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21st Century grifting

Saturday, October 23, 2021

A few days ago I reported on a book I was (and still am) reading about the building of the intercontinental railroads in the Gilded Age. For the most part the tycoons who “built” the railroads were actually involved in financial manipulation through which they diverted money, often borrowed from the government, through the railroad, to other entities, and ultimately into their own pockets, while the railroads themselves went into bankruptcy. These schemes at least had the virtue of appearing to be on the up and up; the fraud was not immediately apparent to a potential investor, though the game was exposed soon enough.

Nowadays the grifters seem to announce themselves in advance. I’ve written before about the NFT craze, which involves paying huge sums for the alleged sole ownership of a bunch of pixels. Now we have, and who could have predicted it, Donald Trump launching another grifting operation that involves a financial sleight of hand so dubious that one would think it would alert any potential investor to the underlying fraud. In this case we’re talking about SPACs, or Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicles.

SPACs are an increasingly popular means through which private companies (like WeWork) can go public quickly and with less rigor than is involved in the traditional IPO process. The mechanism is that a shell company raises money through an initial public offering with the promise it will find a promising company to acquire. (This is why they are often referred to as “blank check companies.”) The company then uses that money to buy a private firm, after which it basically hands the business and name over to the acquired company.

I admit this boggles my mind. Apparently the SPAC, which is in essence an entity that does nothing, can get on the stock exchange simply by representing that it will eventually buy another company that will in fact make money. And apparently investors actually buy into this. Presumably the folks behind the shell company get to walk away with a good share of the money garnered from investors, who are stuck, unless they pull out fast enough, with shares in a company almost bound to lose money. At least from what I’ve read, the folks who form the shell company have no legal liability if they buy a turkey, and, when you think about it, only a turkey would need to use this mechanism to get on the stock market in the first place. In this case it’s a media company the sole purpose of which is to allow Donald Trump to have a presence on the internet.

It all seems a bit like a Ponzi scheme, in the sense that the first ones in, who will also be the first ones out, are the only likely winners. In this case, Trump, of course, stands to drain millions from his MAGA followers, who deserve to lose every penny they have. I suppose the scheme is at least somewhat more credible than the NFT scams, but not much more so. Those of us who wish Trump ill can take some comfort in the fact that any ill gotten gains he makes from this grift will likely go toward paying the huge debts he’s accumulated over the past few years, not to mention his lawyers.

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Book report

Monday, October 18, 2021

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

The above is attributed to Mark Twain, which is somewhat apt, as he, along with Charles Dudley Warner wrote The Gilded Age.

A week or so ago I was perusing the blogs, and read a post by Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money, which, somewhat in passing, heaped praise on a book by Richard White called Railroaded, The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, so I downloaded it onto my Kobo (no Kindle for me, my local bookstore gets a cut every time I buy an e-book.)

Sort of as an aside, it seems to me that one of the main jobs of modern historians is to refute the fairy tale version of our history that predominated a half century ago when I was just a lad reading a lot of that fairy tale history. All the brouhaha about critical race theory really boils down to a demand on the part of the racists that we stick with that fairy tale version of history instead of facing up to the actual facts.

Railroaded is not about race, but it certainly describes a situation that rhymes with a lot of what’s going on today.

We were taught that the railroads were the triumphant expression of American expansion, with the driving of the golden spike symbolizing a golden moment in our history when the continent was united by the efforts of railroad men such as Leland Stanford, whose name is enshrined as the founder of a rather prestigious university.

What we aren’t told is that the men (no women involved, of course) that “built” these railroads were con-men and swindlers who make Donald Trump look like a rank amateur. They put up no money of their own, but were heavily subsidized by the federal government, both by land grants and loans that were never repaid. Most of the roads lost huge amounts of money, but the swindlers who ran them made out like bandits. One common dodge: they would bribe Congress into giving them loans to build the railroads, and would then contract with construction companies they happened to own to build said railroads, thus lining their own pockets while driving the railroads themselves into debt. Speaking of rhyming, this reminds me of a common charter school dodge nowadays: the “non-profit” school gets public money, much of which it must pay to the landlord that owns the school building, that landlord being a corporation in which the operators of the charter school have a substantial, if not sole, interest. The railroads also made sure rates stayed artificially high. For instance, the California railroads paid a steamship line, that could have easily transported goods east from California via Panama cheaper than the rails could do so overland, a monthly bribe to keep its rates artificially high, thereby enabling the railroads to charge higher rates.

