A depressing thought occurred to me recently. Those of us who experienced the 2016 election as a national and personal trauma could be forever doomed to live with the mysteries and what-ifs associated with it, in the same way my parents’ generation is still haunted by the Kennedy assassination and the horrors that unfolded from that.
Am I being a drama llama to compare the two events — an assassination and a fucked-up election? Possibly. In 1963, a sitting president was murdered — a shockingly violent act. The violence associated with the 2016 election has thus far been indirect and mostly out of sight: people dying of treatable diseases, hurricane victims left to fend for themselves, people brutalized by emboldened rogue cops, folks murdered by re-energized white supremacists, etc.
In the future, the 2016 election’s body count may very well be increased by women who die from back alley abortions, children silently poisoned by polluted water and air, cities drowned by rising seas, a higher suicide rate among LBGTQ youth and victims of a war John Bolton is itching to start. Horrific results are already here, and more definitely await us; only the magnitude is in question.
James Comey’s current halo-polishing tour inspired this depressing line of thought, specifically his struggle to explain his decision to insert himself into the election at critical inflection points, which arguably set the current nightmare into motion.
Among Comey’s rationales was his perceived need to counter Russian bullshit about Loretta Lynch controlling himself and the FBI on Clinton’s behalf. So, Comey was the biggest fly by far caught in the “fake news” web Putin’s operatives spun. We’ll live with the consequences of that, one way or another, for the rest of our days.
Maybe that’s why I’ve felt compelled to watch the bastard’s “aw shucks, I’m just a big ol’ Boy Scout” book tour. It’s horrifying and fascinating to watch him explain why he did what he did — kinda like watching the Zapruder film. You know the outcome is catastrophic. But you watch it anyway, wondering how things might have turned out differently, marveling that so much turned on such insignificant things, like one man’s massive ego.
Eh, fuck it — let’s watch something more pleasant, like these birds on my hanging feeder. They’re house finches, maybe?
That feeder hangs from a tree and is located about four feet from the window where my my workstation is. When we have high winds like we did the other day, I take the feeder down because I’m afraid it will start swinging hard enough to bust through my window — possibly with squirrels attached to it, which would obviously result in chaos.
Anyhoo, open thread?
kindness
Comey tried to spin his version of the Clinton press conferences on Colbert the other night. Colbert tried to put it in perspective but Comey refused to see his hypocrisy. Now I’ll take Comey’s help in gutting Trump but in all honesty if Comey hadn’t done what he did in July 2016 & October 2016, we probably would be bitching about Hillary’s presidency right now. And for that I will never forgive Comey. He’s a sanctimonious twit.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
Open question: Any thoughts on Operation Paperclip?
T S
@kindness:
So would Trump…on TrumpTV.
Patricia Kayden
Trump and his imps have already rolled back Obama-era regulations on the environment and other key issues. My fear is that it will take years to fix whatever damage Trump is able to inflict on us.
LAO
I tried to explain to my RW father last night that, it was possible to think Comey is a self-righteous asshole but still believe that he possesses more integrity than the Trump. Why is this so hard to understand?
Ben Cisco
Given the stakes, no.
MattF
One consequence, for me, of the 2016 election is that I now tend to assume most people are lying most of the time– unless proven otherwise. We face a tsunami of dishonesty and that just has to be taken into account. I remember that one of Jimmy Carter’s themes in his campaign was that he wouldn’t lie– at the time, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. Now I know better.
JohnO
Journal entry after watching the No Apology Tour, a little bit, and reading about it a lot:
The 40% thing still blows my mind.
The Moar You Know
No. Both represent a theft of the democratic choice made by the people of this nation.
I might add that I was not yet born in 63, but the parallel is obvious. More so given the flyers being posted around Dallas before Kennedy’s visit by the local right wingers.
terraformer
Well, I have the same kind of thoughts. But probably the most eye-opening thing for me – which may or may not be due to some level of naivete on my part – is that there are a too-high percentage of my fellow countrymen (and women!) who missed out on the empathy gene.
They care not a whit for other people, or if they do, it’s only because the others look just like them or are just like them on the economic ladder. I suppose they’ve always been with us, but damn they’re out of the proverbial woodwork right now. And we’ve got to fight them to ensure that their preferred reality doesn’t become all of ours.
EBT
Just think how many minority lives have been, and will be lost.
OzarkHillbilly
House finch or purple finch, female of course.
ETA Looking at Audubon I’m going with purple finch
Elizabelle
I think the stolen election is far worse (but for the loss of life and love experienced by the Kennedy family and friends; the children’s loss is irrevocable) because LBJ did not turn around and take a blowtorch to America because “take that, libtards.” They stole a Supreme Court seat too. That was unprecedented.
FWIW, I think Comey is slightly diminishing his own (self-affixed) halo with this book tour. His story does not hold up.
What’s horrible, though, is that Comey got forced to act by the constant, unrelenting Benghazi scandalmongers. Misusing the public’s time, millions of dollars and other resources like they did should not be legal. And they need to clean out the nest of shitwads in the NYC Field Office.
This was treason. I don’t see how we rebuild our country, either, with Fox News and rightwing propaganda flooding the airwaves and internets.
It’s way more depressing than an assassination.
Josie
There will be a price paid by many for the outcome of the election. The other side of the coin is that it may destroy the Republican party eventually, which is not a terrible thing. Kennedy’s assassination was traumatic for the nation, and there were negative consequences. The other side of that coin was that Johnson was probably the only one who could have pushed through the Civil Rights Act, so sometimes there seems to be a balance of sorts.
Elizabelle
We cannot allow the precedents that Mitch McConnell (stolen Supreme Court seat) and Trump have set let stand.
I want to see both of them prosecuted, convicted, and in McConnell’s case, either executed or in Supermax for life.
Cheryl Rofer
Female housefinches.
ETA: Could be purple finches. The bills are kind of big for housefinches.
Elizabelle
@Josie: That’s a nice touch, you’re right about the Civil Rights Act.
And yeah, I think this might blow the Republican party apart, and that would not be happening with President Clinton. I hope we get some pony for suffering through all this shit. And “suffering” is not an exaggeration. We all wake up and wonder “what else blew up yesterday or overnight?” Plus, how can this ship of fools and fake priorities be good for the economy and our prospects. They are not.
Gelfling 545
@LAO: Shouldn’t be that hard. There are people serving jail time right now with more integrity than Trump.
Adam L Silverman
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
If you want to see some alternative outcomes for the Kennedy assassination, I recommend Stephen King’s 11/22/63. It’s about a guy who can go back in time and chooses to try to stop the killing but keeps screwing up and having to do it over.
Kelly
@Patricia Kayden:
Yes this. Worst of all the window to reduce climate change from a problem to a disaster is closing. We have the wealth and technology to avoid this, if only we were not blocked by the only major political party in the world that rejects the existence of the problem.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
We have been invaded and occupied (behind the scenes) by a foreign adversary. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to compare to the trauma of the JFK assassination. The fact that it’s happening in secret, and the investigation into what exactly has been done to us is still behind closed doors, makes it weird. There are no foreign tanks imposing martial law. Instead the occupier has coopted our own legislature and president to do their will.
I get more and more depressed about the damage being done, and reading today about the appointment of a known grifter to be gut NASA as administrator is depressing me even more. I’m starting to think that I may not live to see all the damage repaired. (Given, say, 20 years life expectancy)
I’m still optimistic enough to think that we’ll win big in November and begin repairing the damage. And also that we really have exposed enough of these assholes that we can get them off the reins of power for a generation. And fix the gerrymandering. And take back control of the state governorships and legislatures.
But, my god, the damage.
SFAW
@Elizabelle:
Would you be OK with execution, followed by spitting* his (preserved)** body outside of a Supermax?
* “Spitting” == placed on a spit
** So that every time the remaining Rethugs think about more treason (or similar), someone can show them a (recent) picture of “Turtle al fresco.”
JPL
@Elizabelle: Early this morning I saw Adam’s title To Arms, To Arms. The War Has Begun: The Midnight Riders and my stomach sank.
MattF
@Elizabelle: Speaking of President Clinton, can you imagine the unrelenting barrage of venom and lies she’d now be facing from the right wing? Given Trump’s utter dysfunctionality (and possibly criminality), one might argue that we’re better off with Trump, rather than some competent winger; e.g., McConnell.
Anotherlurker
The trauma of the 2016 election is very real. I am never relaxed, waiting for the ass99le to start another un-winable shooting war or watching the republicans get closer to gutting S.Security. It has taken a toll.
On the other hand: Let’s go Mets!
Olivia
I just keep thinking that if Hillary had won, we would be seeing more of the same that was done to Obama and probably worse. I was always worried that Obama would be killed and I think the threat would be greater with Hillary. All the chicken shits in Congress who are leaving now would have no reason to leave and the mid term elections would give us more of the same. It will take years to fix everything the orange asshole has fucked up but the corruption that has been business as usual is being revealed at an astounding, breathtaking rate and is resulting in activism that we haven’t seen in ages.
Elizabelle
@MattF: Yeah. That’s true. It was going to be ugly, whatever happened.
Something has to break this fever plague that the rightwing has become. They’re dangerous.
Elizabelle
@JPL: Yeah. My sympathies.
Adam L Silverman
@Patricia Kayden: They have actually only rolled back 6 regulations that were in place on the environment. All 6 deregulatory actions are being challenged in court. What they have done is cancelled about 120 or so regulations that were scheduled to go into effect, delayed them going into effect, or put them back into the comment period which will delay them going into effect. These are also either being challenged in court or will be challenged in court. It will take years before these rollbacks actually take effect. If they do actually take effect.
rikyrah
@LAO:
Not hard to understand at all.
different-church-lady
2016 was a trauma not because an outright idiot got to be president; it was a trauma because it made one wonder if common decency was dead in our society.
cleek
i just posted an epic comment about this on ObWi, but here’s my view:
almost everything that worked against Clinton in 2016 was driven by one thing: the assumption that she had the election in the bag.
without that, Comey might not have felt comfortable injecting himself into the race, “the left” might not have felt comfortable going so hard against her, the press might have taken Trump more seriously and might have thought about not rushing off countless no-info stories about “her emailz”, maybe some fence-sitters wouldn’t have throw protest votes to Trump just for giggles.
