Tag: crime

The Fall of the House of Trump

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

A New York judge has issued an order that essentially gives the Trump Organization the corporate death penalty. Judge Arthur Engoron’s order rescinds the Trump Organization’s business charters and puts Trump’s corporate empire into a receivership. Ultimately this may do just as much or more to end Donald Trump’s reign as the many criminal indictments against him.

The Trump Organization is in the bullshit business. Real estate is just the side hustle. Trump shamelessly slapped his name on anything he could—golf courses, steaks, a failed airline, even vodka (which tee-totaling Trump does not drink). Trump is right that the main source of his revenue was through his “brand,” a brand which is now synonymous with right-wing extremism. But ultimately Trump is incredibly cash poor and highly leveraged. His real-estate empire was basically an attempt to get more and more money from lenders to keep his incredibly-leveraged empire afloat.

Now, that scheme is falling apart. Trump was already radioactive to most banks, forced to go to less savory banks connected to Saudi and Russian oligarchs. But Trump needed legitimate assets to do that, including Trump Tower and his Mar-a-Lago club. Now, Trump has run out of both legitimate assets and likely the revenue streams he needs to keep his secured creditors at bay.

Trump’s money, real or imagined, is what kept everything together. Now Trump has a voracious need for cash, not only to keep his quasi-campaign afloat, but to pay his lawyers in his numerous criminal cases and keep his standard of living going. Right now Trump is quite adept at fleecing his followers with everything from t-shirts to worthless NFTs. But that is likely not going to be enough. While their may be a sucker born every minute, Trump needs a lot of suckers to keep himself afloat, and sooner or later that well will run dry.

The question becomes what happens next. Trump will certainly appeal Judge Engoron’s ruling. That appeal is highly unlikely to change anything, but it may delay the process. However, no matter what happens, Trump’s access to credit through conventional means is likely to be incredibly curtailed. That leaves Trump even more at the mercy of Saudi autocrats, Russian oligarchs, and other unsavory characters than he already is. Whether Trump can get enough support outside of banks depends on whether the Saudis, Russians, etc. see him as a valuable investment or simply damaged goods. The more legal hot water Trump gets into the less his “Teflon” appearance becomes.

Just as in Hemingway’s quotation above, Trump’s downfall could be gradual then incredibly sudden. Trump has so far been incredibly adept at avoiding the consequences of his actions, but this ruling strikes at the heart of who he is and who he makes himself out to be. At some point Trump’s luck and bluster will run out. His only hope at this point is to win the Presidency and use the power of his office to make his legal troubles go away. Sadly for the country, there remains a precipitously high chance that could happen. But the entire Trump mystique is based on him being the world’s greatest businessman. That has never been true, and the collapse of Trump’s empire of bullshit might be more personally devastating to him than even a jail sentence.

The Massacre At Newtown

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Jay Reding

The murder of 20 innocent children and 6 innocent adults in Newtown, Connecticut is nothing short of heartbreaking. As the world turns toward the Christmas season, it is fitting that we reflect on the tragedy of this shooting. Twenty-six lives cut short in a senseless act of carnage. The image of those empty places at dinner tables, the Christmas presents that will never be unwrapped by their intended recipients, the grieving families, all of them bring a sense of undeniable tragedy at a time that should be about peace and family.

Yet like nearly everything else in society today, the Newtown atrocity has become yet another excuse for the crudest of partisan politics. Mere minutes after the shootings, the predictable calls for gun control were echoing online. We are being told, in that typically histrionic style, that opposition to gun control might as well be the same as siding with the murderer. The political-media complex are already in full swing, doing all they can to shape the narrative in favor of more firearms restrictions.

Blame the Person, Not the Object

The problem with this convenient narrative is that it misses the points. Guns didn’t kill 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut. Guns are inanimate objects, not evil talismans that possess innocents and turn them into mindless killing machines. The Newtown atrocity was committed by a deeply disturbed person with what appears to be a substantial history of mental illness. It is easy to try and “control” firearms—at least on paper. But admitting that this country has a crisis in mental health is a much harder debate. Instead, the focus is on the longstanding objective of the left: disarming the American populace.

For one, that will never work. Guns exist. High-powered assault rifles exist. We can make them marginally harder to obtain, but criminals will still find a way to get them. The idea that Congress can pass a law banning certain weapons and those weapons will magically disappear is childish thinking. Indeed, we’ve already tried with the Assault Weapons Ban. But when that ban expired in 2004, the number of shootings remained constant.

The anti-gun crowd keeps making predictions of imminent disaster: if the Assault Weapons Ban is not reauthorized, blood will run in the streets! The ban was not reauthorized, and the level of violent crime continued to go down. We heard that if states adopted Concealed Carry laws, that the result would be the Wild West all over again—but the hard evidence shows that concealed-carry permit holders are in fact less likely to be involved in violent crime than the general population. The fact is that as terrible as mass shootings like the ones we have seen this year are the exception, not the rule.

