The trials and convictions of extremists

The leaders of the extremists groups behind the attacks on January 6th have had some serious setbacks in the courts. Last week saw the leaders of the Proud Boys get convicted of seditious conspiracy

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three other members of the far-right extremist group were convicted Thursday of a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol in a desperate bid to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 presidential election.

A jury in Washington, D.C., found Tarrio and three lieutenants guilty of seditious conspiracy after hearing from dozens of witnesses over more than three months in one of the most serious cases brought in the stunning attack that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, as the world watched on live TV.

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The government’s cash balance dips sharply again

The cash balance in the governments account dropped sharply on Wednesday. It started the day with $94.629 billion, had revenues of only $16.310 billion and expenditures of $42.6226 billion, ending the day with $68.332 billion.

This graph shows the steady decline in the cash balance over the past year.

In May of last year, the balance was close to $800 billion and kept steadily dropping with just a few upticks until it reached the current value, which is less than one-tenth of the starting value.

The puzzling appeal of Nazism in the US today

We know that Hitler and the Nazis were impressed by racist and eugenics ideas in the US and that they coopted many of those ideas in their theory and program of Aryan supremacy that led to the mass killings of Jews, the Romani people, and others. We now have the reverse phenomenon, where some Americans are taking inspiration from those Nazi ideas and express admiration for Nazis. As a result, we have had various groups of white nationalists and anti-Semites recruiting people to their cause using neo-Nazi rhetoric..

I have been struggling to figure out what exactly is the contemporary appeal of Nazism in the US. Let me be clear about what puzzles me. The appeals to quasi-eugenics ideas such as the ‘great replacement theory’ according to which there is a deliberate plan to displace white Christians from their dominant position by immigrants and people of color and Jews and other religions, have been around in the US long before the Nazis came to power in Germany.
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The government cash countdown and novel solutions to the crisis

The debt ceiling has always been a tool for Republicans to force through measures that would otherwise never get legislative approval.

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine book describes how conservatives in this country and abroad use a crisis — natural disasters and other unexpected calamities — to push through policies that would never win legislative support. What happened was, in the Obama administration, his Republican adversaries realized they could actually plan a crisis by refusing to increase the debt ceiling and then use the shock doctrine to push through their desired policy (spending cuts and, if they can get away with it, tax cuts too).

At the end of day on Thursday, May 11, the amount that the government had in its operating cash account to pay its bills was $143.314 billion. On Friday May 12th, the income was $15.982 billion and the outflow was $19.352 billion, leaving a reduced cash balance at the end of that day of $139.944 billion. As the days go by, the trend line for the closing balance is to keep dropping, though on some days the balance might rise.

The current debt ceiling limit was last raised on December 16, 2021 to $31.4 trillion. If you want to know the value of the US debt down to the last cent, as of May 12th, it was $31,458,532,169,329.81. How can it be larger than the limit by about $58 billion? It is because “under current law, [the Treasury] can take well-established “extraordinary measures” to borrow additional funds without breaching the debt ceiling.” But there is a limit to such extraordinary measures. The nominal limit of $31.4 trillion was reached back in January.

I am not sure how low the cash balance has to sink before it becomes a full-fledged crisis. Such a date is known as the ‘X-date’. This article discusses some of the known expenditures to come and who might get paid if the debt ceiling is not raised. But the Biden administration has ruled out paying some bills and not others.
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What we can learn from the E. Jean Carroll trial

This American Life had a segment about how, back in 2020, Carroll recorded as series of interviews with women who had accused convicted sex offender Donald Trump (CSODT) of sexual assault or harassment. They played her interview with Jessica Leeds who had also testified at the trial.

In cases like Carroll’s, much depends on how credible each side is but that is hard to gauge based on the written word. I have never seen or heard Carroll live and of course I did not see the trial so could not judge how the jury might have perceived them. But when I listed to this 16-minute discussion between the two women, I could understand why the jury seemed to have no difficulty whatsoever in finding them to be credible.