White & Gold Purgatorian
Since this is an open thread, can anyone explain how money laundering works, or perhaps point to an “Idiot’s Guide” sort of article on the subject? I read about the obscene amounts Manafort and Gates apparently laundered and the money laundering likely taking place with Cohen’s real estate and taxi businesses, but have no understanding of what that involves, practically.
Clearly, I have no talent for crime because I just can’t figure out how dirty, off the books money — esp. overseas money — somehow gets run through a business and turned into squeaky clean, legitimate dollars. Is it tax write offs, losses, just plain cooking the books?
Kelly
@Adam L Silverman:
Which explains their ground breaking efforts to control judge appointments.
B.B.A.
@MattF: We’d have a long-term government shutdown as the House would be so busy screaming BENGHAZI they’d forget to write a budget bill.
sharl
I’ve only caught 2-3 Comey interviews, so could have missed it…but has Comey addressed – in detail – his concern about potential leaks from within the FBI? IIRC this was the primary concern that resulted in his dumb-ass decision to publicly re-open the Clinton e-mail issue so close to the election. Why does he think discipline and devotion to proper process have broken down so badly within the FBI that leaks were such a concern for him?
Relatedly, has he been asked about the rogue NYC field office, and such issues as the relationships between people in that office and Rudy Giuliani? He would likely deny that “rogue” description, but I’d like him on record on the topic, what with him being all high-&-mighty and morally sanctimonious while on this book tour. Do those agents and supervisors in the NYC field office serve as good examples of moral/ethical public service, to his mind?
I’m not hopeful of getting clear-eyed, blunt (self-)assessments from the man in answer to questions like these – he’s been drinking his own damn Kool-Aid for too long – but again, would like to get him on record.
snicker
@different-church-lady Yes.
The moment he won forced me to reevaluate what I thought about not just millions of people, but members of my own family.
Some of that was to realize that I place more importance on these things than a lot of other people. Some folks in my family seriously look at it like a soft drink preference. But some of it was noticing something dark I somehow failed to see before.
mr_gravity
@Elizabelle: The assassination of Kennedy is like finding out there is no Santa Claus. The election of Trump is like finding out there is no God.
JPL
@White & Gold Purgatorian: I watched Ozark on Netflix and I’m still not sure.
mr_gravity
Perhaps i’ll figure out how block quotes work someday.
Jeffro
@Olivia:
Oh, you mean like this? From frickin’ Atlas Obscura, of all places (I saw it today but clearly it was written before the election):
Here’s an interesting landform. Let’s work an anti-Hillary quote into a story about it!
So here we have not just a bit of “local color” that is so mindbogglingly stupid you end up praying for. the. sinkhole., but the author felt like he needed to include it, somehow, someway, somewhy.
AO members, be sure to ‘suggest an edit’ as I did.
Adam L Silverman
@JPL:
MattF
@White & Gold Purgatorian: Basically, just make everything as complicated as possible. Be sure to use banks in the Bahamas that don’t identify account owners, multiple intersecting sets of owners for every LLC, lawyers who are trained in the use of ‘No Comment’. And, a lot of lying. It’s ‘security through obscurity’ and it works most of the time.
And, btw, the money itself is real enough, so there are armies of would-be middlemen who would be deeply grateful to get their hands on it.
CaseyL
@different-church-lady: Yes, this. Trump may have been an inevitable result of 30+ years of rot in the public sphere. Recall, it was Reagan who re-normalized using the Southern Strategy, as governing philosophy as well as campaign tactic.
And the GOP had 12 years – Reagan’s two terms, plus Bush I’s single term – to transform much of the bureaucracy as well to dismantle most of the civic infrastructure that had supported civic life in this country.
Common decency is dead because it isn’t self-sustaining. Common decency requires a well-educated, engaged populace that is economically secure enough to support liberal programs. What the GOP has done over the past 30+ years is destroy the foundation that sustains common decency.
Chip Daniels
What the two traumas have in common is the drastic lurch from something great and hopeful to its opposite number.
The hopeful promise of the New Frontier was quickly eclipsed by the ugliness of riots and Vietnam.
I think of the transition of Obama to Trump as something like the transition from Marcus Aurelius to Commodus, from one of the very best to the very worst.
raven
FIDO, Fuck it and Drive On. Three weeks before Kennedy the South Vietnamese dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated with the cooperation of US officials. No one knows what would have happened if neither of them had been offed but the shit didn’t turn out too well.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for the ‘splainer, Adam – I was under this kind of impression about what Trumpov & Co. have actually “rolled back” in most Cabinet agencies.
The thing I worry about the most is that most every agency is headed by appointees who are not just incompetent, but are ideologically opposed to their agencies’ very missions. As many have stated many times before, one almost has to be grateful for the incompetence factor – a chief executive with even half the volatility and/or obvious stupidity of Trumpov would draw at least somewhat higher-quality wingnuts and operators, and then we really would be in trouble.
But that’s during ‘routine’ times. With these putzes, just one major international crisis and we’re going to be down the rabbit hole. No one seems to get how much danger the country is in…
Adam L Silverman
@White & Gold Purgatorian: Here’s a quick criminological explainer. Hopefully one of the legal fleegles will jump in with a lawyerly one.
Basically money laundering occurs when one takes money earned illegally or stolen and funnels it through legitimate transactions – business acquisitions, investments, real estate purchases – in order to make the money seem legal. The US Treasury Department estimates that approximately 30% of all real estate deals in the US are actually money laundering schemes. What happens is that through funneling illegal and illicit cash flows through legitimate businesses and purchases, you clean, as in launder, the money. Making it legal and therefore suitable for all future uses.
rikyrah
@MattF:
you mean White folks.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
The election of Donald Trump has changed the course of my family’s life significantly. My wife came to this country from Africa and applied for political asylum about 18 years ago. She had to rely on help from friends for a long time, which caused her to move quite a bit before she settled here in Chicago. I met her in 2010, we married in 2012, had our daughter in 2014 and our son in 2016. Even though she is married to an American citizen, with 2 American children, resolving her immigration status was far more complicated then we expected. As difficult as it was, we could see light at the end of the tunnel with the policies that President Obama had put in place and were most certainly to be continued or expanded upon if Hillary Clinton had won. We were just a couple of weeks away from being a “normal” family. With James Comey’s fuckery and Trump’s unexpected victory our lives were thrown up in the air and that light was snuffed out for now.
Kelly
I’m deeply puzzled about the longer term fate of the Republican party. I don’t see an explosion or implosion due to factional disputes. More a gradual and individual backing away. The 26% are true believers and have nowhere else to go. Maybe right wing billionaires buy the Blue Dog caucus? The racists and theocrats use the remains of the Republican Party to shout at the rest of us? I don’t how see a third party can amount to much these days.
White & Gold Purgatorian
@JPL: I had to google Ozark. $500 million! My only thought in that situation would be to start buying stuff with cash, then selling. Problem is, you might lose $ on the transactions and nowadays very large cash transactions set off red flags. Is part of this story that the reporting of large cash transactions is not necessarily followed up by someone investigating the source of that money, thus an apparent white collar crime epidemic?
Frankensteinbeck
Long-term, the most important result of this election will be whether women stay as angry and activated politically as they are now. For all the damage he is doing, it’s not that different from the damage another Republican president would do. Republicans are the problem, their voters and their elected officials. Only by voting can we fix this. A lot of people who used to not care, now care. A lot of people who used to merely vote, are now royally fucking pissed and being activists and working in the political system. Women seem to be in the lead. MeToo is not an accident, there is ‘We’re not going to take it anymore’ anger going on.
If it continues, we will see dramatic political change, but Republicans will fight at every step to destroy the country so they can prevent it.
Jeffro
Now then, for the second major irritation (after that Atlas Obscura betrayal noted above)…ah well, at this time it’s from the Times, we can expect no less: Thomas Edsall on The Democrats’ Gentrification Problem.
“DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY!”, you say? Well to be honest…don’t y’all always say that?
Yes…the two “wings” of the Democratic Party are about to go to war…over a problem that has nothing to do with the Democratic Party. Perhaps we could consider each party’s stand on issues important to the middle class – child care credits, good schools, and hey maybe HEALTH CARE? – and then see if our “wings” are really all that far apart, compared to the vast chasm that separates the two parties? Asshole.
Get ready, folks. They can’t sell the GOP to anyone…so it’s going to be all about getting Dems to fight each other and not show up in 2018 & 2020. Now more than ever, it’s the Repubs’ last hope…
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman: Restaurants too.
Elizabelle
@mr_gravity: Clever.
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: That’s the longer term concern, the remaking of the agencies in the image of those who have been appointed to run it. For instance:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-united-nations-womens-conference-pro-life-abortion-a8267691.html
Much more at the link!
Jeffro
@Jeffro: Whoops, forgot the link back up at #55.
LAO
@White & Gold Purgatorian: @Adam L Silverman: Adam’s pretty much sums it up. But, I can offer you a very basic example from one of my cases. Run of the mill drug case, defendants purchased a number of cars with cash — those transactions were charged as money laundering (which I thought was fucking ridiculous but my motion to dismiss the money laundering counts was denied).
