US Politics: the McCarthy Trials

[Jaxom 1974]

Guys! You guys! Hes running!

[Zorral]

Whew!  Will this Amanda Marcotte article get the incels, racists, misogynists and fascists screaming.  Hope they split just like Rumplestiltskin. 

The unsung hero behind Donald Trump’s crushing fraud case: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Progressive firebrand's first big win: Exposing Trump's fraud so Letitia James could bring down his company

https://www.salon.com/2023/10/03/unsung-hero-behind-donald-crushing-fraud-case/

Quote

 

The main hero of the Donald Trump fraud trial that kicked off Monday is, of course, Letitia James. New York's attorney general has worked tirelessly for years on investigating Trump's decades of criminal and corrupt behavior, resulting in a $250 million lawsuit accusing Trump and his two grown sons of running a fraudulent business. Her case is so airtight, in fact, that New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled Trump liable for fraud from the bench, rather than waste a jury's time figuring out what was indisputable from the evidence. The ensuing trial — which drew Trump himself into the Manhattan courtroom this week — is entirely about how serious the penalities will be. 

There are weeks, maybe months to go before we learn how much Trump will have to pay for defrauding investors, banks and insurance companies over several decades. So we'll have to wait a bit for James to get her virtual ticker-tape parade for kicking the most hated man in New York real estate out of town. In the meantime, however, there's another well-known New York City politician who is owed a debt of gratitude for bringing some accountability to Trump's gold-painted front door: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

In our era of 24/7 media onslaught, four years can seem like like four lifetimes, so it's easy to forget that when Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Congress in January 2019, there was a lot of curiosity and outright skepticism about her among the Beltway press. She'd gotten there in improbable fashion, winning a 2018 primary against Rep. Joe Crowley — a power broker in Queens who chaired the House Democratic caucus and was seen as a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi. Before that, Ocasio-Cortez had been working as a bartender in a Manhattan taco joint. So the media was watching eagerly to see whether she'd rise to the occasion or fall flat on her face. 

Ocasio-Cortez's first big test came in February 2019, when Trump's former personal attorney and "fixer," Michael Cohen, testified before the House Oversight Committee. Cohen was about to go to prison for a campaign finance crime committed at Trump's behest, and told a genuinely moving story of crime and betrayal. But most of the Democrats on the committee whiffed this opportunity to ask questions of a guy who had been nestled within the Trump gang for years. Instead, they devoted their time to grandstanding for the cameras, rather than learning any new information about Trump's illegal dealings. 

Except, of course, for the young congresswoman from a working-class, multiracial district in Queens and the Bronx. Much to the surprise and delight of mainstream journalists, Ocasio-Cortez was all business. She showed up with a long list of questions about how much Cohen knew about Trump's business dealings and whether the man currently in the White House had spent his previous career defrauding creditors and investors. Cohen's answer: Trump was criming all the time. The transcript is worth re-reading and relishing:

Ocasio-Cortez: To your knowledge, did the president ever provide inflated assets to an insurance company?

Cohen: Yes.

Ocasio-Cortez: Who else knows that the president did this?

Cohen: Allen Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari.

Ocasio-Cortez: And where would the committee find more information on this? Do you think we need to review his financial statements and his tax returns in order to compare them?

Cohen: Yes, and you would find it at the Trump Org.

Federal investigators follow Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's questioning of Michael Cohen with new probe
That line of questioning, in which Cohen confirmed that Trump routinely manipulated numbers to evade taxes while defrauding banks and insurance companies, was the first step on the long road to Trump making a stink-face in court on Monday morning. New York state regulators started to sniff around Trump's business. James had already been dealing with a smaller case involving Trump's charitable foundation, but Cohen's testimony opened the door to a much bigger investigation. 

Three years later, James came out with the stunning — and largely irrefutable — accusations she's presenting in court this week: Trump's wealth is built on a sandcastle of lies. He doubles, triples or quadruples the valuations of his assets in order to get loans from creditors, and drastically undervalues them to evade taxes. With this shell game, the four-times-indicted ex-president lives like a rich man despite his proven inability to make much money from his business ventures. Everything Cohen said before that committee has pretty much proven true, and only AOC even thought to ask him about it. 