That brings us to the rhyme that keeps repeating itself: the corruption of politicians who enabled the railroad con-men. The methodology of delivering a non quid pro quo bribe was different back then, but certainly rhymes with the kind of stuff going on now. One common method back in the Gilded Age to bribe a congressman: Loan him the money to make an investment in your business. Despite the fact that the business was losing money hand over fist (while you are walking away with millions) hand him a handsome return on that investment in just a few months, more than enough to repay the loan and generously line his pockets. Of course both congressman and con-man assured one another that their arrangement had not the slightest impact on how the congressman might vote on legislation important to the con-man.

It’s not the history that we learned years ago, though there were certainly plenty of people aware of what was going on back when this was all happening.

For the most part, bribery is handled differently these days, but the essence is still there. Massive campaign contributions, which they take (looking at you especially, Krysten and Joe) while eschewing any implication that it will affect their votes at all. Republicans, in particular, can look forward, should they lose their seats, to a gilded retirement in which they sit back and collect money while “working” for a think tank funded by the folks whose water they so faithfully carried while in office. There can be little question that there are other methods that have not yet been exposed, but things may once again get more blatant now that the Supreme Court has ruled that, at least for Republicans, it is necessary to prove an explicit quid pro quo in order to convict a bribe taker. A mere wink-wink, nod-nod, is definitely not enough.

I think it’s fair to say that the corruption excesses of the Gilded Age were significantly curtailed in later years. That’s not to say there was none, but the more or less blatant corruption faded. We’re now in a second Gilded Age, with that corruption getting perhaps less attention from our press than it did then, despite the fact that back then, there were lots of newspapermen taking bribes to give the railroad men good press. Given the other things going on, and the present day ability of the corporations to also engage in unprecedented types of propaganda to maintain a large constituency for their policies and their subversion of our institutions, it seems unlikely that we’ll be able to pull out of this Gilded Age even to the extent we managed to get the last one somewhat behind us.

Anyway, to complete the book report, it’s a good read.

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What is this first amendment to which you refer?

Friday, October 15, 2021

We live in strange times. Just when you think someone has done the most outrageous thing you can think of, someone comes along and tops it.

You can read the full story at the link. I’ll summarize: A reporter in Missouri discovered a flaw in a state website that exposed the personal information of thousands of state employees. He got the information in a way that anyone with a fairly basic grasp of how the internet works could have done. He pressed a button on the state website, then pressed another that allowed him to view the source code. He notified the state of his discovery and his paper did not publish an article about the situation until the state took steps to correct it’s unbelievably stupid programming error.

Well, remember, we’re talking about Missouri, which is still somewhat of a border state, in that it’s not completely under the thumb of the yahoos, but said yahoos sure have a lot of influence, including, at the moment, the governorship.

His honor, the governor decided that the reporter, who had just done the state a service, should be rewarded for his good works by being arrested for allegedly hacking the state website, which he decidedly didn’t do.

It will not surprise you to learn that the governor is a Republican. It will also not surprise you to learn that he has some decidedly interesting ideas about what constitutes totally legal behavior:

Why, yes, that is the same governor who just pardoned gun nuts Mark and Patricia McCloskey for waving guns at racial justice protestors walking down the street. Because that’s not a “real” crime.

There is no way the reporter committed a crime. Back when I went to law school, before the law had been perverted as it has been recently, there was a civil cause of action for malicious prosecution. A plaintiff could sue a state actor for bringing patently false criminal charges. If they actually arrest this guy, he would have had a slam dunk case. But who knows? There may be an exception for plaintiffs who embarrass Republican governors.

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Fools and their money

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Back in the olden days of this blog, I wrote about a fairly new financial vehicle called *credit default swaps”, which I pointed out posed a substantial risk to the economy. You can read three salient posts, here, here, and here. Based on the relevant Wikipedia article, I conclude that credit default swaps are still with us, but, as they have not made much news lately, the threat posed to the economy, and the suckers who got caught up in the underlying grift, has been tempered somewhat.

Still, I can understand the underlying premises of credit default swaps and I can even see how some of the investors bought into the grift (the actual grifters excluded, of course).