Amir Khalid
In terms of how much damage to America, I would say Trump’s victory has had more serious consequences. Johnson kept the US headed more or less where it had been headed under Kennedy. I think LBJ and his administration made pretty much the same mistakes that JFK would have — especially in Vietnam, remember that the US began escalating its inolvement there under JFK. Hillary was offering a chance to build on the progress that Obama made; Trump campaigned on clawing it all back, and then some; and it’s the one promise he made that his administration is working to keep. (Whether Trump himself is working to do anything is open to question.)
Elizabelle
@Jeffro: Thomas Edsall smells of urine and despair. Give the man a fresh Depends. Saw that headline and thought “not again.”
Fuck the Fucking Vichy New York Times. Is it the Sulzbergers or their clueless editors? Who has been compromised? Names, please.
Kay
I wonder if it would be popular to run on “cracking down on white collar crime”.
Wouldn’t that be fun, even it isn’t popular? Just turn the “tough on crime” thing on its head. I don’t claim to speak for the public but I personally would love that. Someone should do it in a House race- see if people take to it. I bet they would.
Every time anyone brings up crime say “and on that subject, what about white collar crime? Seems to be a LOT of it, doesn’t there?” There’s so many great examples, and not just in the Trump Administration.
You’ would almost have too much to work with – the speeches write themselves! :)
JAFD
To paraphrase a 70-year old joke:
“Spiro Agnew made me a Democrat.”
“If I get him the wool, will he make me one, too.”
I survived the Nixon administration (mayhaps you y’nguns will say “the first Nixon’s administration…”, sometime ??), and if you felt depressed about the country in November of 2016, please have a bit of empathy for those who cast their first presidential vote in 1972.
My father was born in September of 1913, oldest of 10 children – which meant he turned 16 and ‘got his working papers’ just in time for The Great Crash. Never said much about his youth, but “Save the Bones for Henry Jones” was one of his favorite songs.
OK, am wearing my old T-shirt today
“Love a history major.
It will be a date to remember”
Frankensteinbeck
@Jeffro:
Yes, the results of the special elections over the last year certainly show that the Democratic Party is splitting apart.
Gravenstone
@Kelly: Controlling the judiciary is the only reasonable mid-long term means the Republicans have to continue fucking over the country. It’s not limited to their efforts to gut environmental regs.
JPL
@White & Gold Purgatorian: It involves real estate and casinos, something our pres knows about so we could ask him.
JPL
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: That is so sad, and I’m sorry that you are having to endure such a stressful situation.
Elizabelle
@Kay: White collar crime, for sure.
And I think people could be made to understand that the plutocrats don’t want a functioning IRS, because they don’t want their taxes scrutinized. Our services are suffering/in decline because the wealthy are not paying their fair share. Hell, you have a lot of the wealthy even saying that. Out loud.
And, eventually, excessive CEO suite compensation. It’s what’s been driving a lot of the horrible decisions.
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: Without a doubt.
Doug R
@White & Gold Purgatorian: Casinos are very popular for money laundering. Take shady cash, drop it at the tables and generally make back about 85-95%.
trump’s casino went bankrupt, money laundering was probably a big part of it.
Kay
I think I’m tired of being taken advantage of as a voter. From the Clinton impeachment to Gore (especially) to Obama to Trump, there seems to be an assumption Democratic voters will remain calm and accept the results, and there isn’t an expectation like that of Republicans. I’m sick of being the adult. I want to pitch a fit like they do. I want the same kind of treatment that Trump got prior to the election – all that “but what if he doesn’t ACCEPT that she won?”
Start worrying about me not accepting. The next weird fucking shit that somehow ends up with a Republican benefitting is about enough for me.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
No wandering off to CEO compensation. Stay on crime. There’s enough there to keep us busy and that’s an easy sell.
Tax fraud is a crime. Start auditing.
Mike J
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
If you own a legit business that passes a lot of cash through, it’s easy to slide dirty money in one side and take clean money out of the other. Traditionally casinos* and cab companies have been used,
* you don’t really need a link to an example
MattF
@Doug R: I’d assume that Trump was too dumb and too cheap to pay for staff who were experienced with the gambling business.
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck: I agree that Trump’s domestic agenda isn’t that different from a regular Republican’s, aside from being more overtly racist, sexist and xenophobic. I do think Trump’s presidency is uniquely terrible on the foreign policy front, since Trump seems determined to turn the U.S. into the client state of a third-rate power. I guess it’s debatable whether that is worse than neocon imperialism. I tend to think it’s worse — for the U.S. and for the world.
oldster
“Am I being a drama llama to compare the two events — an assassination and a fucked-up election? ”
No.
I have lived through Kennedy’s assassination, the attack on the WTC and Pentagon, and Trump’s installation by a Russian covert operation.
The third one has been by far the most disturbing, and gives me by far the greatest concern for my country’s future.
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
So far, that is.
Aimai
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: I’m so, so, sorry!
Elizabelle
@Kay: Yeah, I was thinking that as I typed. Mission creep.
White collar crime, fer sure.
CarolDuhart2
@MattF: I suspect that part of money laundering involves buying assets that can be then used as legitimate income: A cab company generates income that then can used as a source of income on the books. And it’s a business that largely works in cash. If you overcharge for your services, whatever is above and beyond expenses and legitimate taxes can be skimmed off the top and become personal income. The books reflect the legitimate expenses (and by the way, those can get padded as well, and are often poorly defined). Real estate is usually based on what buyer and seller agree to. High end real estate is more show than anything, so selling a house worth $4 million for $10 million might be a way of pocketing the difference on one end-the seller pockets the difference somehow, the buyer gets a quickly sellable asset that can be converted to cash. And these are transactions that are usually private.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I am 100% in favor of adopting a law and order for white-collar criminals AND opposition to corruption in government as campaign themes. Holy moly, what a target-rich environment the Trump administration presents on both fronts.
Elizabelle
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: I’m sorry to hear that. Please keep us posted.
Betty Cracker
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: All my sympathies. We have a somewhat similar situation in my family, and it keeps me up nights.
White & Gold Purgatorian
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks.
I’m floored by the 30% figure and don’t see how that could happen in a system that places a value on stopping money laundering. Which dovetails with something I read (somewhere) recently suggesting Putin could easily tank the real estate market in several major cities worldwide (NYC was one) by cutting off the dirty money supply.
People out here in the hinterlands have no idea what this whole money web looks like or means and unless the money aspects of these crimes are presented to the American public in an easy to understand form, there is zero chance Trump voters will ever believe he or those close to him did anything wrongor illegal. The complexity and confusion factor will work in their favor, not just in escaping prosecution for so long, but in the court of public opinion. “He lied under oath” is an easy concept. “Billions of dollars passed through his hands” will get a response of “Of course it did. Hell, he’s a billionaire.”
cleek
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
imagine you have a bunch of illegally-made cash in your mattress. you need to look like it came from a legitimate business. so, you find someone with a bakery and you two conspire to launder that money. so you become a silent partner in the business. to launder the money, she writes up a bunch of orders for cakes that she never bakes – some number that won’t look crazy, a dozen a month or something. and each time she does a fake order, she ‘pays’ for it with your illegal money – just take the cost of a cake in your cash and puts it in the register just like she would with a real order. at the end of the week, she deposits all the cash in the bank. and at the end of the month, you get a paycheck. and she keeps a a slice for herself.
unless the IRS starts looking closely at the amount of flour she uses or the number of people who actually come into the bakery, it’s hard to see what’s happening. the bakery does its normal business, and the partners take their cut of the proceeds, just like a normal business. the only difference is that some of the business is imaginary.
Kelly
Obama on the Parkland kids.
http://time.com/collection/most-influential-people-2018/5217568/parkland-students/
Fleeting Expletive
Comey, on O’Donnell, re his response when DJT asked him Flynn loyalty question said something like “I stared at him real hard…” I haven’t played that back, but when I heard it the chilling thought was that there is a real sexualized, rapey component in this horror. The same threat as HRC described in that stalking behavior at one debate. It’s the creepy I-can-make-you-do-it threat that he’s always shown, but maybe I’m slow to have realized that so many many MEN he implicitly threatens to fuck, have responded in ways victims of sexual threats do or don’t.
And too, for all his resume of courage (or “courage”), Comey didn’t say “Back off, Creep”, as he should have done, as any of them should have done. I wish she had said it, and yet…
Cursing rants and whatever else is going on in the actual freaking White House…What is going to happen next? There ain’t nobody knows.
Puddinhead
@LAO: put it in simpler terms. You can think one fart stinks, but another fart stinks far worse.
Thoroughly Pizzled
Every now and then I flashback to that horrible night in November. I remember all of it.
Adam L Silverman
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article168617672.html
https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-targets-shell-companies-purchasing-luxury-properties-seven-major
Kay
@Elizabelle:
Democrats always do it. It happens locally all the time. “We’re having a rally for Social Security…and ground water!”
My job is to tell them they only get ONE TOPIC :)
I read about a judge who ordered a sheriff to go seize money damages from a bank that had been awarded to compensate a couple who had been foreclosed upon improperly. The national bank wasn’t paying. He sent sheriff to the closest branch to the courthouse to GET the money – that’s the kind of thing we need.
Kelly
@cleek: Or Gus’s restaurants in “Breaking Bad”.
Rick Taylor
Heck, I was traumatized by the election of George W Bush in 2000, and his re-election in 2004. I was shocked we would elect a President so obviously unqualified for the office. Little did I know, we were just getting started.
J R in WV
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
Any mostly cash business, like a bar, laundromat, taxis, can ‘”wash” dirty money just by over-reporting their cash income to include the money from whatever illegal source it has, gambling, prostitution, whatever.
Real estate deals can do the same thing by selling property for far more than it would normally sell for as some point in a chain of real estate transactions. That’s more complicated than just over-reporting cash income, but think of a Russian billionaire buying a Drump condo that is worth $500K for a million bucks.