The near-certainty that Trump's allegedly enormous wealth is an illusion has already been documented in reporting on his tax documents showing that he is deep in debt — perhaps as much $1 billion — even though inherited nearly half a billion from his father and earned another $427 million from his reality-TV star turn on "The Apprentice." All available evidence suggests Trump blew through that money and kept digging, creating a money pit so enormous that banks likely had given up hope of seeing any of it repaid. Yet Trump has kept up the illusion of immense wealth with his private jets and entourages, all paid for through dozens of opaque shell companies — and, as James' evidence suggests, through massive fraud.

He might have gotten away with it, too, if not for that nosy congresswoman from the outer boroughs. I'm a little surprised that almost no one seems to remember the crucial role Ocasio-Cortez played in this. At the time of the hearing, after all, she got an avalanche of good coverage for her showing, especially from journalists who were sick of listening to politicians bloviate rather than perform their constitutional duties of legislative oversight. Her willingness to do her actual job, however, didn't just make her look good by comparison. It got a very big ball rolling that could 

One reason AOC's role has been forgotten, I suspect, is that the Beltway press tends to think of "progressives" as entirely distinct from the people who really want to see Trump go to jail. Turn on MSNBC or CNN, after all, and the people talking on the Trump crime-and-punishment beat are often centrist Democrats and never-Trump Republicans, your Claire McCaskills and George Conways and the like. Progressive Democrats are usually called upon to talk about policy issues: health care, climate change, jobs programs and so on. So there's this unspoken assumption that progressives don't much care about corruption and accountability. 

In fact, there's substantial evidence that progressives may put an even higher value on opposing corruption than their more moderate colleagues. For instance, progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania were among the first to call for the resignation of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., after his recent indictment on bribery and corruption charges. This isn't just about political progressives also being people of conscience. I think they understand how intertwined corruption and authoritarian politics are, and understand you can't fight one without fighting the other. 

Authoritarians like Trump gain power by exploiting public cynicism. The more that voters believe that all politicians cheat the system, the more decent citizens will give up engaging meaningfully in politics at all. Eventually, the only people left in politics are the ones with no vision of a better world beyond a bitter desire to stick it to racial minorities, LGBTQ people and women. Getting people to believe in equal justice and functional government is a necessary prerequisite if folks like Fetterman and Ocasio-Cortez are to make any progress on the social and economic issues that matter most to them. It makes sense that AOC opened the door for the massive lawsuit that may bring Donald Trump's business empire crashing down. Maybe the main reason she's not taking more credit for that is that in the here and now she's busy trying to expose the corruption of House Republicans. 

 

 

[Varysblackfyre321]

15 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

by David Graeber and David Wengrow that from what I would call a rightist position attacked the very idea of the inevitable of the State that they suggested pervades the academy.

Yeah if you’d mentioned reading Ben Shapiro—who is probably the best incarnation of what Jewish person can be without going full Hitler was good— he still gets a ton of hate on the far right because he is Jewish. Hell during the Dailywire’s beef with Crowder, one of Crowder’s lackeys just flat out said during by tim pool(another far right media personality) something to the tune of at least Crowder wouldn’t be working for a Jew.

the person you were engaging would  have gone to the same route even though they and Shapiro probably agree on 99% of stuff with the biggest disagreement being whether Shapiro should killed for being Jewish.

16 hours ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

The Jews. It always comes back to the Jews for the anti-establishment right.

 

Even when they don’t when actually having to give specifics such as who they’re against and why their opposition is doing what they’re  it’ll usually be the Jews who want their civilization through the spread of degeneracy(socially liberal values).

Sometimes it is really is just a vibe though a vibe that’ll be more easily exploited by more ideologically coherent actors. 
I was watching a debate between a progressive and an Andrew Tate fan(a teenager, obvi), and when grilled on who the “Matrix” was he was unsure but when questioned if he believed the Jewish question and explained what that meant he was really receptive to the premise of it.

 

[Varysblackfyre321]

On 10/4/2023 at 10:31 AM, Phylum of Alexandria said:

But also, even if I don't believe it as literally true, religious traditions and scriptures are far richer and important for our culture than the barren assessment of them as "fiction," as in mere fiction. Really powerful fiction has changed my life, no need to minimize it. To paraphrase Alan Moore in V for Vendetta: "Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I told you a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself."

