Indeed. DC has been broken and corrupted for a very long time. It won’t take too much shaking to see things falling out of the trees.
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Yes, exactly. If it happened to Manning, it better damn well happen to Manafort. (I wrote my MP and minister about the Manning issue. Generally I take issue with the whole policy.)
To me this isn’t odd at all because I think Russia’s goal is to sow chaos in the US and make US democracy look like a mess.
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Do you actually think you need assistance with that?
We’re even worse, and nobody has suggested that the FSB has its hands up the back of our politicians. They can be dysfunctional all by themselves (OK, with a little help from $45000 a year fees at their private schools.)
Edit - my point was that I was surprised at first that they printed the indictment, which clearly shows that Manafort is accused of supporting Yanukovich in exchange for big money laundering facilities. Yanukovich is the pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician.
But more and more I think this is the work of old Communists, whether based in St. Peterburg, Moscow or inside the Kremlin itself. For them, Manafort being in cahoots with Yanukovich is still good news because it shows that capitalism is quite capable to destroying itself through greed. Putin and his team might well prefer it not to come out because it’s close to them. But for a former KGB officer whose day job was getting Westerners with access to spy for the USSR, it’s a success because although he was found out it is hugely embarrassing for the US - just as Philby, Burgess and Maclean had to defect, but the revelation that going to the right schools and knowing the right people did not mean that you supported the British Government - was a huge blow to the British Establishment. You can get a sense of this from John Le Carré’s books after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which give some slight idea of the loss of confidence. In Le Carré’s world, of course, the revenge fantasy works out. But in real life it did not in that way - the whole Wall fell instead, and the UK was utterly irrelevant in that event.
To put all this another way, I think the idea of some overreaching Russian master plan is a mistake, just as the idea that the US has some consistent foreign policy in the Middle East or that the British government has the first clue what to do about the EU is a mistake. I suspect we are seeing different actors with different agenda. This gives the problem of a response. US foreign policy has been a succession of backing wrong horses since before Roosevelt decided he could trust Stalin.
The desire to believe in shadowy masterminds and criminal kingpins seems deep rooted in the human psyche, perhaps because since we stopped being hunter gatherers the real world has been too complex to grasp. The same with the tendency to project all our own desires onto what Auden described as a “psychopathic god”. But one thing is clear to me. If the human race wants to make it to 2100 AD and still have civilisations, it needs to stop shaking its fists and start thinking.
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my very favorite part was Papadopolis’ attorney making sure we knew he couldn’t comment because that might make his client appear less cooperative than he has been since he was secretly arrested in July. 
I have a funny feeling someone has been wearing a wire for a while…
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Indeed.
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I’m amazed there aren’t at least a dozen GOP insiders on planes to the Bahamas and Dubai right now.
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They’re not on there because they don’t think it’s going to be them going down for all this… How often are white collar crimes really prosecuted effectively and how often do people convicted really serve time, despite the fact that there crimes are often far more impactful on a far larger number of people? They know their white, male, elite privilege protects them from the worst punishments.
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In Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, the confidence trickster says that he has never killed anyone, to which the golem replies that he has in fact killed something in excess of two people through his frauds.
If the same techniques used by, say, NICE to evaluate medical treatment was applied to white collar crime there would be a sudden rush to abolish the death penalty in the US. Bankers, I suspect, though indirectly, kill far more people than terrorists.
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I think for the law a quick and direct size of fraud divided by statistical value of human life times punishment for murder would do fine.
I guess for RT there’s also the goal of keeping up appearances. Even if we think they are a very thinly veiled propaganda arm of the Russian government, there is value to them in maintaining that thing veil. So they have to report on stories of certain importance. (From the cheeseburger incident we see that Fox News has abandoned this completely, but there’s a difference when you are domestic, RT wants to stay international)
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there’s an article in the atlantic arguing that the laws relating to lobbying on behalf of a foreign nation really haven’t been enforced.
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I feel like this should definitely be a bOINGbOING game…
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Ummm, just about never? No major bankster has been convicted in all the larceny that went on in the subprime mess.
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Madeblinately
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Most Are Grifters Anyway
Might Attempt Going AWOL
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IIRC, a big part of why that is true is that a lot of what they were doing was not, technically, illegal. Reckless and unethical, definitely, but not quite illegal. Legislation and regulations had fallen way behind, and even the big banks themselves didn’t quite understand the ever more complex financial instruments they were using to extract more money.
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