A short history note regarding official emails and documents

A radical right Republican Party propaganda talking point has been and sometimes still is self-righteous moral outrage over Democrats' sloppy handling of emails and official documents that belong to the US government and are supposed to be archived. Hillary Clinton was vilified and investigated for it while improperly using a personal server. The GOP howled in sanctimonious outrage over Clinton's alleged sloppiness and incompetence on this point. She was a severe national security threat and whatnot. The Republican rank and file was foaming at the mouth over this outrage and demanding justice.

LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! 

And, when the ex-president was recently found to have stolen documents, including some classified papers, his shameless party said nothing. It was just hypocrisy as usual for the Republicans. The ranks and file was just hunky dory with the theft.

But, there was another incident about improper document handling that has been mostly forgotten but should be mentioned for convenient recall. Under president Bush, his email communications were run through Republican Party servers, not government servers. In yet another failure to vindicate the rule of law, the Republican Party erased millions of Bush emails. No criminal prosecution resulted. Newsweek wrote this about it in 2016:

For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton's personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.

Clinton's email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House "lost" 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America's recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. "It's about as amazing a double standard as you can get," says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. "If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers' emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton's emails set up on a private DNC server?" (emphasis added)

And, lest  we forget, one other quick point merits mention. The email issue was a non-trivial factor that lost Clinton the 2016 election. That disaster resulted in election of a mendacious, corrupt, demagogic tyrant-wannabe. So, don't forget about Republican Party hypocrisy and official documents and emails. They are wicked important.

Note the date: Oct. 28, 2016, 

about 1 week before the election

That's been your daily serving of political history. 

Russia's propaganda: Does any of this sound familiar?

The con-artist accuses the US of being a con-artist and, to deflect  

from his own corruption and failings, he has festering historical  

grievances and accusations of a relentless Western plot

The New York Times writes:

PARIS — President Vladimir V. Putin has ordered Russian troops into Ukraine but made clear his true target goes beyond his neighbor to America’s “empire of lies,” and he threatened “consequences you have never faced in your history” for “anyone who tries to interfere with us.”

In another rambling speech full of festering historical grievances and accusations of a relentless Western plot against his country, Mr. Putin reminded the world on Thursday that Russia “remains one of the most powerful nuclear states” with “a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons.”

In effect, Mr. Putin’s speech, intended to justify the invasion, seemed to come closer to threatening nuclear war than any statement from a major world leader in recent decades. His immediate purpose was obvious: to head off any possible Western military move by making clear he would not hesitate to escalate.

Given Russia’s nuclear arsenal, he said, “there should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.” He added: “All necessary decisions have been taken in this regard.”

Mr. Putin’s move into Ukraine and his thinly veiled nuclear threat have now shattered Europe’s notions of security and the presumption of peace it has lived with for several generations. The postwar European project, which produced so much stability and prosperity, has entered a new, uncertain and confrontational stage.  

Europe has rediscovered its vulnerability. Mr. Macron said on Thursday that Mr. Putin had “decided to bring about the gravest violation of peace and stability in our Europe for decades.” Of Ukrainians, he said, “Their liberty is our liberty.”

But no European country, nor the United States for that matter, will put lives on the line for that freedom. The question, then, is how they can draw a line for Mr. Putin.

After his short war in Georgia in 2008, his annexation of Crimea in 2014, his orchestration in 2014 of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two breakaway regions, and his military intervention in Syria in 2015, Mr. Putin has clearly concluded that Russia’s readiness to use its armed forces to advance its strategic aims will go unanswered by the United States or its European allies.

“Russia wants insecurity in Europe because force is its trump card,” said Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador. “They never wanted a new security order, whatever the European illusions. Putin decided some time ago that confrontation with the West was his best option.”  

“Nearly everywhere, in many regions of the world where the United States brought its law and order, this created bloody, unhealing wounds and the curse of international terrorism and extremism,” Mr. Putin said. America’s conduct across the globe was “con-artist behavior.”

He continued: “Therefore, one can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same ‘empire of lies.’”  

He appeared to have forgotten that Ukraine once had a vast nuclear arsenal before it gave it up in 1994 under an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum. Russia was one of the countries that signed the accord, promising in exchange that it would never use force or threats against Ukraine and would respect its sovereignty and existing borders.

A couple of points merit comment.

Putin threatens nuclear war. That arguably is apocalyptic talk. People have criticized me for raising the issue of the threat of nuclear war in the Ukraine mess. Accidents and/or mistakes sometimes happen because humans sometimes accidentally or mistakenly do stupid. Stupid includes nuclear war. Now, Putin is making explicit nuclear threats. Something stupid could happen, but we all hope the chances of that are very, very low.