That’s dangerous, this forsaking of truth for a perceived social utility will always be to the detriment to human survival and progression ultimately especially right now where we’re facing a climate catastrophe that’d be recognized as just a signal of the end times by many white American evangelicals

I’m not saying attack everyone whose religious as primitive and reactionary.

Many an atheist have been more intolerable to me than a theist.

but fostering good faith debate, honest dialogue, about the validity of a religion or a supernatural or what have you is healthy and necessary to avoid accepting some really bad modes of thinking and dogma as absolutely true.

 

 

Edited October 7, 2023 by Varysblackfyre321

[Larry of the Lawn]

20 hours ago, Zorral said:

And, um, why not?  Plenty of people were prognosticating exactly what was happening was going to bring about what it brought about.  Why do you think such a perceptive and sensitive poet had less understanding than all those, which included many within the circles he inhabited?   This just seems ... incredibly short-sighted of you.

So that poem is about the state of the US Republican party some 100-odd years later?

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

So that poem is about the state of the US Republican party some 100-odd years later?

 

No.  It is a poem about the human condition universally… that seems (to me and @Zorral) to resonate particularly strongly about what we have become in the US.

When I say prophetic… I’m not being literal.  I’m being metaphorical.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

12 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

That’s dangerous, this forsaking of truth for a perceived social utility will always be to the detriment to human survival and progression ultimately especially right now where we’re facing a climate catastrophe that’d be recognized as just a signal of the end times by many white American evangelicals

What Alan Moore is talking about with respect to art and lies is as dangerous as a person reading A Song of Ice and Fire and relating to the characters, or seeing something true about the moral weakness of the court nobles. Meaning, not dangerous at all.

I mean, I get that the character V in V for Vendetta was a bit of a sociopath, but the meta-commentary about fiction has been voiced by Moore elsewhere in other words.

Note that my original comment was not trying to minimize the importance of confirmable truth. It was a riposte to the view of life that is limited to only that which is confirmable, relegating scripture and art as "mere" fictions and merely myths. Which I find to be impoverished.

Edited October 7, 2023 by Phylum of Alexandria

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

So that poem is about the state of the US Republican party some 100-odd years later?

 

Why are you deliberately being obtuse and stupid?

[Martell Spy]

Angus Deaton on inequality: ‘The war on poverty has become a war on the poor’
The Nobel prize winner and author of new book Economics in America argues economists must get back to serving society

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/oct/07/angus-deaton-interview-book-economics-in-america

Quote

 

But, as Deaton describes in his unsparing new book, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, he soon realized he had run headlong into the libertarian monetarists of the Chicago School of Economics, and they were driving US policy.

“There is this very strong libertarian belief that inequality is not a proper area of study for economists,” Deaton said. “Even if you were to worry about inequality, it would be best if you just kept quiet and lived with it.”

 

 

[Zorral]

Presumably then, with the US effectively shut-down, thanx to the idiot fascists feuding over which of Them can be House Speaker For A Day, not only is aid to Ukraine frozen, aid for Israel can't be allocated.

[Larry of the Lawn]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Why are you deliberately being obtuse and stupid?

 

Scot used the word "predicted", and then in explaining his reference to the Yeats' line went on to talk about gridlock in Congress.  He then clarified and said he was speaking metaphorically.  I think it's completely understandable that people might have been unclear as to what he meant.  

It is entirely possible to hold the idea that Yeats had great insight into the human condition, and that some things he described are observable in this Congress, and still be confused as to whether or not Scot was calling this an actual prognostication or simply an examole of behavior that fits the words.   What Scot wrote, particularly the doubling down on the "prediction" aspect by citing the McCarthy shit show, did nothing to clarify this for me.  

When I asked that question, I was simply trying to parse out what Scot meant by "predicted" - from context it seemed like it could go either way.  

 

I think it's pretty inaccurate, and unfair, to say that Ormond's being "short-sighted" and I'm just being deliberately "obtuse and stupid".    

 

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

 

Scot used the word "predicted", and then in explaining his reference to the Yeats' line went on to talk about gridlock in Congress.  He then clarified and said he was speaking metaphorically.  I think it's completely understandable that people might have been unclear as to what he meant.  