Fast forward to today. I confess to being unable to understand why anyone would buy an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) and being incapable of understanding precisely what a buyer of said token is buying. There’s a discussion here, in which this capsule description appears to accurately describe what I’ve been able to glean about these things:

First let’s talk about what the NFT market actually is. Unlike buying bonds, equities, real estate, or actual art you’re not buying something with any tangible existence, rights or utility. You’re buying an expensive entry in someone else’s database.

The database entries usually consist of digital “works of art” which are supposedly uniquely accessible to the “owner” though there’s no reason to believe that is true, but apart from that, the “owners” continued ownership is totally dependent on access to the database, something over which they have no control, and due to the way these things work, ultimately in the possession of persons unknown who are immune from suit once they walk away with your money.

Lots of people are dumping lots of money into these things. It sort of boggles the mind. On the other hand, one sort of suspects that if you created a Venn diagram of the people who are talking Ivermectin and those buying NFTs, there’d be a lot of overlap. Still, we’re talking about fairly large amounts of money in each transaction. Where do these griftees get the money, and how have they managed to hang on to it long enough to get conned by these particular grifters. Life is full of mysteries.

Afterword: I suspect, but am not sure, that we can take heart that this particular grift does not pose a threat to the wider economy. The Republican Party has that job well in hand.

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Yet another shocked enabler

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Driftglass often remarks about the fact that memory is a liberal superpower, and as with most things he says, he seems to be right. He has, of late, been quite busy exposing the Republican never-Trumpers for the hypocrites they are, as they attempt to cover up their own part in creating the fascist party that is the current Republican Party. The claim that everything was peachy keen before 2016 is historically absurd, as is the claim of these ex-right wing radio hosts, and ex-political consultants that they are mere witnesses to the devastation they worked so hard to bring about.

Today we hear from yet another of the enablers, over at the New York Times, one Donald Ayer, who “was a U.S. attorney and principal deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration”. Mr. Ayer is terribly distressed at the direction taken by the United States Supreme Court:

As the court begins a new term, regrettably, its recent history suggests that it lacks a majority of justices with sufficient concern about the basic continuity and integrity of the law or the ability of government to function.

…

This distressing turn of events has a special irony for me personally. In the 1980s, along with three of the current justices (John Roberts, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas), I participated in the Reagan revolution in the law, which inspired and propelled the careers of three other current justices (Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett).

The Reagan revolution pitted itself against “activist” judges who were seen as following personal whims by altering the law and creating rights not found in the Constitution. Through interpretive tools like textualism and originalism, the Reagan lawyers sought to make the law more predictable and steady — as articulated by John Roberts, the job of justices was “to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”

That revolution, however, has morphed into what it was meant to curtail, as the expanding right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has relied on an array of innovative constitutional rights to undermine traditional governmental actions while discarding longstanding precedents with which they disagree.

Example number one from Mr. Ayer? Why, the court is going to overrule Roe v. Wade. Who would ever have thunk that a right wing court stocked with justices picked in part to do just that would do just that?

Who would have thought that a movement hiding behind the bullshit guise of “original intent” would, in order to serve the interests of the few, use the pretext of uncovering the intentions of long dead slaveowners to know precisely what they would have done faced with modern realities of which they had no clue? Who would have guessed that it turns out that those slaveowners would have felt it appropriate to rule in favor of corporate interests at every turn? Who would have guessed that while original intent would be dogma when interpreting portions of the constitution that could be bent to serve right wing interests, it would have no place in interpreting the clear original intent of the 13th through 15th Amendments, since the drafters of those Amendments actually meant to give equal rights to black people which is very inconvenient at the moment since black people tend to vote for Democrats? Who would have guessed that a party dependent on a base consisting of “religious” bigots would find a way to let those bigots freely exercise their bigotry in the name of religious freedom, while being careful to make sure that the new rules only applied to groups of which those bigots approve, while claiming that James Madison, who held no particular brief for religion, would have approved of what amounts to an establishment of religion.

Who would have guessed?

Anyone paying attention.

Certainly Mr. Ayer should have done so, since he confesses to being right in the middle of the “Reagan Revolution” that began our descent into darkness. It’s not like the Federalist Society and its ilk made any secret of their objectives. They now have what they want, and it won’t matter to the current court that the American people have a low opinion of it. They can do what they want and they will do what they want, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them. (Thanks to Joe and Krysten for that too!)