Now Drump has $500K in real money and $500K in laundered money. I’m not sure how the rest of that scam works out, but you can see that there’s extra money there. In Panama, or one of the former Russian republics, what are called The ‘Stans because keeping track of them is too much work.
That’s how money laundering works, part “now you see it and now you don’t” handicraft and part creative accounting. Very creative.
glory b
@LAO: I was listening to a writer (can’t remember his name) for New York magazine on Pod Save America. He was talking bout money laundering and said that a sign of it is a bunch of real estate deals that don’t come to fruition. Lots of money changes hands, the deal fizzles out and no one accounts for the money.
Also, he said that the deals for a few million here and a few million there represent a significant amount of the economies of major cities, think New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, London. That’s why the leaders of those countries don’t really want to turn those rocks over, their economies will take a hit.
So many bigger deals are out there, the small fry (relatively speaking) never get chased down. That’s why deals like many of the Trump’s, Manafort’s and Cohen’s go under the radar.
Roger Moore
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
As I understand it, the basic problem is that the government wants to look at where money comes from because that’s a good way of tracking down big-time crime. To help them out, they require banks to report suspicious patterns of financial transactions, like depositing large quantities of cash without an associated business. To get around this, criminals need to find a way of getting their money into the financial system without triggering the banks’ warning signs.
There are many, many ways of doing this, but most of them revolve around having somebody with an apparently legitimate business that has an excuse to engage in some of those kinds of transactions. Classic small time money laundering businesses are things like antique stores, art galleries, and collectables dealers, who sell items whose value is hard to fix. The criminal buys items from the business with dirty cash, but the business owner/confederate can deposit the money because it’s coming from an apparently legitimate business.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
For me, I realised for the first time how radically different millions of my countrymen view America. They don’t care about policy or helping everyone. They don’t see citizenship as being based on birth. They see it as being based on blood and ethnicity, like some banana republic or a country from 19th century Europe. Skin color is often all that matters to them. And I find that so alien and unAmerican.
There are more of us than there are of them. I just wonder how sustainable one-party rule (let’s face it, the GOP are never going to get better) will be for the Democrats (assuming that happens. I think it can) when 1/3 of the populace are regressive reactionaries.
Kay
@Rick Taylor:
I was okay with 2004. IMO it was a normal election. 2000 was a fucking travesty. Outrageous.
trollhattan
JFK upended us and sowed the fields for MLK, RFK, Vietnam, urban riots and George Wallace. The assassination consequences echoed in the nation’s hallways for the better part of two decades and ultimately delivered our Lord and Savior, Ronaldus Reagan. Here’s hoping the Trump Event Horizon is an order of magnitude smaller and shorter lasting.
hilts
Trump’s administration is a crime against reason, rationality, and yes, a goddamn fucking crime against humanity. Is it hyperbolic of me to call his administration a crime against humanity? I don’t think so. Just look at his environmental policy. This ratfucker is the most anti-environmental President I’ve ever seen. When it comes to science, Trump is simply anti-Enlightenment. By any metric I can think of, Trump is head and shoulders worse than any of his predecessors: the corruption, the 24/7 mendacity, the hubris, the jaw dropping ignorance. The toxic, venomous Trump has unleashed against people of color, his non-stop hateful rhetoric against the media, and his call for jailing his opponents. So yeah, I’ll stand by my labeling of his administration as a crime against humanity
I hope there’s a special place in Hell reserved for James Comey. NOW it dawns on this sanctimonious asshole that Trump behaves like a Mafia boss and is morally unfit to be President. Where the fuck was Comey during the goddamn campaign? Was he in some kind of catatonic state? Trump demonstrated over and over again during the campaign that he was a chip off the block of Mafia don wannabes and that he was morally unfit to be President.
TenguPhule
@kindness:
And Pence and Ryan and McConnell.
And then strap Comey down for his turn to be gutted. He’s a Judas goat and should be treated as one.
Elie
Its been hard to comment in recent months. I fight my anxiety anger and impatience by staying involved here locally in getting local Democrats and progressives elected to office. I just can’t take the Comeys, the Cohens and all the rest… I am just completely without words anymore, beyond “elect Democrats to everything — that is all“. That is our only true shot at fixing this horror — and even with that, it will take years to fix the damage to our government — and to our psyches.
Betty thank you for your postings of the birds and other wildlife. I am sitting here looking out at my double hummingbird feeders covered with Rufous and Anna’s hummingbirds. This gives me some comfort.
So many things are damaged — not all by Trump but by greed and our sheer inability to care for each other. My husband is having a real hard time finding a psychiatrist that will accept Medicare…. very few do anymore. Too many also want to have low stress practices dealing with uncomplicated depression. No one wants to deal with anything complicated or not easily fixed with one simple prescription. I laugh when I hear all the people who talk about getting mental health services to prevent gun and other violent deaths. The unvarnished truth that I wish someone would write about is that the psychiatric profession generally has no interest in complicated, seriously ill people. The few clinics that exist that can handle such patients are over worked and not available everywhere.
Anyway, enough about that. Its a beautiful spring day here in the Northwest and I am going out to see if a walk will soothe my heart.
rikyrah
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
IMMA explained the taxi money laundering in yesterday’s morning open thread, I think.
Real Estate.
Here’s an example. This is the clearest one for me. Actually happened.
Dolt45 bought some monstrosity mansion in Florida for 45 million.
He does nothing to it. He sells it to a Russian Oligarch for 95 million.
Between the buying and the selling the money gets clean.
mark k
Both were coup’s. The one in ’16 was in slow motion but will be much more catastrophic.
HermanNewticks
The news that Cohen just dropped his defamation suits against Fusion GPS and Buzzfeed, which were based in part on the dossier claims that Cohen met Russians in Prague, seems to be some confirmation that Mueller really can place him there. One explanation for dropping the suit is that he can no longer argue that those claims are false (which he’d have to do to prove defamation) without facing a perjury charge.
TenguPhule
@Patricia Kayden:
Generations. His people are in positions of power at the WORSE POSSIBLE MOMENT short of actual collapsing human civilization (and this may be debatable).
rikyrah
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
Wasn’t my first time, but doesn’t mean that I’m not disappointed by it.
Roger Moore
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
You do. The point is that the ultimate goal of most criminal enterprises is to be able to live well, and that requires you wind up with money you can spend on ordinary goods. A suitcase full of Benjamins doesn’t do you much good if you can’t use it to buy fancy houses and luxury yachts, and you need clean money to do that. It’s worth taking a substantial haircut on a money laundering transaction if it lets you convert money you can’t spend into money you can.
Kelly
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
I realized this fight will last the rest of my life. Deeply depressing.
BC in Illinois
@oldster:
You know, I think you’re right. I remember the assassination and 9/11, but the memories are primarily of “that week” and what it was like to live through it. The shock, the grief, the time spent with the TV.
Not to minimize the longer term effects — my memory connects JFK’s assassination with MLK’s and RFK’s, even though they were five years apart — and I was concerned about where our country was going and what our country was like. After 9/11 (and Iraq and torture and Patriot Act), I was also and still am concerned about the effects.
But Trump’s election raises concerns about our survival as a nation. What did Obama say? “. . . these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing.” The value of all people; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; self-government. These are not automatic. The Constitution’s checks and balances do not work, unless people make them work.
And we have a political party — a minority party! — in control of government, dedicating to making our democracy not work. I am more concerned for our country now then ever in my lifetime. I am focused on the 2018 election — 200 days and 18 hours away! — but I dread what it will bring out.
TenguPhule
@Elizabelle:
There’s a solution to that. But you won’t like it, because its final.
BC in Illinois
@Kelly:
And as Mrs BC said it, “There’s just so much to un-do!”
TenguPhule
@Josie:
I stopped believing our current system will allow this the day they teabagged a majority in 2010.
StringOnAStick
@Jeffro: I saw a little of this when I volunteered at the state democratic party assembly last weekend. There was a candidates forum for the top state offices, so you got to hear from each one in the running (candidates have to get 30% or better of the assembly votes to automatically be on the primary ballot, unless they want to try to qualify by petition signatures alone). It was easy to figure out who the Fernie Fro’s were by (1) ranting about super delegates and “thumb on the scale”, or (2) ranting about gentrification with added vague “eat the rich” verbage. I’m about as liberal as they come but I’m a pragmatist; I’m more concerned about winning as many offices as possible and I am damned near out of patience for the purity brigade. Seems like most of the attendees were too, because the “super delegates and thumb on the scale” guy was booed and got less than 2% of the vote. The other most obvious Fernie Fro candidate is a Hispanic current state rep and put the “fire” in fire breathing, had rabid supporters and yet still came in last in that category (Attorney General). Denver does have a rapidly growing gentrification and affordable housing crisis, but the guy came across as nearly unhinged and I suspect there are lots of videos out there that would be in the opposition research file for effective future ads.
I really want to flip the AG and Secretary of State offices, badly. This state is mostly purple (red in the rural areas, blue in most of the Front Range cities and ski towns), but the current SoS couldn’t have turned over the state voter database to Kobach any faster without working a 24 hour shift. That shit needs to be punished.
I will say thought that I just addressed all my remaining postcards, and there is just so damned much to choose from that it is hard to decide what nastygram to send to Senator Gardner today. My brain is reverting to his mother smelt of elderberries, that’s how crazy this seems right now.
Puddinhead
@Kay: wrap tax fraud prosecution into deficit reduction. If we just collected what is owed, the deficit would be X billion smaller is a pretty simple line to draw. Stop the tax cheats might be an effective slogan.
Peale
@Kay: Yep. Enforce the current laws. Then determine if we need more.
