2021 Archives

The best of the rest of the news this week. — Donald Trump learned the way of mob bosses from his first lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, whose other “big” clients were John Gotti of the Gambino crime family and Jeffrey Epstein. That’s why Trump has always run his business (and the White House) like a crime boss would, refusing to put anything in writing, asking lawyers not to keep notes (and tearing up the translator’s notes from his time with Putin in Helsinki). As Michael Cohen has noted in sworn testimony before Congress, “Trump talks in code” to get things done…a variation on Henry II’s coded-assassination-request about Archbishop Beckett: “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”

We should not have a two-tier justice system like this in the United States; America should hold the rich to the same level of accountability as the rest of us. Bill Cosby got the Rich Man’s Deal. Seriously. The only reason Bill Cosby is out of jail right now is because initially prosecutors offered him a civil settlement that allowed him to pay for his crimes financially rather than by going to prison. And they only did that because he was rich enough to pay. That prosecutor, who then went on to become one of Trump’s lawyers and promoted Trump’s “big lie” about the election, essentially acted as an agent for some of the women Cosby raped, to extract millions of dollars from Cosby on their behalf in exchange for a promise not to put him in jail.

America needs to solve it's parasitic billionaire problem or our democracy will continue to crash & burn. America has to reinvent our understanding of economics after 40 years of living under a tax-cutting, austerity-imposing, Republican-promoted trickle-down Reaganomics scam and return to a Keynesian system that still works in those countries like Norway, New Zealand or Denmark that never adopted “austerity.”

The best of the rest of the news this week. The most under-reported big story of the week is a blockbuster in The New York Times about how Eric Prince and other wealthy rightwingers paid infiltrators to sabotage the Democratic Party in Wyoming and the region. Nobody knows how many other states’ Democratic parties have been similarly infiltrated or what other sabatoge efforts are underway as the GOP moves closer and closer to becoming a full-blown fascistic party.