So, Mr. Ayer joins the Charlie Sykes, Matthew Dowds, Mona Charens, and Bill Kristols (to name just a few)of the world. Enabler though he was, he just couldn’t see this coming!

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Do I repeat myself? Very well then I repeat myself.

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

While I’m too lazy to gather the links, I ask any reader who drops by to rest assured this is not the first time I am beating this woefully dead horse. I was moved to this repetion when I stumbled upon this New York Times article in my RSS feed. The header?

Biden Scales Back His Agenda in Hopes of Bringing Moderates Onboard.

The article summary:

President Biden has acknowledged in a meeting with House Democrats in recent days that he and Democratic leaders will need to pare down their plan in a concession to centrist holdouts.

(Emphasis added in both cases)

And, of course, the article goes on to label Sinema and Manchin as centrists.

It should not be lost on these writers that the use of the terms I’ve highlighted implies that those to whom they have applied that label are commendably situating themselves where the bulk of the American electorate also finds itself. They are commendatory labels and amount to an implicit endorsement of the position of these politicians, whether that is the intent of the writer or not.

What is infuriating is that these people are not centrists by any definition of the term, nor are they moderates, if one assumes, as do press types, that the words are synonymous. Let Paul Krugman speak for me:

Corporate groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were all in on entitlement reform but are lobbying furiously against Build Back Better. Indeed, the Democrats trying to scuttle Biden’s agenda are more accurately described as the party’s corporate wing than as “centrists.” After all, polls suggest that the policies they oppose are highly popular, so in that sense they’re well to the right of the political center.

It is also the case that most people, particularly Democrats (and these people even describe themselves as Democrats), recognize the reality of climate change and the need to address it. Not so the “moderate, centrist” Joe Manchin, who is busily scuttling any meaningful movement to address climate change. After all, he’s got a lot of money invested in coal.

Words have both literal meanings and connotations. Both “moderate” and “centrist” have positive connotations. Since the literal meaning of the word does not apply to any of the so-called “moderate” or “centrist” Democrats that are doing the bidding of the Republicans, they are getting the benefit of that positive connotation without earning it.

Postscript: For those not recognizing it, the title of this post is a paraphrase of a line from Walt Whitman, America’s greatest poet.

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Just asking

Sunday, October 3, 2021

Shouldn’t this woman be facing criiminal charges? Losing her medical license, especially given that she was otherwise retired, seems like a trivial punishment:

A Connecticut physician has surrendered her medical license after an investigation uncovered that she was giving signed blank vaccination exemption forms to anyone who sent a self-addressed stamp envelope.

An anonymous tip to the Connecticut Medical Examining Board prompted an investigation into retired physician Sue McIntosh.

She had been “providing fraudulent vaccine exemption forms through the mail related to COVID-19 vaccines, general vaccines, COVID testing, and medical opposition to wearing facial masks,” the investigation said. Patients, when they received these forms, only had to fill out their name and date and then select a reason for a mask exemption, records show.

Via Politicus USA citing Business Insider.

I didn’t practice criminal law, so I’m not sure what statute might cover this, but there are a lot of people doing time who caused far less harm.

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Remember when you couldn’t make this stuff up?

Friday, October 1, 2021

Just read this article from the New York Times on line and followed the link therein to the report from the actual auditors who audited the sham audit in Arizona. From the Times article:

The circuslike review of the 2020 vote commissioned by Arizona Republicans took another wild turn on Friday when veteran election experts charged that the very foundation of its findings — the results of a hand count of 2.1 million ballots — was based on numbers so unreliable that they appear to be guesswork rather than tabulations.

The organizers of the review “made up the numbers,” the headline of the experts’ report reads.

The experts, a data analyst for the Arizona Republican Party and two retired executives of an election consulting firm in Boston, said in their report that workers for the investigators failed to count thousands of ballots in a pallet of 40 ballot-filled boxes delivered to them in the spring. (Emphasis added)

From the report itself, the final two conclusions:

  1. Having zero experience in election audits, the Ninjas announcement that they had confirmed, to a high degree of accuracy, the election results of the second largest county in the country is, we believe, laughable.
  2. The assertion that Trump had lost 261 votes was, we believe, a “shiny object” designed to convey believability to an otherwise unbelievable hoax.