ETA: Give the white collar regulators quotas like they do police departments. Near the end of the month and you haven’t issued your allotment of fines? Well then we’ll stop and frisk corporate directors. Pull them over for out of period adjustments to financial statements giving us the pretense to search everything. XD
Adam L Silverman
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
I would personally stake good money that this is not the case. In fact I am absolutely, 100% certain that significant numbers of elite and notable people out in the hinterland got to be elite and notable by either engaging in this behavior or playing footsie with those who do.
rikyrah
@sharl:
THIS IS THE QUESTION I’VE BEEN WANTING ANSWERED.
Jeffro
Ok, somewhat extended note here…
I think it was that New York Magazine piece I linked to earlier this morning (which someone else linked to last night, I’m sure), that got me thinking about the media kind of missing the obvious – if everyone’s talking about Cohen “flipping” (including many in the Trumpov camp) and not screaming about Trumpov’s innocence, well, that kind of tells us something. It’s a version of the usual ‘horse race’ coverage: instead of pointing out that these are the actions of guilty people, the media has been covering this as “whether or not Trumpov’s evasive maneuvers/Congress’ overt aid in obstructing justice will work as a strategy”. That’s why they ask him, over and over, “Mr. president*, are you going to fire Mueller?” instead of “Mr. president*, given that you’ve admitted to obstruction on live TV, why haven’t you resigned?”
And then I thought way back, to when Trumpov asked (also on live TV):
But even more than that, thinking about the obvious…let’s take a second to think back to the firings of Sally Yates and James Comey.
Sally Yates: Mr president*, the Justice Department has evidence that your national security adviser is compromised by connections with a hostile foreign power.
Orange Crash: Um…you’re fired.
In any sane universe, the Trumpov presidency comes crashing down right then and there. “Sir, you were told that the national. security. adviser. was compromised…and so you fired the messenger?” And he’s shown the door within 24 hours, the idiot Pence is sworn in, life resumes its unhappy but at least sane course.
Then there’s the Comey firing:
Trumpov: so…go easy on Flynn…and get rid of this investigation
Comey: um…no
Trumpov: you’re fired.
(soon after)
Trumpov to Russian comrades, in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Russians: this guy, I swear!
(soon after)
Trumpov to Lester Holt:”…in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said ‘you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won’.”
Lester Holt: (!)
Michael Che: Ok, I can make that funny on SNL but seriously, it’s not funny
In even a marginally sane universe, there are agents waiting to arrest Trumpov right outside that TV studio. Every intelligence agency we have has said publicly, privately, and eight ways to Sunday that Russian interference in our elections was a real thing. Trumpov’s ego doesn’t void those judgments. Even if you don’t buy that Trumpov is a traitor actively working to bring down our country, right there on TV he just exhibited such dangerously stupid and self-serving behavior that he should have been removed from office before supper time. And that’s just in a marginally sane universe…in the one where I get to (metaphorically, of course) swing the swift sword of righteous justice, Trumpov’s removal is followed by a coast-to-coast forced march while being tarred and feathered. Hey Donnie, break’s over, time to start headin’ into Iowa. Hey Vlad, what do you think of your boy now, motherfucker?
But I digress. Those were real, and really obvious, points where the other leaders of this country should have brought everything to a screeching halt. I’m primarily talking about Trumpov’s GOP enablers in Congress, but frankly, either/both of those firings would have been entirely appropriate opportunities for the Dem leadership to shut this country right the hell down. Pound on the media to get answers, to get the Repubs on the record right then and there. To walk them through it: “Senator Rightwing, do you understand that firing the FBI director for his refusal to halt the investigation into the attack on our country by a hostile foreign power means you are wedded to defending Donald Trump/your party/Russia over your. own. country?”
Barring that – just being honest – we ourselves should have hit the streets. I should have. Hit the phones, hit the media’s phones and TV studios, all of it. I did call my MoCs a few times, angry as hell, but that was about it.
Now we are seeing “moderate” Repubs absolutely fleeing Congress. Ryan – the freaking Speaker of the House! – can’t get out fast enough. Charlie Dent’s taking off even more quickly. Many have already said they aren’t running – there will be more to come. They know what’s coming and they don’t want to be anywhere near it. Trumpov going after Mueller, Rosenstein, or both will happen.
When the time comes…heck, now, before the time comes…let’s all commit to going all-out on this. We’ll have to pound on our Reps and Senators to truly take a stand and shut the country down if need be. We’ll REALLY have to pound on our media to recognize the crisis for what it really is, not just ‘reporting’ on each side’s strategies for winning. NO. HORSERACE.
We’ll need to make the Repubs see that this mockery of the rule of law will not stand, despite what they got away with re: Yates and Comey. We can’t just say, “well, we’re probably going to take control of the House in November”…we need to shut the whole country down and send a message that echoes through history (and not just Americans’ concept of history/time, either, LOL) Let’s keep working hard to win in 2018 – we still have to execute on the fundamentals of registering voters and getting them to the polls like never before. But please start mentally preparing for a day – a call to action – that is probably coming very, very soon.
TenguPhule
@different-church-lady:
Yes. And I’m afraid the answer to the question is still in doubt.
Aardvark Cheeselog
I have zero trouble concluding that Election ’16 is easily as consequential as the Kennedy assassination.
Yutsano
@Adam L Silverman: Best example I can think of that? Car dealerships. The owners of those small town but huge lot dealerships tend to be local big shots who spread money around like water. It wouldn’t surprise me if they took care of a few favours for cousins as well.
rikyrah
Chicago Police arrested #TylerLumar for a $25 traffic fine.
It had been paid for months. They never updated the system.
He hung himself in jail.
This was 2016.
He was rescued before dying but had horrible brain damage.
He just died. https://t.co/Ely6LYo5IT pic.twitter.com/V7ea4WtDeW
— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) April 19, 2018
TenguPhule
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
Simplest explanation: Dirty money is money from illegal operations that you can’t provide a “clean” legitimate origin for how that large amount of money is in your possession. Laundering it simply means you use places like casinos or taxis to provide an explanation for how you got that large amount of money. I.e. random people gamble and lose money, everyone knows that. Random taxi customers paid in cash, lots of fares and can’t remember them all.
Shana
@Elizabelle: I still think that if we now had President Clinton we’d be seeing the Obama GOP behavior on steroids. I’m not sure it’s worth it but after the Trump administration they’ll be a much diminished GOP.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
Common decency is like common sense. To be common more people would actually have to have some.
Elie
@StringOnAStick:
Good on you to volunteer to help us pull our country out of the ditch, one state, one county and one neighborhood at a time.
Here, we battle with ourselves as free range liberal progressives and with an opposition of religious culturists who have ways and means of recruiting young folks and holding onto rural family loyalties. Groups like “Forlorn Hope”, which arise from the same right wing nationalists that took over the national park last year, leave recruiting messages on bulletin boards at cattle auctions and similar events. Organizations euphemistically labeled as “Healthy Youth” are about fostering a network of religious tribalists who recruit people using fear and paranoia against government. They have our County and State ecology departments afraid to actually enforce some laws. THIS is what we have to fight to remove from local offices even more, I would say, than Trump. THIS is the bench feeding the horrible GOP Congress and the appointments Trump has made to destroy our hard won regulations. I urge everyone to pay strong attention to your local (County and State) contests and be ready to shell out your time and doe to fix. THIS is where the war to reverse this must have its roots in my opinion. We must not pretend that removing Trump and the GOP led Congress will do it…
mai naem mobile
Comey fucked up for sure but the ones who fucked up the biggest was the media. The media was sleeping st the wheel. There are enough 45+ year olds in the media that all the Russians at the RNC should have had fire engine sirens and lights going off in their heads. Add to thar that so much media is based in NY and they have to know about the Russian mafia and Russians in NY RE. All the media covered was HRC s emails, Bill Clinton’s meeting wih Loretta Lynch and HRC s fall. All they covered on Dolt 45 were his crazy Nazi rallies and Ivanka.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: Yep. Also some of the ranchers and other big landowners as well.
Mary G
I was only eight in 1963, but I remember it clearly. It was different because the whole country was suddenly shocked and horrified. If people were happy about it, they hid it well. (I have a bunch of deplorable relatives in Texas who worship the Confederacy, but were appalled by the assassination).
This is more like the Civil War. It pits Americans against Americans, and it’s going on and on and on.
Patricia Kayden
@Adam L Silverman: National Geographic is keeping track of Trump’s attempts to rollback Obama-era regulations. It’s scary that he may have up to 8 years to mess things up.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman: I have to admit, the couple of obvious ones I’ve been in – the ones with just a handful of customers, even on the weekends, year after year – usually make me laugh. Even just driving by. Come on you goombahs, shouldn’t you at least dine in your own ‘laundry’ and keep up appearances?
I’m sure there are 5-10x as many that are moderately successful, while reporting “highly successful” levels of income. But the quieter ones do make me chuckle.
Steve in the ATL
@LAO: Why is this so hard to understand?
Because he doesn’t want to understand, but you know that already.
Ksmiami
@terraformer: I don’t want to just fight them I want to crush the gop and it’s henchmen
J R in WV
Simplest demonstration of money laundering was the first time I watched it myself.
Many years ago three of us were leading a complex software development project. We depended on discussing things and coming to a consensus to make good decisions. This meant going to lunch together at a local bar/lunch counter called The Wheel, where Bob made a blue plate special, and had burgers, hotdogs, sandwiches, fries, etc, along with meatloaf or baked steak, whatever.
Usually there was a good crowd for lunch, some days not so much. There was a black-market poker machine on one corner, and Bob also sold from a bucket of pull-tags that awarded prize money on some tags, which were two for a buck IIRC.