Putin, like our tyrant-wannabe ex-president and his morally rotted, autocratic political party, is a chronic liar. When they accuse others of lying, con-artistry and the like, they are projecting onto others what they do themselves in spades and with a shameless vengeance. Once again, it is clear that to demagogues, tyrants, crooks and liars ('bad people'), shameless hypocrisy and double standards are not concerns, morally or otherwise. It is just what bad people do. Those tactics sure do sound familiar. It sounds a lot like the rhetoric and behaviors from America's radical right. 

Putin is probably right that confrontation is his best option, assuming something stupid doesn't happen as an consequence. Due to its crippling corruption and authoritarianism, Russia's GDP is a paltry ~$1.5 trillion, while the US GDP is ~$21 trillion and California's GDP is ~$3.3 trillion. Putin just doesn't have an economy that he can leverage. That is his fault, no matter how hard he blames the EU, NATO and the US. But he does have a powerful military and nuclear arsenal. Since he is rigidly demagogic, kleptocratic and autocratic, he won't cooperate or negotiate with the EU, US or NATO in good faith. All he has left is brute force and the threat of nuclear war.

Free markets vs. the public interest

Private sector profit centers in public markets

As far as I know, all or essentially all neoliberals, laissez-faire capitalists and other free market advocates uniformly argue these days that free markets do better for the public interest or general welfare than government. That is rock solid dogma and not questioned. Dissenters are attacked and smeared as socialist or communist crooks, liars and tyrants or totalitarians. Current evidence indicates that the free market dogma on this point is false. Arguably it has to be false for undeniable structural reasons. 

Specifically, (i) free markets usually demand and get higher returns than governments, making the product or service more expensive right from the get-go, (ii) alleged private sector efficiency and alleged government fraud and waste do not compensate for the difference, and (iii) actual, real-world evidence indicates that free market efficiency usually does not translate to lower prices or better products ands services for the public for government products and services. 

But for some capitalists and ideologues at the top, the wealth and power rewards for believing and living the pro-free market myth are gigantic. The free market mega-incentive demands blind, absolute adherence to the myth of its superiority. Belief in the myth is unshakeable, just like the Republican's 2020 stolen election myth.

Salon writes:

The Privatization of Everything is a book that sneaks up on you. Or at least it snuck up on me. Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian's subtitle should have prepared me: "How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back."

Slowly but surely, it dawned on me that the authors had articulated a sound, sensible and compelling vision about how realize the promise embedded in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: "to promote the general welfare." That vision holds the promise of a pathway to rebuilding civic trust and a sense of common national purpose. That might seem to be wishful thinking, especially at this historical moment. But public goods are highly popular across the board, with Republicans as well as Democrats and independents, ....

Salon: Let's start with some of the basic, broad principles or perspectives in your book, starting with the idea that what's been privatized is the entire notion of public goods.  You argue that they shouldn't be understood in terms that economists have used, as "non-excludable non-rival goods," but rather should be defined by the public itself. Why is that important?

Cohen: .... health care is a private good. you can exclude people, and we do, and of course there are only so many doctors and nurses and hospital beds. So if it's a private good, the market drives and the market rules. But if it's a public good, then we get to say that everyone should have it. We should be able to do that democratically and not let the neoclassical market definition of public goods define what we can do.

Salon: You repeatedly make the point that privatization is more expensive, even when it appears cheaper upfront. This is glaringly obvious in one way, since private investors routinely expect double-digit returns while public bonds typically return around 4% a year.

 

Cohen: Businesses have legitimate business expenses, as well as pretty high executive compensation packages, in the millions, depending on the corporations. They have returns to investors, profit. They have political expenses, lobbying, and they also have debt, because they're involved in mergers and acquisitions, buying up other businesses. All of those are business expenses, none of which, fundamentally, is being spent on the service.

They say they're efficient, but efficiency is just spending less to get more. There's a finite list of things you can spend less on. You can have fewer workers, which they do. It happens in private prisons, they have higher ratios of prisoners to corrections officers. You could pay them less, lower wages and fewer benefits, which they do. You can use lower-quality equipment or supplies, that happens as well. And ultimately, you can give less service. When they privatized Medicaid in Iowa and Kansas, know what happened? Simple math. You got less care. So it's it's really a fallacy when they say "more efficient." There may be things you can do to make services more efficient, we should always strive to do that. But when they say "more efficient," really what they mean is they're going to spend less, and quite often that's very much counter to our interests.

Salon: My next question is about the basic logic of who's being served with public versus private financing, where interests and incentives aren't well-aligned. That's perhaps clearest in your discussion of public-private partnerships, or P3s.

