Tag: complicit

What’s the harm, eh?

9 Comments


Thanks, gocomics.org

IF we make it past Trump’s attempt at a coup…
IF we make it to an inauguration in January…
IF we have enough Congresspimps willing to indict Trump for his crimes…

We should be ready to indict a helluva lot of Republicans as co-conspirators!

That rotten smell in the White House is a racist, our fake president

2 Comments

❝ It seems maddeningly repetitive to have to return time and again to the fact that Donald Trump is a racist, but it must be done. It must be done because it is a foundational character issue, one that supersedes and informs many others, in much the same way that his sexism and xenophobia does.

❝ On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Representative Elijah Cummings’s district “is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” a “very dangerous & filthy place” and “No human being would want to live there.” Cummings is black, as are most people in his district…

None of this is about crime as a discrete phenomenon, but rather about inextricably linking criminality to blackness. White supremacy isn’t necessarily about rendering white people as superhuman; it is just as often about rendering nonwhite people as subhuman. Either way the hierarchy is established, with whiteness assuming the superior position.

❝ It would be easy to prosecute a case against Trump on policy, but policies are not at the center of the creature. White supremacy, white nationalism and white patriarchy are.

The core of this man is racist in a way that is so fused to his sense of the world that he is incapable of seeing it as racist. It is instinctual for him to attack people of color. It is instinctual for him to denigrate the places they live and the countries to which they trace their heritage.

This commentary by Charles Blow in the NYTimes is detailed, profound, in addressing our fake president’s racism. I shan’t waste time and space trying to convince Trump’s supporters. They must be aware of racist content – and not decrying it, not rejecting the front man for this racist attack on America’s body politic – they are willing to be complicit.

The task is to explain this to that larger, sweeping body politic who wish to move forward from the stink of racist populism that now owns the Republican Party.

Science envoy resigns from government to protest destructive policies

1 Comment


Click to enlarge

❝ An energy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, resigned his post as a science envoy for the US Department of State on 21 August, citing US President Donald Trump’s “attacks on the core values of the United States”.

In a resignation letter addressed to Trump, scientist Daniel Kammen joined political leaders from both major parties who have criticized Trump’s equivocal response to violent demonstrations by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 12 August. Kammen also criticized the Trump administration’s “destructive” policies on energy and the environment, which he said have affected his work as a science envoy. Such policies include the president’s decision to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate pact.

Hilarious. Click the snap of Kammen’s letter for the enlarged version. Make a word from the first letter of each paragraph. Someone will have to show Trump how to do this – and then he’ll blow a gasket.

Brits beg Obama for Special Dispensation over participation in US torture program

Leave a comment


Preppie Crimelords

The government stands accused of seeking to conceal Britain’s role in extraordinary rendition, ahead of the release of a declassified intelligence report that exposes the use of torture at US secret prisons around the world.

The Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation programme, due to be released in days, will confirm that the US tortured terrorist suspects after 9/11…

Now, in a letter to the human rights group Reprieve, former foreign secretary William Hague has confirmed that the UK government has held discussions with the US about what it intends to reveal in the report which, according to al-Jazeera, acknowledges that the British territory of Diego Garcia was used for extraordinary rendition…

Cori Crider, a director at Reprieve, accused the UK government of seeking to redact embarrassing information: “This shows that the UK government is attempting to censor the US Senate’s torture report. In plain English, it is a request to the US to keep Britain’s role in rendition out of the public domain.”

Lawyers representing a number of terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo Bay believe their clients were rendered via Diego Garcia. Papers found in Libya indicated that the US planned to transport Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, an opponent of Muammar Gaddafi, and his wife via the territory, an atoll in the Indian Ocean leased by Britain to the US. The government has denied Belhaj was rendered via Diego Garcia, but there are suspicions that others were held on the atoll.

Crider said the UK’s attempts to lobby the US into redacting parts of the report “turns the government’s defence in the Libyan renditions case of Abdul-Hakim Belhaj and his wife entirely on its head”…

“The government protested America would be angered if this kidnap case ever went to trial – and now we learn the British government is leaning on the Americans not to air Britain’s dirty laundry. It exposes their litigation stance as mere posturing,” she added.

Confirmation that a British territory was involved in extraordinary rendition could leave the government vulnerable to legal action. Last month the European court of human rights ruled that the Polish government actively assisted the CIA’s European “black site” programme, which saw detainees interrogated in secret prisons across the continent…

The judges concluded that not only was Poland “informed of and involved in the preparation and execution of the [High Value Detainee] Programme on its territory”, but also “for all practical purposes, facilitated the whole process, created the conditions for it to happen and made no attempt to prevent it”, prompting lawyers to ask what else it has been used for since.

The exposure of how far Tony Blair would go to maintain the UK as the United States’ 51st state will open that nation to more than embarrassment for their crimes. Criminal prosecution of the kind already historically required against the United States – should proceed against co-conspirators. Breaking treaties, abrogating human rights on a global scale should have consequences. Citizens of countries committing such crimes have a responsibility to speak out, to demand that the thugs in charge of government should bear the responsibility for those crimes.

Tony Blair and William Hague deserve prison time as much as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Bank of America sued for aiding Internet Ponzi scheme

1 Comment


Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Victims of an Internet-based Ponzi scheme have filed a lawsuit against Bank of America and the organizers of the scheme in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

Using elaborate misrepresentations, including numerous video postings on YouTube, organizers induced victims from around the country to purchase so-called “ad packages” from the following entities: AdSurfDaily, AdSurfDaily Cash Generator, Golden Panda Ad Builder, and La Fuente Dinero. The scheme promised that participants could earn large rebates for viewing web advertisements and commissions for referring additional participants.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were collected from approximately 140,000 victims across the country, in amounts ranging from $500 to $250,000 at large rallies and through online deposits…

At least one other financial institution closed the accounts of the organizers for suspicious activity, according to a sworn government complaint. VISA also considered the enterprise suspicious and would not process charges directed to the scheme by would be victims. And the very popular PayPal payment system rejected efforts by participants to purchase “ad packages” using their system.

Beginning in November of 2006, Bank of America allegedly allowed the scheme’s main perpetrator carte blanche at the bank. The complaint claims the scammers opened and maintained at least 10 separate accounts for running an unlawful Ponzi scheme. These accounts were opened at a tiny Bank of America branch in Quincy, Florida under various “doing business as” designations.

The suit claims Bank of America looked the other way when these accounts amassed deposits in the tens of millions of dollars from thousands of individual transactions.

There is an established range of regulations requiring oversight from bankers over activities like these. Most require reporting suspicious activity to the Feds. Surely looks like someone in the food chain at BofA was looking the other way. Deliberately.