Bob had legitimate income from selling lunch, dinner, and beer, the pool table, and the video games. He had “dark” money from the poker machine, the pull tabs (I’m sure there was a name for those, I don’t know it as I’m not a gambler at all of any sort — tips maybe?) and ball games. He can’t declare the gambling money, it’s illegal. So he sells way more lunches, however many he needs to to account for the poker machine, the pull tabs, and the football game cards. Maybe LOTS of lunches. Hard to claim he didn’t sell $2,800 in lunches last week.
One day when no one else was there, he asked us why we never played the poker machine. We looked at each other, the reason was that we knew the “odds” were set by a dial in the machine, not by the shuffle of actual cards, or even random numbers generated by the machine. But we didn’t want to insult him. So we looked at each other and started talking statistics and math. It still pissed him off a little, but we were regular customers for lunch, which made a profit.
Doing it with real estate is more complicated, takes more people with experience and skillz, but way more money at a time gets washed.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
There voting base bombs abortion clinics. Ours peacefully protest and are safely ignored most of the time by Republicans.
CarolDuhart2
A lot of rents and leases and subleases are paid with cash-or cash adjacent means: (money orders, counter checks). There really is no regulation on the amounts to be charged. The value of the place is one thing, the actual amount can be another. Money can be laundered this way to the owner as well.
Also the assassinations were a one-shot deal. Once the killers were caught, or tried, that was it. This is not a one-event deal where everything was clear-cut and final. We don’t know how this ends, or its extent. And nobody handling this was even 25% as dysfunctional as Trump.
Adam L Silverman
@Patricia Kayden: It is good they’re keeping a tally. But every single one of these is going to be challenged, and as a result of the challenge, held up in court for years. Step 1 is electing as many Democrats up and down the ballot this November and during special elections as possible. The more Democratic led states, the more challenges to these actions. The bigger the Democratic majorities in Congress, the more rigorous oversight and congressional pressure – including using appropriations – to bring Pruitt, Zinke, Carson, etc to heel.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Its harder then you think.
It costs time and resources and some of the requirements to prove intent are a pain in the ass to prove against any nominally competent fraudster. Don’t get swept by the headlines, all of those big convictions were the idiots.
Roger Moore
@Yutsano:
The thing I think of is some of the little dusty shops downtown when I was growing up. They’d somehow manage to stay in business forever despite being full of junk nobody would want and (apparently) nobody actually bought. Or businesses like typewriter repair shops that managed to keep going long after most people switched to computers.
Jeffro
@Kay: Looks like while I was running long at #120, you were saying it shorter and better – great minds and all that (only one of which is good at editing!)
Lee
@rikyrah:
Yeah me too. No one seems to have the balls to ask it or Comey told them beforehand that it was one of the things he couldn’t talk about.
Soprano2
I hope a front-pager does a post about the Senate voting yesterday to roll back a 2013 guidance put out by the Consumer Financial Protection Agency on car loans, based on a new GAO reading of the Congressional Review Act. They re-defined the “guidance” to be a “rule”, and then said that since the “rule” had never been published in the Federal Register the 60-day period had never started, and thus they can repeal any guidance like this one with 50 votes. I hope someone can challenge this in court, because if it stands they could roll back literally thousands of guidances from decades ago. I daresay Congress never intended for this law to be used in that way.
rikyrah
@Jeffro:
PHUCK EDSALL.
PERIOD.
Adam L Silverman
@TenguPhule: So you think Democrats should start bombing abortion clinics? A little extreme. Likely to be confusing given the constituency. But if you think it will work…//
Full disclosure: I am NOT advocating that anyone should bomb an abortion clinic. Or do anything else to impede the lawful medical operations at abortion clinics. Or bombing anything else.
geg6
@JPL:
I had the same reaction. Started getting ready to call off work and to march on the Federal Courthouse in Pittsburgh. I honestly thought Mueller and Rosenstein had been fired overnight. It may have been all the news reports here in Pittsburgh about how the city police got wind of the Resistance preparations for that possibility and are preparing for riots in case it happens. City police have been told to come to work with their riot gear until further notice.
rikyrah
About money laundering -car washes and laundromats are a business of choice for low level launderers like your drug bosses- lots of money, not really traceable.
Adam L Silverman
@Soprano2: It will be challenged in court.
germy
@Mary G:
Goaded on by an Australian (murdoch)
SiubhanDuinne
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
What a nightmare for all of you. I’m so sorry, and I hope we will soon return our country to one where you and your family can just be the “normal” family you dreamt of being.
Ruckus
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
Basically you do transactions which are fake. ie: Set up corps to sell a building to someone that has a large amount of cash gotten either illegally or in a way that is very suspicious. Money changes hands through a few corps a few times and the trail becomes difficult to follow and the money ends back up in the original hands, minus a few shekels profit for the washer. It can even be done without the money actually changing hands or a washer involved. Think of 666 whatever blvd in NYC. Sold to a numbnuts for way too much and refinanced for 1.2 billion by a last minute secret investor. Why would anyone with more brain power than a potted plant invest almost double what the building is worth or reinvest if the motive was profit from the actual building? It isn’t, the money is moved around to hide it, to profit off of moving it, not from the buildings inherent value as a structure.
IOW it’s the moving of the money enough times that makes it look clean. Which is all it has to do is look clean if you don’t stare at it long enough. The government has the power to look in ways you can’t though, so the corruption can be found. But that takes time and eyeballs and that costs money so it doesn’t happen as often as necessary. It takes inept people trying to pull off the con and failing at it. Sound familiar? Think drumpf and family. They have some money, they have all the wrong connections, they do stupid financial things all the time and everything they touch turns to shit. How are they making anything but small rocks from big ones?
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@JPL: @Aimai: @Elizabelle: @Betty Cracker:
Thank you all.
TenguPhule
@Peale:
Uh no, that gets you people making stuff up to meet quotas.
Understand this, prosecuting white collar crime is a real pain in the ass because our legal system does not handle complicated explanations very well and the details of a white collar crime scheme merely start at complicated and can wind up in mindboggling incomprehensibility by design.
Murders are goddamned simple, by comparison.
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
Oh God, we need an HGTV show “Flipping with Donny” where every episode his him “buying” (’cause he never pays) some fancy-schmancy, preferably lurid piece of real estate then limoing in a string of furriners avec escorts and seeing who tosses him the highest bid. Each episode ends with a BRINKS TRUCK backing up to the Trump Tower loading dock.
“Another satisfied customer!” [closeup of Donny’s upturned thumb]
TenguPhule
@Adam L Silverman:
No. But I miss the days when our unions had actual fucking teeth and kneecapping the opposition wasn’t a metaphor.
White & Gold Purgatorian
@rikyrah: so in this case the oligarch gets property with a realistic value of $45 mil, Trumpov gets $50 mil in profit and everyone goes away happy? Yeah, that’s a nice racket.
Brachiator
@MattF:
No.
Psych1
No one seems to have mentioned that in the process of laundering the money taxes get paid. That is a reason to not go after it.
CarolDuhart2
@Adam L Silverman: He probably wants us to be more militant. However, what does that mean? I would hesitate to advocate that especially in the wake of 911-like regulations. Also the 1960’s experience left a bad taste in the mouth of women and other groups who were shunted aside. Sexism in the anti-war movement on the radical side led to a great deal of the women’s movement, and radical black groups ended up being dead or jailed.
tamiasmin
Although none of us lived through it, I think a better comparison to our current debacle might be the assassination of Lincoln. After all, as Josie (14) wrote, LBJ was able to push through much of Kennedy’s stalled agenda, especially on civil rights. It’s impossible to know for sure, but Lincoln might have given actual force to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and spared the country and black citizens especially a hundred years of Jim Crow and all the rancor and shame and murder that that entailed, evil which we have not even yet come fully to terms with.
We can’t know for sure how bad and how long-lasting the consequences of Trump’s maladministration will be, but it is clear already that they will be as bad as he can make them. We have two hopes: his befuddledness and November.
Elizabelle
@tamiasmin: Great point. The historical counterpoint is Lincoln’s murder. I think he would have done a far better job of Reconstruction. As it is, WRT America’s Original Sin: it’s still a huge factor. Black Lives Matter because Blue Lives are too quick to shoot. Economic opportunity. Now, they’re tearing back voting rights.
StringOnAStick
@Elie: I agree completely with your assessment that we need to choke off their bench of future candidates by taking out the ones starting to rise now. I decided at the assembly that my main contributions and energy will go to getting rid of our one term odious state senator for my district. The guy is (1) owner of a gun range, (2) president of the rocky mountain gun owners association, and group that formed because the NRA is “too liberal”, and (3) introduced a bill to allow concealed carry anywhere in the state without a license less than 24 hours after the Parkland shootings.
Things we have on our side are D’s really, really hate this guy, the D candidate is excellent, and this is the same area that recalled the winger school board in 2015 and from that have grown some well organized action groups for improving school funding so we’ve got people who started getting serious about individual activism even before the 2016 travesty. Our senate district was redrawn before the last election which I think is the strongest reason why that guy won since it now includes some very red neck foothills locations. Also, CO is now a mail-in ballot state and that recall election was the first one where that was true. I think mail in ballots improves D chances anywhere since people are more likely to vote if they can do it without taking off from work, dealing with kids, etc. In my line of work there is simply no way I can take time off from work to vote (I see a patient every hour on the hour, no breaks).
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks. There are a lot of shitty aspects to the situation but one of the worst is how “home” is one of the least safe places for us to be. That’s what makes it feel not normal. Out and about in the city, visiting friends at their homes, etc, we’re at peace and carefree. But every day I go to work there is that ever present fear that maybe today is the day when our world turns upside down. Occasionally my wife and kids visit and stay with some friends up in the north burbs for a few days and even though I miss them it helps release some anxiety.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@mai naem mobile: One of the outlets responsible for a lot of the worst coverage is based in New York, in fact: the Fuck the Fucking Vichy New York Times. The FTFVNYT may not have been as awful as Faux News, but its coverage is arguably just as influential, given how many TV news broadcasts take their cues from the FTFVNYT’s coverage. Lots of people who would never think to watch Faux trust the FTFVNYT, though.
