are now mainstream in GOP leadership. Authoritarians don't compromise. Only democrats compromise. The president gets the blame for all of the damage this incompetent bigoted freak caused.

New Year Musings

Happy New Year!

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It isn't clear how 2021 is going to turn out. The political fissures that grew in 2020 are not going to go away any time soon. American social glue is weak and ways to repair it are not clear. Unfounded conspiracy theories tend to be more persuasive than reality for an angry, insurgent radical right minority. Inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning are all weak and unpersuasive in the eyes of that warring tribe.  

By now it is obvious that an angry minority of Americans have lost some or most of their trust in democracy, including the recent election. They have been persuaded by decades of ruthless propaganda that more authoritarianism and Christianity in government and society generally is their preferred way forward. 

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Given the circumstances, what makes sense? Since appeals to facts and reason are generally ineffective with the angry minority, an emphasis on appeals to emotions and morals seems to make more sense going forward. That calls for a different kind of rhetoric. Of course, one can argue that reliance on a different kind of rhetoric (1) capitulates to unwarranted and unjustified means of interaction, and (2) undermines the proper role of facts and reason in politics. It also raises the issue of the morality. If one resorts to lies, deceit, unwarranted emotional manipulation and partisan motivated reasoning, that is a win for darkness and ignorance and a loss for facts, reason and honest democracy. 

What to do differently, if anything, is not clear. I'm personally uncomfortable with significantly abandoning facts and reasoning, which tend to be more objective than dealing with emotions and morals. And, I don't know how to directly speak to emotions and morals.

Some time to cogitate on this is called for. Maybe over the next few days or weeks, something will emerge from the fog.

Normal Everyday Lies From Normal Everyday Liars

Three separate examples illustrate what is normal for politics and political discourse among some in the US and elsewhere. This has been going on for at least decades, but for some reason, personally it feels different and worse than before. Maybe it feels that way because it is that way. Or, maybe it feels that way because knowledge of it is so clear and discouraging.

Stephanie Mohr - presidentially pardoned thug

Hey Sarge, we got a new dog. Mind if it gets a bite? -- He only needed 10 stitches

An opinion piece in the Washington Post discusses the president’s pardon of a police officer, Stephanie Mohr, who was ordered to let her police dog attack a homeless person surrounded by police. The homeless person posed no threat and was in full compliance will all orders the police had given to him. The dog attack was just a test for a new dog to see how it would work out: “A police sergeant later testified that he was approached by Mohr’s supervising officer who said, ‘Hey Sarge, we got a new dog. Mind if it gets a bite?’” In court Mohr downplayed the incident, commenting that the victim needed “only 10 stitches.”

This incident occurred in 2001. The opinion piece was written by Alex Busansky, the former lawyer in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who prosecuted Mohr. Busansky described the incident, the lies by Mohr that led to the pardon, and the lies in the president’s pardon like this:

This was no accident or split-second mistake. It was a willful and deliberate act of police brutality. It was also not Mohr’s first — and there was a pattern to the violence. Evidence at trial showed that Mohr had previously released her dog on a Black teenager sleeping in a hammock in his own backyard. She had threatened the relatives of a fugitive that she would let her dog attack their “black ass” if they did not tell her where he was.

In early December, Mohr made a direct appeal to the president for a pardon by going on Newsmax. She spewed falsehoods about the case, claiming she had been made a scapegoat. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The White House statement announcing her pardon noted that it reflected her “service and the lengthy term that Ms. Mohr served in prison,” adding, “Officer Mohr was a highly commended member of the police force prior to her prosecution.” Actually, she had been sued at least four times for brutality, was twice found to have made false statements to a superior and was flagged as a potential problem officer by the department’s early warning system.

Russia & COVID

Lying about pandemic deaths - fire the statistician

The New York Times reports that COVID-19 deaths in Russia are much higher than officially reported. This comes as no surprise. Experts have been saying for months that the official death toll has been too low in view of the number of reported infections. Like the US president, Russian dictator Putin has not treated the pandemic seriously because, also like the US president, he does not care about the well-being of Russian citizens. Statistical data triples Russia’s Covid-19 death toll. Despite the newly released data, the Russian government still refuses to release the actual death toll. The NYT writes:

The statistics agency said 230,000 more people died through November of this year than did in 2019, a hike attributable to the virus.

After months of questions over the true scale of the coronavirus pandemic in Russia and the efficacy of a Russian-developed vaccine, the state statistical agency in Moscow has announced new figures indicating that the death toll from Covid-19 is more than three times as high as officially reported.

From the start of the pandemic early this year, the health crisis has been enveloped and, say critics, distorted by political calculations as President Vladimir V. Putin and Kremlin-controlled media outlets have repeatedly boasted of Russian successes in combating the virus and keeping the fatality rate relatively low.

But the release of the data received little coverage on state media and the news was crowded out by upbeat reports ahead of a lengthy national holiday to celebrate the new year. State television focused on what it said was the eagerness of foreign countries, especially Belarus, to roll out a vaccine developed in Russia.  

Russia has reported more than 3 million cases of infection, making it the world’s fourth-hardest-hit country, but only 55,827 deaths, fewer than in seven other countries. A demographer at a government agency who questioned the official fatality figures, dismissing them as far too low, was fired over the summer.

China & COVID: We are not gonna tell you what we know

Like the US president and Russian dictator Putin, the Chinese government does not care much about the well-being of people, at least ones outside China. The AP reports that the Chinese government has shut down access to research information on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This is an example of government lying by withholding information. The AP writes: 

Deep in the lush mountain valleys of southern China lies the entrance to a mine shaft that once harbored bats with the closest known relative of the COVID-19 virus.

The area is of intense scientific interest because it may hold clues to the origins of the coronavirus that has killed more than 1.7 million people worldwide. Yet for scientists and journalists, it has become a black hole of no information because of political sensitivity and secrecy.

A bat research team visiting recently managed to take samples but had them confiscated, two people familiar with the matter said. Specialists in coronaviruses have been ordered not to speak to the press. And a team of Associated Press journalists was tailed by plainclothes police in multiple cars who blocked access to roads and sites in late November.

More than a year since the first known person was infected with the coronavirus, an AP investigation shows the Chinese government is strictly controlling all research into its origins, clamping down on some while actively promoting fringe theories that it could have come from outside China.  

The government is handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to scientists researching the virus’ origins in southern China and affiliated with the military, the AP has found. But it is monitoring their findings and mandating that the publication of any data or research must be approved by a new task force managed by China’s cabinet, under direct orders from President Xi Jinping, according to internal documents obtained by The AP. A rare leak from within the government, the dozens of pages of unpublished documents confirm what many have long suspected: The clampdown comes from the top.