Rebecca Traister discussed with On The Media host Brooke Gladstone about what the trial and verdict of CSODT tells us. She says that it shows how long it takes for movements such as #MeToo to gain ground and that when we take the longer view, we see how significant the result was and what an important victory it was not just for Carroll. She says that we make a mistake by taking short-term setbacks as definitive.

The 20 minute interview can be heard here.

The ‘town hall’ was not that great for convicted sex offender Donald Trump

The day after he was found guilty of sexual assault and defamation against E. Jean Carroll, convicted sex offender Donald Trump (CSODT) took part in a ‘town hall’ in New Hampshire that was broadcast live by CNN and hosted by one of their anchors Kaitlin Collins. I did not watch it but the general reviews were that it was a debacle for CNN because they gave CSODT a platform to spew forth a barrage of lies and insults to Carroll to an audience that cheered him on. As always, the media tends to take the attitude that anything, anything at all, works in favor of Republicans and that this shows that CSODT was not hurt by the verdict.

But is that true?

The biggest fault of CNN was in agreeing that the audience would be made up of Republicans. That makes a mockery of the concept of a town hall which is supposed to contain a fairly representative sample of the community. This was more like an indoor rally of partisans. New Hampshire governor John Sununu, himself a Republican, said that he was embarrassed by what he saw and what the crowd’s behavior conveyed about the people of his state.
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The debt ceiling

The US is once again going through debt ceiling brinkmanship. The first thing to note is that raising the debt ceiling is entirely the responsibility of the Congress, and has to start with the House of Representatives, The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, himself a hostage of the extremists in his party, has decided to do some hostage taking on his own, vowing to not raise the ceiling and throw the system into chaos unless President Biden agrees to the Republican budget proposals that would roll back some of Biden’s signature achievements as well harm the less well-to do.

Biden and the Democrats have pointed out, correctly, the raising the debt ceiling does not lead to more spending by itself but is needed to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized. They have also pointed out that Republicans were willing to raise the debt ceiling three times while Trump was president without any conditions but suddenly become budget conscious only when a Democrat is in the White House. They say that raising the debt ceiling is entirely under the control of the Republicans, no one else, and that they therefore must bear sole responsibility for any catastrophe that might ensue if the government should go into default if it is not raised.
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Let’s not forget that other serial liar …

While much media coverage has naturally focused on convicted sex offender Donald Trump, yesterday federal prosecutors criminally charged congressman George Santos. He turned himself in at a federal courthouse in Manhattan this morning and was arrested.

The congressman was probably treated the same as any other criminal defendant, a person familiar with the matter said. That would involve the congressman being fingerprinted and getting his mugshot taken, and sitting for a preliminary interview before being arraigned.
…

The US justice department unsealed a 13-count indictment: seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public money and two counts of making false statements in reports to the House of Representatives.

Santos faces a maximum sentence of 20 years on the top count, the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of New York said. He will not have to relinquish his congressional seat, though members sentenced to at least two years cannot vote or be on committees.

“The allegations in the indictment charge Santos with relying on repeated dishonesty and deception to ascend to the halls of Congress and enrich himself,” the US attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.

The indictment outlined three alleged fraudulent schemes, starting with a political contributions scheme in which Santos and an unnamed Queens-based consultant are alleged to have induced donors to give money to Santos’s company, which he is alleged to have spent on luxury designer goods and to pay debts.

The second alleged scheme involved unemployment benefits fraud during the Covid pandemic, when Santos applied for government assistance though he was employed and receiving a $120,000 salary from an investment firm in Florida.

The third alleged scheme involved Santos misleading the House about his financial situation, overstating a source of income without disclosing his salary in May 2020, during his first, unsuccessful run for Congress, then making false statements in September 2022 during his victorious run.

The false information prosecutors say Santos included in his second financial disclosure appears particularly notable because of the significant amounts of money at stake and the bizarre circumstances in which they were recorded.

Prosecutors alleged that Santos certified that he earned a $750,000 salary and between $1m and $5m in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization, and claimed to have $100,000 to $250,000 in a checking account and between $1m and $5m in a savings account – none of which was true.

All in all, this has been a bad week for liars and sex abusers. And it’s only Wednesday.