Elie
@Jeffro:
While I share your frustration with so much of the “analysis”, I find him a good read because it lets me know the issues that we should at least be thinking about how to either address or ignore. He is not just a shill for the Republicans. I have to admit I hated his columns initially, but I have learned a lot from them as well. He and some others like Bret Stephens are worth reading. I don’t have to agree with everything they say.
TenguPhule
@CarolDuhart2: Anti-abortionists persecute doctors and clinics, mostly by technically legal methods, while an extremist “fringe” (that’s not so fringe) that they still hold hands with employs actual violence against the same targets. When that fringe succeeds, they condemn the agent but celebrate the crime. This has become expected and normal behavior in this country.
Given that environment, you can see why only the bravest and most dedicated doctors risk doing abortions at all.
rikyrah
@Kay:
AND, there is so much corruption in this Administration. So much to choose from. The ads write themselves.
Ruckus
@Kay:
I agree about 2004. I knew that GWB was going to continue to be the president. Presidents don’t normally get voted out during a war. One of the reasons to start one in the first term. That way the crap that your party wants, like tax cuts can be worked into the system. Of course now we have such a massive maladministration and all three branches controlled by the same party that they managed to get their extreme tax benefits for the 1% passed without a war. Not that the maladministration isn’t trying to drum a war up just in case.
LAO
This is crazy — Alice through the looking glass crazy:
Elie
@StringOnAStick:
We see eye to eye, you and I. :-) Its my main focus now. In our legislative district, our organization has just been getting up to full speed in the last year and our potential candidate identification and recruitment is just getting amped up to where it needs to be. We have a lot of catching up to do but we are pretty energized. Now, if we can just stop ourselves from self inflicted injury from having too many people in primaries…. Running for office is hard and expensive. We are trying to give more support and do some candidate building for those coming up..
Amir Khalid
@CarolDuhart2:
Groan.
TenguPhule
@LAO: Reichstag is starting to smolder.
KS in MA
@Kay: Works for me!
eric
@J R in WV: the real estate is not hard. There will always be a second deal between the two participants where the one who received invests into a venture run by the dirty money guy. The dirty money guy gets “paid for services rendered” and voila dirty money turns into income (or investment income if they equalize capital contributions with a non-monetary component from the dirty guy). This is not legal advice.
Joeg
11/22/63 and Prez DJT ultimately were two operations driven solely by MONEY (sometimes defined as power).
JFK Hit: Mil Ind Complex, Bankers, Oil and parts of US Intel Community tied to each wanted big military actions. Either with Cuba, USSR, East Germany, or as a consolation prize Vietnam. Fostering a Long Term vision of DoD budgets and footprints, along with Intel Community pot-stirring for foreseeable future. Cold Wars 365 with hot wars every now and then.
Dolt45: Various US and Intl Bankers, bored billionaires, and various Russian, East European, Far East strongmen want US (and as a result China, EU, and S Amer) CHAOS. Lots of money [see: Trillions] (dirty and clean) gets churned, moved and ultimately taken and given to .01% and kakistocracy/mafia/oligarchs-mode of leadership takes root. Long-Term vision CHAOS 365 with major chaos every now and then, and permanent structure of illegal money washing to legal and staying with .01%
Similarities:
Marilyn Monroe —- Stormy Daniels
Jackie —- Ivanka
CIA —- FBI
Communists Hatred —- Russian love
Zapruder —- Book of Faces
Autopsy —- Pardons
RFK —- Don Jr and Eric
Dallas —- NYC
Oil —- Banks
Ruby —- Cohen
Grassy Knoll —- Trump Tower Lobby
Warren Comm —- Fox Newz
Cubans —- Romanians
Dan Rather — Sean Hannitty
Garrison —- Maddow
If computer social media existed in 1963 Oliver Stone releases JFK on Dec 24 1965. Everything is moving faster now but hopefully the govt (with big help from network news and print media) wont shut away all the facts for 75 yrs or longer.
11/22/63 minutiae: A mgr of a filling station saw a man in a car parked but running for 15-20 minutes at his station at approx 3:30 pm on 11/22/63. Mgr approached car and drivers hurriedly drives off but mgr gets lic plate number.. After mgr watched Ruby shoot LHO live on TV night of 11/24 he tells his wife that LHO looks exactly like the guy in that car he saw at his shop that afternoon. He call Dallas PD. Note, LHO was in Dallas police station at 3:30pm on 11/22/63. Police run lic nuber and determine car is owned by a worker at Bell Communications (soon to be Bell Helicopter) and friend of Officer Tippet (who was killed earlier in afternoon allegedly by LHO). Car owner tells police he loaned his car to a friend that day – not LHO. In 1977 car owner was given immunity to speak in closed door session of HSCA. Transcripts of meeting have been withheld from release ever since. Even after JFK Records Act.
Ive been a 11/22/63 buff since 1988. I was 7 months old on that sunny day in Dallas…
JaneSays
If Hillary had won…
a) We would still only have 8 Supreme Court justice seats filled, because McConnell would refuse to even give any nominee she puts forward a vote.
b) A few Cabinet positions might still be unfilled because McConnell’s sole mission would be to inflict as much damage as his office allows on Clinton’s presidency.
c) Hearings, hearings, hearings. Special prosecutor for sure. All based on bullshit pretenses, but still taking their toll nonetheless.
d) A 2018 midterm election that would be a repeat of 2010 and 2014 – larger GOP majorities in both houses heading into 2019.
e) Likely impeachment of Clinton sometime in 2019.
And even if all of those things did happen… I would still take that outcome 7 days a week and twice on Sundays over what we got.
Lee
@JaneSays:
The one thing that only time will tell is this year’s midterms. If things go as we all hope (a Blue Tsunami) then a sustained motivated liberal voting bloc then honestly it will all be worth it (IMHO). There is no way that a Blue Tsunami would happen if Hillary was elected and it was nothing but continued Republican obstruction.
Dmbeaster
@White & Gold Purgatorian: How money laundering works.
DOJ discussion of the technical elements
It basically involves handling money (or certain property acquired with such money) which is known to be derived from a crime (foreign or domestic) and with any one of the following intentions:
§ 1956(a)(1)(A)(i): intent to promote the carrying on of specified unlawful activity;
§ 1956(a)(1)(A)(ii): intent to engage in tax evasion or tax fraud;
§ 1956(a)(1)(B)(i): knowledge that the transaction was designed to conceal or disguise the nature, location, source, ownership or control of proceeds of the specified unlawful activity; or
§ 1956(a)(1)(B)(ii): knowledge that the transaction was designed to avoid a transaction reporting requirement under State or Federal law [e.g., in violation of 31 U.S.C. §§ 5313 (Currency Transaction Reports) or 5316 (Currency and Monetary Instruments Reports), or 26 U.S.C. § 6050I (Internal Revenue Service Form 8300)].
The most common prosecution is the fourth one because it is the easiest to prove. To inhibit the movement of illicit money, there are a number of reporting requirements. Think Al Capone and not paying his taxes. No one involved in dirty money is going to comply with reporting requirements.
Money laundering as a crime is a somewhat technical thing. As a practice and an example, what do you do with $1,000,000 in small bills from drug dealing? What do you do with $10,000,000 parked in a foreign account obtained by bribery or theft from your own government? Its all useless if you cannot spend it someplace useful, but how do you move it without risk?
rikyrah
@Kay:
But, the thing is, Kay.
We haven’t accepted.
And, thus, the problem.
We have consistently, since November 2016, not accepted.
Thus the 20,000 articles on the Dolt45 voter. How we have to ‘ understand’ them.
The whining from the right, on how we’re not ‘ respecting the Presidency’.
The most underreported story is just how much Clinton voters HAVE NOT ACCEPTED what happened in November 2016.
And, how, we are consistently throwing it in the faces of those we believe are RESPONSIBLE for November 2016.
CarolDuhart2
Joeg: there is no evidence that JFK would have ended Vietnam. True, actions were averted in Europe or elsewhere, but nuclear war was/is bad for business. A second term JFK would have kept the pot on a low simmer,perhaps, but the war would have continued without a real resolution. And nobody thought that Vietnam would go on as long as it did or be as traumatic as it was. It was LBJ’s doubling down that made things worse in the search for a final victory that was elusive.
LHO was a wife-abusing loner who needed a shot at glory. He had no friends, nobody who would help out in doing what he did. When he made his foreign trips, he was unwelcome and left empty-handed.
The problem with the assassination “conspiracy’ people is when you start walking things backward and start asking basic questions-like why then, why there, and what was his death trying to resolve? The trip to Dallas was to shore up things in Texas for his re-election. Would he have gone if things were rosy and he could have been assured of the state? Would any competent conspiracy have relied on an improbable procession through Dallas, or a mentally disturbed loner like LHO to carry it out?
The source of a lot of that feeling was the bitterness against LBJ and his escalation of the Vietnam war and the hamfisted way dissent wa handled. But that doesn’t add up to a conspiracy.
And about that- was there any guarantee that LBJ wouldn’t have simply carried out JFK’s military approach instead of escalating?
r€nato
@Kay: that happened in FL around 2009/2010 and the story about it easily found with a web search. It was Skank of America. The couple obtained a judgment, BofA ignored several letters requesting they pay the judgment. So they got an order – not garnishment, but something akin to that – for the county sheriff to close a branch and begin taking everything of value out of there to be sold at auction to satisfy the judgment. Furniture, fixtures, and so on. Not the cash on hand, I don’t think they could do that. The couple got their check within an hour or two, if memory serves. I also recall that the branch manager had a total, “but… you can’t do that!” reaction when the sheriff showed up; the retort was essentially, “yes we can, watch us.”