It is entirely possible to hold the idea that Yeats had great insight into the human condition, and that some things he described are observable in this Congress, and still be confused as to whether or not Scot was calling this an actual prognostication or simply an examole of behavior that fits the words.   What Scot wrote, particularly the doubling down on the "prediction" aspect by citing the McCarthy shit show, did nothing to clarify this for me.  

When I asked that question, I was simply trying to parse out what Scot meant by "predicted" - from context it seemed like it could go either way.  

 

I think it's pretty inaccurate, and unfair, to say that Ormond's being "short-sighted" and I'm just being deliberately "obtuse and stupid".    

 

 

 

No.  I did not mean Yeats literally predicted anything beyond what he specifically said and that his words are meant about humanity generally… not the US and our current situation specifically…

[Larry of the Lawn]

9 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No.  I did not mean Yeats literally predicted anything beyond what he specifically said and that his words are meant about humanity generally… not the US and our current situation specifically…

That's very clear now, thanks 

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

parse out what Scot meant by "predicted"

Not if you know anything at all of the historical context of Yeats's poem.

Which you surely do, since you 'disingenuously' chose to challenge his prescience regarding the application of the sentiments to our own times.

That's why.

Edited October 7, 2023 by Zorral

[ThinkerX]

Okay...so 'Gym' Jordan becomes Speaker of the House. Being a conspiracy theorist and right wingnut, he uses his authority to take aim at his greatest enemy - fact checkers, attempting to push even more legislation against such folks. Then he gets his day in court over 1/6...and loses, along with assorted other wingnuts in the Republican house majority.

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Not if you know anything at all of the historical context of Yeats's poem.

Which you surely do, since you 'disingenuously' chose to challenge his prescience regarding the application of the sentiments to our own times.

That's why.

Well, maybe it's just me.  To me, "predict" and "prognosticate" have specific meanings.  Those are different to me than "describing."  Scot said predicted, putting it in the context of his (Scot's) observations on the internet.  I think the Yeats lines are an apt description of what Scot wrote.  I don't think they actually "predict" any specific event, they describe a tendency for things to fall apart, especially human social endeavors and liberal politics.  When I say "liberal" i'm talking in the classic, not modern sense.

But the way Scot wrote it  was "Yeats predicted this".  Ormond then responded that Yeats wasn't making predictions or some great prognosticator.  (For what it's worth, I agree with this.  I too, was wondering what Scot was getting at).  You then took that comment and made the, as far as i can tell, baseless assumption that Ormond thought Yeats "had less understanding than all those".  There's nothing in what Ormond wrote to give the impression that he believed Yeats to have less of an understanding than his contemporaries.   Scot then in his response made references to the current shit going on in the house.

I've heard people speculate that Yeats might have been referring to the upper classes of Europe when he wrote "the best", and the general populace, hoi polloi, working class masses as "the worst" in the context of the poem.

Then, given what you wrote, and the fact the Scot did seem to be attributing some kind of foresight beyond observations of human nature, it seemed like you were defending the idea that Yeats words were making predictions beyond "people just cant make decisions together when it matters".

I made that initial post about "the Republican party today" because I was quite specifically wondering if you two knew of some kind of specific political meaning behind the words that i wasn't aware of,.  If you want to call that "disingenuous" or "deliberately obtuse" or "stupid" have at it.  It was NOT clear to me what kind of meaning you were attributing to the poem - which is why I asked a question that I thought would clear that up-- from the posts my impression was that you and Scot were onto some kind of political reference in the words that I did not know.  I was curious!  Had Yeats written or said elsewhere something about the press that would be a parallel to the internet stuff?  I didn't know, but it sounded like there was some reference involved.  Which I suppose would have made me ignorant of said reference, but certainly not "deliberately obtuse."

The fact that you pushed back on Ormond was what led me to believe that some such reference existed.  And beyond the general observation on the slings and arrows of government and the class interpretation that i mentioned above, I could not figure out what it might have been.

 

[Fragile Bird]

Geez, I miss pages and pages of DMC, Kal and Ty arguing.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

You don't realize how much you miss great sex until it's gone. 

[Gaston de Foix]

Apparently the Republican Main Street Caucus is bellowing to reinstate Kevin McCarthy because....Israel. 

[Durckad]

14 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

You don't realize how much you miss great hate sex until it's gone. 

FIFY.