Crackdown on ‘pig-butchering’ cyberscam

I wrote recently about being the target of the ugly cyberscam with the ugly name of ‘pig butchering’ that involves human trafficking, that operates largely out of Cambodia and neighboring countries. ProPublica had written a detailed expose of the scam and this may have possibly led Cambodian authorities to crack down on the practice.

A new type of online fraud emanating from scam sweatshops in Southeast Asia is facing its first major crackdown. Cambodian authorities have stepped up raids on compounds alleged to house workers engaging in online fraud, seizing computers, phones and electric shock batons and freeing thousands of involuntary workers. And Apple has removed from its app store two popular trading apps that cybercriminal groups in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have used to defraud people.

As ProPublica reported in a Sept. 13 investigation, pig butchering scams have been fueled by human trafficking. Workers from around Asia are tricked into going to Cambodia, Laos or Myanmar for seemingly well-paid jobs that instead trap them inside scam sweatshops run by Chinese criminal syndicates. Those who resist directives to engage in online fraud face beatings, food deprivation or worse.
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Dramatic reversal of UK’s tax cut for the wealthy

In an embarrassing turn of events for the Liz Truss government, while insisting late into Sunday night that they were going to stick with the plan to massively cut the tax rate for the wealthy that they had announced with pride but had sent the country reeling in all manner of ways, the government announced very early Monday morning, on the first day of the Conservative party conference, that they were scrapping it. They were clearly rattled by the rumblings of a rebellion by the party faithful at the conference that suggested that the measure might be defeated in parliament.

This article describes what happened on Sunday evening.
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Brazil elections bring disappointment and hope

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wins 48% of the votes in Brazil’s presidential election held yesterday, ahead of the 43% for incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Since Lula did not get 50%, that means there will be a run-off election between just the two of them on October 30th.

The results are a a disappointment for Lula’s supporters who had hoped that he might be able to avoid the run-off vote, although the polls showed that it was always unlikely. Bolsonaro got more votes than expected. So now we head to the run-off on October 30th.
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The short unhappy honeymoon of Liz Truss

Whenever a new person becomes leader of a democracy, especially one who replaces a highly unpopular one, they are usually given a grace period of 100 days or six months or so before they start getting seriously criticized, a period often referred to as a honeymoon. This is so that they can assemble their team and formulate policies that will implement whatever they promised to do.

In the case of Liz Truss, who was elected by Conservative party members in September to replace the unpopular Boris Johnson as prime minister after weeks of turbulence, she has managed within the space of less than one month after taking office to create serious turmoil within the country, so much so that even members of her own party are calling for her to either quit or fire her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng or reverse the policies that he had revealed to parliament in a so-called ‘mini-budget’ that gave large tax cuts to the rich, reportedly the biggest tax cuts in 50 years, without any serious thought being given to how the resulting revenue shortfall would be made up. This article describes in detail how it all went down.
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Dangerous times in Brazil

Brazil holds its elections on Sunday and the most significant position is that for the presidency that pits the incumbent right wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro against leftist former president Inacio Lula Da Silva. Bolsonaro is very authoritarian and is currently behind in the polls but has said, like Trump, that he can only lose if there is cheating and that he will not leave office quietly. His supporters are saying that they will not accept any other result than a Bolsonaro victory. If no candidate gets an absolute majority on Sunday, there will be a run-off election on October 30th.


Bolsonaro is in many ways like Trump but while I wrote that it was always unlikely that the US military would go along with any attempted coup by Trump after he lost, that is not the case in Brazil. Bolsonaro is a former officer and has maintained his ties to the military and has, like Trump, given ex-military people important positions in government. Brazil had a US-backed military coup in 1964 and the military stayed in power until 1985. This history of military rule means that the concept of a military takeover is not unthinkable. Bolsonaro during his presidency also greatly relaxed gun ownership laws and that has led to a very large number of people now owning weapons. He also, like Trump, has a hard core of fanatical supporters who believe his outlandish claims, and might be perfectly willing to unleash violence if Bolsonaro urges them on, like Trump’s followers on January 6th.
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Political developments in the UK and Italy

I did not know much about Liz Truss who was elected as the new leader of the UK Conservative party, replacing Boris Johnson and thus becoming the prime minister. Jonathan Pie says that she is the most right-wing ideologue to occupy the premiership, even more so than Margaret Thatcher, and that is saying something. And she has started off by doing what right-wingers love to do, and that is give a massive tax cut for the wealthy.

Pie thinks that the right-wingers are going for broke, trying to give away as much as they can to their rich friends as long as they remain in power.
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Cynically exploiting human beings

The current Republican party seems to have just one policy and that is to ‘own the libs’, whatever the cost to real, live people. The appalling publicity-seeking stunt by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in luring Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, has aroused widespread condemnation as a cruel and cynical example of such thinking, that having to deal with asylum seekers would make liberals reconsider their humane approach to desperate people seeking better lives. Texas governor Greg Abbott has done something similar, sending busloads of asylum seekers to Washington, DC. However, the residents of those areas have responded by helping out the arrivals.

This idea of sending people to other places to ‘teach the residents of those places a lesson’ has a sordid antecedent in the ‘Reverse Freedom Rides’ of the civil rights era, where white segregationists in the south sent busloads of poor black people, especially women and children who were likely to need public assistance, to Northern states, luring them to accept the rides by promising them all manner of good things. The southern segregationists were hoping to change northern opinion against desegregation. It seems like DeSantis and Abbott see no shame in looking like the segregationists of a previous era. It is part, I suppose, of their goal of returning the US to the 1950s, which they bizarrely see as some sort of golden age ideal.
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Betray friends or betray country?

In his 1938 essay What I Believe that can be found in the collection Two Cheers for Democracy, E. M. Forster wrote the following:

I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy – they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long.
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Was there a coup in the last days of Trump’s administration?

During the period of turmoil just before and after the 2020 election, when an increasingly belligerent and angry Trump kept insisting that he could only lose if there was cheating and would not state that he would go along with the peaceful transfer of power if he was declared the loser, there was increasing alarm that he would try and stage a coup rather than leave office. I personally thought that this was unlikely and said so in June before the election and in November just after the election.

The reason for my skepticism was that in order to carry out a coup, Trump would need the support of the military and I could see absolutely no upside for the US military to get involved in such an attempt. Other than so-called palace coups where a group of insiders edge out a leader by some means and replace them with another insider, most coups require actions by the military to seize the major organs of power and the media, arrest opposition leaders, and patrol the streets to quell any nascent opposition. A simple cost-benefit analysis would tell the top US military brass to steer clear of any such move. The potential cost is very high, since if the coup attempt failed, all the officers would be charged with treason. The potential benefits are nowhere close to being worth the cost since the US military already does very well in terms of broad public support. The top military brass get treated very well and have all manner of desirable perks. Both major parties fall over themselves to see who can be more generous in funding the military, sometimes giving them even more than they ask. Why would they risk a very cushy gig by breaking all prior norms and coming down on one side, especially when that side is led by an utterly erratic, irrational, and narcissistic person like Trump? This situation is quite different from that in countries where successful coups have taken place, where the military thinks it has much to gain by taking over the government or aiding a politician in taking it over.
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