White & Gold Purgatorian
@Adam L Silverman:
On reflection, you are probably correct.
The Moar You Know
@TenguPhule: One of my work specialties is digital forensics. Do you know why we have so much criminal activity done using computers/Internet and nobody does jack shit about it? This is why. The legal system could handle it (the complexity, not the sheer volume) but cops, prosecutors and judges have less than zero interest in dealing with anything that complicated or hard to understand…and so they just don’t.
Except for kiddy porn. Wonder why that’s the exception? Because voters will and do throw billions of dollars at that crime. And most of the time that one’s pretty easy to prove.
Citizen Alan
@Adam L Silverman:
I’ve often wondered how the media and the nation would react if some radical feminist group started bombing the headquarters of the various right-to-life organizations. It might be instructive to see how the two patterns of bombings would be treated.
r€nato
@CarolDuhart2: one of the key pillars of the “it couldn’t have happened that way, therefore my conspiracy theory about who REALLY killed JFK is true” arguments, is the profound doubts about the single bullet theory. That a single bullet could have made the crazy path it did, hitting JFK’s neck, piercing Connolly’s body, ricocheting off his ribs and then passing through his hand to rest in his thigh. This theory makes the mistaken assumption that both men were sitting more or less in-line, at around the same height. This was not the case. Connolly was seated lower than Kennedy and off to his left. Therefore, the bullet didn’t have to travel a zig-zag path to strike both men.
With that explanation more plausible, you don’t need a second shooter to explain the JFK assassination. Of course, there was much about the event and the surrounding circumstances and fallout that made fertile ground for conspiracy theories, such as the Ruby assassination of LHO, the fact that powerful Mafia figures were pissed off at the feds going after them so hard when they thought the Kennedy clan owed them a thing or three, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and other Cuba-related shenanigans, the clumsy conduct of the Warren Commission…
White & Gold Purgatorian
@Dmbeaster: thanks for the link and explanation.
rikyrah
@JaneSays: ‘
NO tax scam
None of the judges Dolt45 put through.
At the very least, the people chosen to head the agencies would not be trying to destroy them.
We’d have an actual State Department
White & Gold Purgatorian
Many thanks to all who have shared links, examples, explanations and so forth on the subject of money laundering. Consider me enlightened.
hilts
@JaneSays:
If Hillary had won, while there would clearly be problems created by obstructionist Rethuglicans, there would also be more sanity, reason, and honesty emanating from the White House. I could have settled for that scenario.
Tom Q
@r€nato: Also the fact that it seemed everyone Oswald knew was a former CIA guy.
People say if you look into any event you can find oddities surrounding them, and that may be true, but the Kennedy shooting just seemed to have more than its share.
Brachiator
@r€nato:
Yes,yes,yes. This myth was reinforced by the recreation of the Jim Garrison investigation shown in the film “JFK.” That film, and Garrison’s original work, used a seating chart that was totally inaccurate.
Yep. And Connolly himself testified that just before the shooting, he had turned to speak with Kennedy.
It is amazing how persistent this myth is, even though it is so easily debunked by the actual evidence.
Heywood J.
I’m slightly too young (born in 1967) for JFK to have that much resonance. For me, 2016 was very much like 9/11, in terms of forcing a re-examination of how I viewed everything, in this case my fella ‘murkins. I was certain that I could never be more cynical about the average moron, but on 11/8/16 the yahoos said, Hol’muh beer.
The fact that most of them seem to accept (or even enjoy) the daily malfeasance passively only changes my view of them still further. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were so many people who cared more about sticking their fingers in the eyes of librul caricatures than about the well-being of their country.
I hope they get everything they voted for, quite literally. The damage from this shitshow of an administration will not be undone within our lifetimes.
Joeg
@CarolDuhart2:
The Warren Commission is a complete farce. Their mission statement was to prove LHO acted alone (fact).
Vietnam was short term benefit. DoD and CIA black budgets are now in a space untouchable. Mission accomplished. Who cares if it simmered or boiled over? Cold War was accepted and profit.
There is no proof LHO was a wife abusing commie looking to be a star. There are plenty of allegations…His chance to be a star was met with his assertion he was just a patsy. He defected to Russia with classified U2 info and permitted to return and we are to believe his actions were not tracked and in fact was permitted to work for a time in New Orleans (coffee and photography companies) with known ties to intelligence fronts? (fact) Let alone work in a building with curbside access to the limo route? Even with the release of the news the Dallas FBI was aware of him? Even after the FBI and CIA received cables from Mexico City that LHO was there wanting to talk with known USSR assets with known involvements in assassinations? (fact). Please.
Hoover knew his identity was stolen in 1961 when he alerted field FBI someone was using it in the US when if fact LHO was in Russia (fact).
The actual conspiracy is no networks or media pursues the actual truth even after HSCA and JFK Records Act releases. Just the few facts I’ve listed above would be enough to stop DC in its tracks if they were half as substantial wrt Benghazi, etc…
But maybe it was just a pissed off little commie and he caused the authorities to burn autopsy notes, buy the Z Film and keep it hidden to 25 yrs, lose the brain, release autopsy photos making no sense, shuffle empty caskets in and out of Bethesda, lead to suicides of individuals asked to testify, force Life magazine to publish Z frames out of order, and on and on and on…etc…
It was a coup. Didn’t go very well (see: Ruby killing LHO two days later) but successful. Plain and simple with a few changes. Brazen, vicious, in broad daylight, in front of hundreds.
catclub
@SFAW:
how about Turtle al carbon?
also, Comey’s ego and self righteousness is no insignificant little thing. One is reminded of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s self -regard.
Joeg
@r€nato:
Respectfully, while the SBT can be possible the pristine bullet found and claimed to be the SB had far too little damage or missing fragments to account for the fragments found in Connelly. Who btw refused to have all the fragments removed from his body even after his death and claimed to be hit distinctly by a different that the shot thru JFKs throat. WC panel felt he was mistaken — even though he was in the car and had military and hunting experience/knowledge of gun shot sounds, etc.
SBT works but now with the bullet they claim is the magic one…
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
True enough, but this is based on a very small number of events. And the president’s party has been defeated in midterms during wartime.
Also, George HW Bush was defeated for re-election despite his Gulf War victory.
Hopefully, Trump won’t do anything stupid and start a war, and we won’t have to test this truism about presidents and war.
Captain C
@White & Gold Purgatorian: One way (of many) that I’ve heard, that works for small to medium amounts, is to use a cash-only business. For example, let’s say Yuri Mobsky (Russian equivalent of a mob capo) owns a nightclub which charges a $20 cash cover to get in. On an average night, there are 50 patrons. However, the establishment reports 200, meaning that that with 150 ghost patrons, there are $3000 in cash gate receipts which are now clean, as it’s very difficult to prove that the cash came from anything other than legit customers. Over the course of a year, this comes to nearly a million dollars of ill-gotten gains which Yuri (or his front people) can now report as legit income, giving him visible means of support and cover for other large sums of cash which aren’t necessarily laundered. I’m sure there’s a way to increase the supposed revenue for booze and whatever else the ghost customers consume and use that as a laundry, as well, perhaps at several levels along the chain.
efgoldman
I was already an almost adult (18) in 1963. The JFK assassination unfortunately didn’t exist in historical isolation. It was very recent memory/trauma in ’68. when RFK and MLK were killed and Wallace was shot. All part of the same arc.
Weasel Face’s “election” is the culmination of a different arc, which started with Goldwater in ’64, thru Sanctus Ronaldus, both Bushes, Newtnik, and the TeaParty.
Captain C
@Roger Moore: If Yuri has a million dollar profit on ill-gotten gains, and loses 10% of it at Boris’ casino, he comes away with $900,000 in laundered profits and the extra 10% can be considered Boris’ fee for laundering the money (and it gives Boris some extra legal income if he needs some to cover for other shenanigans).
Kathleen
@mark k: Boom! Thread obviously dead but I had to respond. JFK’s murder was a coup, as was 2016 election. 2000 was also.
Bonnie
I was 18 when JFK was assassinated; and, it still ways heavy on my mind. I remember the weekend that followed and seeing JFK’s assassin shot on TV right in front of me and my family just as we had returned from church. Then, in 1968 Marin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, which I found just staggering in my young life. And, before we could even deal with MLK’s murder, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed a couple of months later. All three assassinations still run in my head and impact my life even now at 72. I remember the Viet Nam war and all the protests and how it often pitted friend against friend/parent against child. I remember Watergate as if it were just yesterday. Yet, I think the worst thing to happen to my country in my lifetime was the election of Donald Trump as President, one of the most horrible human beings in our country. I can only think that every American who voted for this truly horrible human being is every bit as horrible as Trump. And, that is why I hate them. The election of Trump has made me glad that I am so old. I sometimes wish i would drop over dead so that I won’t have to “survive” this presidency. In the meantime, I do my best to keep moving and hope for the American people to come to their senses where this horrible, horrible human being is concerned.
P.S. to John: I am so sorry about Lily. I lost one of my most precious cats three years ago and still am not over that. Take care and I am sure you will do what is best for Lily.
wenchacha
@Roger Moore: My husband was looking at some office equipment for his shop. A large, 4 story bldg. had tons of office chairs, flat files, all sorts of stuff from businesses that closed or remodeled. He sells it for half retail, which is still plenty for a$1400 Vidmar file cabinet. How do you hold so much inventory, even if it was pennies on the dollar?
Several years ago I read some highly detailed piece online about money laundering. Author’s theory was that all the little shops that open and close, year after year, are due to laundering. stores with no visible means of support, same thing. Be nice if some of that was called out for what it is.