A few days ago I observed in passing that there was no reason to believe anything the Cyber Ninjas had to say, but was somewhat mystified about why the Arizonans went about this exercise in the first place. This latest bit of news raises the question anew in a slightly different form.

I read the report at the link, and I confess that I didn’t follow it completely, but I’ve no reason to doubt that their conclusions are accurate, particularly conclusion five that is excerpted above. It would be interesting to know the backstory to all this, and what communications passed between the Cyber Grifters Ninjas and the Arizona Senators who wasted tons of state money on this sham. Could it be that they realized that they had put themselves into a no-win situation should they actually try to come out with obviously fraudulent results and that they reached an agreement to produce the “shiny object” to which the report refers in order to put an end to the process, get it behind them, and proceed to the more important business of suppressing the vote in future Arizona elections?

It certainly appears that something along those lines must have happened, so the question now is whether this new report will have any impact. My guess is that, alas, it won’t. It will be ignored and forgotten, and the Arizona politicians who participated in this fraud will go, unhindered, about their business of destroying our democracy.

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A Must (not) read

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Apparently, writing tell all books about the disaster that was the Former Guy is quite the cottage industry. Latest practitioner is Stephanie Grisham, herself a disaster as press secretary, at which job she held precisely 0 press conferences in the course of about nine months at the job, leaving only in the middle of an insurrection.

Naturally, none of the “revelations” in these books come as a surprise to anyone who was paying the least bit of attention. Case in point:

Little is known about what happened in the 90-minute conversation between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Osaka, Japan, two years ago. But as journalists were quickly ushered out of the room at the 2019 Group of 20 Summit, Stephanie Grisham once again found herself with a close-up view of the action.

She saw Trump lean toward Putin that day and tell him: “Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave, we’ll talk. You understand.”

Who would have thunk it? And how, one might ask, does one justify enabling this sort of behavior by saying nothing until it’s time to cash in.

Grisham also lets us in on the fact that Trump is a total asshole who abuses his staff and can’t stand it when his lawyers tell him that it’s illegal even when he does it.

I’ve always wondered who buys these books. The MAGA folks obviously won’t, and I certainly wouldn’t give her a dime to tell me what I already know, and I doubt that any of the people I know on this side of the political divide feel differently.

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A tale of bumbling fraudsters

Monday, September 27, 2021

Well, honestly, this is something I did not see coming. It seems the “auditors” in Arizona have determined that Joe Biden did in fact win the electoral votes of that state, and that, in fact, he got 360 more votes than the official tally gave him. I should add that while I used the term “in fact” in the previous sentence, there is absolutely no reason to believe the Cyber Ninja count is more accurate than the original count, but one can’t help feeling a bit of Schadenfreude, as both Cyber Ninja and the former guy both take substantial hits. The Orange One had to take down a statement from his website in which he related that “everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!”.

Well, now we know, and the shocker is that both the “auditors” and the corrupt Republicans in Arizona were unable to manufacture even a laughable argument in support of their attempt to steal the election.

Here’s the puzzler: Why did they do this in the first place? Had they simply bowed to reality the Arizona Republicans would have had some of the MAGA types mad at them for doing nothing, but that ire would quickly have dissipated. Now, having needlessly raised the hopes of those of little brain, who will continue to believe what they want to believe, and what Fox, OANN, and the other purveyors of lies encourage them to believe, they have set themselves up for retribution at the polls at the hands of MAGAs who will sit on those hands on Election Day. As for Cyber Ninja, why should any of the other state legislators seeking to follow Arizona’s lead hire them to “audit” their states, when they know they can’t be trusted to manufacture a specious argument that their states electoral votes were stolen? That was the whole point of the Arizona “audit” after all, as it’s the point of all the other proposed “audits”. Besides, so far as Cyber Ninja is concerned, there can be little doubt that the wrath of the Orange One shall soon descend upon it.

Endnote, so to speak: I wrote the above a few days ago when I first heard the news, but didn’t post it right away for a variety of reasons. In the meantime I have been not at all surprised at how little attention has been focused on this story. Again, we must imagine what we would be hearing had the Democrats done such a thing, bearing in mind that after all, they did have at least one election stolen from them, eons ago in 2000.

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