Cohen: Yes, particularly involving infrastructure. The way you build stuff is design, build, finance, operate and maintain. That's how infrastructure is built. So, design/build is often private. When you bring in private finance capital, which is more expensive than public finance — often a lot more expensive — then the private financiers, usually along with the consortium, want to take control of the asset, do the operations and maintain it for decades.

So several things are true there. One of which is they're paying more for capital. The second thing is, they say they'll do it cheaper and faster, and they often say "with no new taxes," when they're advocating for public-private partnership. But there's a real simple truth: Things cost money and there's only one place to get money. From us. If it's not a tax it's a toll, if it's not a tax it's a rate hike. There's no free lunch. There's no free money out there. So that's the first thing you have to put aside. It's going to cost money. The question is who's going to get it.

I use the example of Chicago parking meters as the example on P3s. [Private investors, led by Morgan Stanley, paid the city of Chicago $1.16 billion for a 75-year operating contract in 2008. That had realized a $500 million profit as of 2019, with 64 years to go.] There are two things wrong with the deal. It was an incredibly stupid way to borrow money on your future revenues. But even if that was the only option, they got taken. They sold $1 billion too cheap.

But here's the real problem with P3s. If the city wants to eliminate parking spots, to get people out of cars with rapid transit or dedicated bus lanes or pedestrian street malls or by changing housing patterns — the responsibilities of a city — they have to buy the parking spots back. That's the core of what the problem is, because when [private entities] get control of the asset, they get control of the decisions that we ought to have. The city of Chicago's elected leaders — the city council, the mayor — their hands are tied if they want to expand transit.

The interview is long and it goes on and on. The quoted portions make the point. Free markets are inherently and, because humans are human, intractably at odds with the public interest or general welfare. 

To be blunt: Free markets are there to maximize profits for the people at the top and un-subverted government markets are there to minimize costs for the public good. Or put another way, the business of business is business, but the business of government is service to the public interest or general welfare, which includes providing the best at lowest cost. 

To flog this dead horse one more time, free markets do just one thing: They look to maximize profit by selling stuff at the highest price with the lowest production, worker, social and environmental protection cost, risk and accountability. By contrast, governments look to meet public needs and wants at the lowest cost for the most people. Those are two fundamentally different things. Both want the lowest cost for different reasons, profit for the private market and maximized public good for government. That generally makes the two intractably at odds. 

The problem with white collar crime

White-collar crime: this kind of crime spans a wide range of frauds committed by business and government professionals. These crimes are characterized by deceit, concealment, or violation of trust and are not dependent on the application or threat of physical force or violence; Wikipedia: refers to financially motivated, nonviolent or non directly violent crime committed by individuals, businesses and government professionals 

The New York Times and other outlets report that two key New York state prosecutors have resigned from a case that is gathering evidence to potentially prosecute the ex-president for his past business practices in New York. In my limited experience, white collar crime is hard to prosecute and get convictions for. My guess is that about 0.05% of all white collar crime is prosecuted. Lack of sufficient evidence to convict is the main reason. Most of the few cases that are brought to trial lead to a conviction because sufficient evidence to convince a jury was found. Plausible deniability is a powerful shield that protects white collar crooks who know how to use it as a defensive weapon against law enforcement.

The main problem is insufficient evidence to convince a jury of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. There are ways to create reasonable doubt in at least 1 juror on a jury. Systemic factors also inherently create room for reasonable doubt, e.g., no one takes any responsibility for anything they can weasel out of. That is just standard business practice. 

So, ‘reasonable doubt’ is all that it takes in the mind of one juror to get a crook off the hook. There may also be a limited resource problem because prosecuting white collar crime take a lot of time to gather evidence. 

With the resignation of the two key prosecutors after their boss expressed doubts about the case, it looks like the ex-president will get off of white collar crimes he committed in New York state. The NYT writes:

The two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his business practices abruptly resigned on Wednesday amid a monthlong pause in their presentation of evidence to a grand jury, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The prosecutors, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted their resignations because the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicated to them that he had doubts about moving forward with a case against Mr. Trump, the people said.

Early this month, (Trump’s accountants] Mazars notified the Trump Organization that it would no longer serve as its accountant and that it could no longer stand behind a decade of Mr. Trump’s financial statements.

Mazars said it had not, “as a whole,” found material discrepancies between the information the Trump Organization provided and the true value of Mr. Trump’s assets.

Even with the retraction from Mazars, a criminal case would likely be difficult to prove. The documents, known as statements of financial condition, contain a number of disclaimers, including acknowledgments that Mr. Trump’s accountants had neither audited nor authenticated his claims.

And the prosecutors would have to show that Mr. Trump’s penchant for hyperbole crossed the line into criminality, a tall order when it comes to something as subjective as property values. A case like this might hinge on the testimony of a Trump insider, but the prosecutors have not persuaded Mr. Weisselberg to cooperate with the investigation, depriving them of the type of insider witness whose testimony can be crucial to complicated white-collar criminal trials.

Another challenge is that Mr. Trump’s lenders might not appear to a jury to be sympathetic victims.[1] The lenders, which made millions of dollars in interest from Mr. Trump, conducted their own assessments of his assets.

The advantages a white collar criminal has are huge and obvious. Mazars hides behind disclaimers. Juries will not be sympathetic to big lenders who made lots of money helping the ex-president commits his crimes. Witnesses refuse to cooperate. Maybe it is a miracle that any white collar criminals are ever convicted.

Adding to the deep insult of his probably unpunishable criminality, the ex-president publicly blasts the District Attorney as a politically motivated black racist, even though his predecessor DA was a White guy who started the investigation into Trump’s corrupt business dealings. 

When I complain about the rule of law being under attack and weak, a major part of what I am complaining about is immunity from prosecution for white collar crimes.[1] Street thugs are not white collar criminals. Rich and powerful people are. They have the opportunity, a protective system and an intense motive, more wealth and/or power, that drives them. Why not be a white collar crook? The reward is usually quite high and, when a good opportunity presents itself, the risk of accountability is quite low.

Footnote: 

1. A lawsuit I was very familiar with involved an unsympathetic jury (not a white collar crime). An attorney committed malpractice and that cost his clients about $800,000 in avoidable loss. The jury convicted the attorney for malpractice but awarded his former clients $1 in damage. Why just $1? Two reasons. First, the clients were paying the attorney “only” $187/hour when the going rate was closer to maybe about $250/hour. The attorney, not the clients, suggested that rate because that was his rate for similar work and they accepted it.

Second, was the defense attorney’s closing argument based on a story that he claimed was personal. His story was this: Me and my wife went out to dinner. I was looking forward to a nice steak. But when we ordered, she made me get the chicken. End of story.

I was completely baffled by that story and its relevance to the lawsuit. My confusion aside, apparently the chicken dinner story left a big impression on the jury. Apparently, they thought the attorney’s wife was a cheap skate and he deserved his steak, not the chicken. The jury transposed that reasoning into the lawsuit and decided the two clients were cheap skates and all they deserved was $1 for their cheapness. 

So, the clients paid ~$300,000 to their attorneys and got $1 in return for their loss. They would have been ~$300,000 better off just letting their loss go. 

Lessons: Juries are humans and can be deeply flawed. Humans are often (usually?) not rational beings. The legal system is not close to perfect. To protect the innocent, the law is heavily tilted in favor of the accused, especially accused white collar criminals. That tilt also protects the guilty, especially smart white collar criminals who know how to build and maintain plausible deniability.

Plausible deniability in action

 

Freedom!

 

Question: Can a free country have too many freedoms?

If no, why not?  Explain.

If yes, where do you see that "imposing on a freedom" line drawn?  Please give details.

     Some ideas to think about:

-Whenever a freedom breaks the law

-Whenever a freedom turns violent

-Whenever a freedom creates public panic and/or disruption

-Whenever a freedom harms another (physically rather than emotionally)

-Whenever a freedom harms another (physically and/or emotionally)

-Whenever a freedom exacerbates an already problem situation (e.g., not getting vaccinated or wearing an uncomfortable mask)

-Whenever a freedom of the one outweighs the freedom of the many

-Whenever a freedom to not bake a gay cake or preform a gay wedding is imposed

-Whenever a freedom to keep and bear arms is threatened

-Whenever a fetus is threatened

-Whenever a lie or falsehood is perpetuated

-Whenever a religion is threatened 

-Whenever etc.

Thanks for posting and recommending.

How to punish Putin and Russia:

 All the civilized world needs to come together, especially the EU and NATO, as well including Australian, NZ, Japan, S. Korea, etc:

Pull ALL of your citizens out of Russia, then ban ALL travel to and fro, especially ban all tourism to.

Immediately stop ALL imports of anything from Russia, no more importing vodka.

Immediately shut all of your ports to Russian interests and stop shipping anything to Russia.

Ban ALL Russian banks and financial institutions and immediately seize all Russian assets held in the above mentioned countries.

Close ALL Russian embassies and send them all back to Russia.

Ban Russians from ALL international sporting events and do NOT participate in any held in Russia.

Send to Ukraine, IMMEDIATELY, our most deadly weapons. Make a war too costly for them.

Russia engages in cyber attacks on other countries, imagine if ALL the other countries, especially those listed above, ALL engaged in full non-stop cyber attacks on Russian interests.

Then hire me as special advisor to NATO and the U.S. because quite frankly...… the advisors they have now don't have a clue what to do about Putin or Russia.

Your welcome.