Culture Matters, But Not in the Way You Think

Saying that America’s “gun culture” is to blame is equally facetious. For one, it’s not like these shooters are card-carrying members of the National Rifle Association. The people who care about Second Amendment rights tend to be people who have a healthy respect for firearms. The NRA itself is diligent in promoting safety training and the responsible use of firearms.

There is a cultural problem here, but it has less to do with guns and everything to do with the media. The media breathlessly reports on these mass killings, even going so far as to ghoulishly shove their microphones into the faces of traumatized children from Sandy Hook School. And these killers, almost always mentally ill young men who feel ostracized from society, get exactly what they want: publicity and notoriety.

At The Week, Matt K. Lewis has a deft takedown of the media’s irresponsibility over the Newtown shootings:

To be sure, a transparent society demands reporting newsworthy incidents — and this definitely qualifies. But it should be done responsibly. And that is not what we have witnessed. We have instead a feeding frenzy that is all about beating the competition — not disseminating information.

It’s about being first, beating other media outlets, and making a name for themselves. It’s a ghoulish mentality that stokes controversy and violence — for business purposes. It’s a sort of “if it bleeds it leads” mentality that causes cable networks to create logos and theme music for such tragic events (all the while, they feign maudlin concern and outrage.)

Come to think of it, the media is guilty of doing what they criticize big business for — putting money (in this case, ratings, newsstand sales, and web traffic) ahead of humanity and decency. Just as greedy businessmen put profit and personal gain ahead of ethics, so too do our media outlets.

It is a commentary on our media that there’s a mad rush to repeal the rights protected by the Second Amendment, but none to restrict the dangers of the First Amendment. After all, the Founders never envisioned a world where irresponsible mass media could broadcast falsehoods and misinformation across the globe in a matter of seconds. The Founders could not have envisioned a world when a handful of media outlets would have such control over the public discourse and could use their power to advance their own agendas. In their time, the press consisted of numerous small region publications that could check the excesses of one another. Should not the freedom of the press be restricted only to reasonable technologies such as a basic Gutenberg press? After all, that would be more in tune with what the Founders really intended, wouldn’t it?

Of course that’s a silly argument—but why then are the same arguments used in the context of firearms? Yes, the Founders lived in a time when firearms were relatively crude and cumbersome. But that is not the point of the Second Amendment. The point is that the last and most crucial bulwark against despotism is an armed and capable populace—a nation of riflemen is far more resilient than a nation that has been thoroughly disarmed.

Our culture is the problem, but its a culture that is created by the very same media that wants to disarm the rest of us. If we want to reduce the incentives for these horrific attacks, then the media should have policy that the name of the shooter is never released, the focus is only on the victims, and sensationalism is to be avoided at all costs. Fat chance of the media ever agreeing to that, even in principle.

As The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf points out this country has already had an in-depth conversation about guns, and the pro-gun side won decisively, with anti-gun efforts failing across the country. The right to self-defense has been recognized as such, and the American people have spoken. We value our ability to keep and bear arms, and that is a choice that represents the democratic will of the American people.

Does that mean that gun violence will continue to be endemic in America? Only if you assume that the availability of firearms is the biggest factor, rather than mental illness, the breakdown of the American family, a failing prison system, etc. The fact is that the number of firearms in this country continues to rise while restrictions on firearms have been loosened—and violent crime continues to decrease.

What happened in Newtown was undeniably a heartbreaking tragedy. But using it as a launching pad for another campaign to restrict the rights of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans is not only a poor way of honoring the dead, but ultimately counterproductive as well.

Postscript: Oddly enough, it is Saturday Night Live that had the most appropriate reaction to this tragedy: having their cold open this week be a children’s choir singing “Silent Night” in front of a single candle. That a comedy show showed more class and dignity than their news operation says a great deal about the media today.

Obama ‘Acted Stupidly’

President Obama made a major mistake this week by attacking the police officer that arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It was a mistake that could cost him significantly.

The President got elected largely on his ability to transcend the racial politics of the past. He presented himself as a post-partisan healer who rejected the transparent race-baiting of a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton. It was one of the reasons why the Obama campaign went to such lengths to bury Obama’s association with the viciously racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright—because it undercut the narrative they wanted to portray.

Now, Obama has waded right back into the politics of racial polarization with his attack on a veteran Cambridge police officer.

All this will do is polarize the country. The police officer can hardly be accused of being a racist—he taught classes on stopping racial profiling, tried to save the life of NBA star Reggie Jackson, and has a sterling record on the police force. Yet the President, without knowing all the facts, accused him of “acting stupidly” and insinuated that race played a factor in the arrest.

Based on the police report of the incident, race did play a part. Prof. Gates’ racist diatribe, not his attempting to get into his own house, is what got him arrested. The mere sight of a white police officer legitimately trying to do his job was met by a tirade by Gates. If anything, it was Gates who “acted stupidly.” Perhaps not stupidly enough to get arrested, but stupidly enough that he was hardly a victim in all this.

By taking sides in this matter, the President was walked right back into the fields of racial polarization. He has diminished his office by attacking a law enforcement officer without knowing the facts—and even if Sgt. Crowley was at fault, the President should not have injected himself into the matter in the first place.

This may not sink the Obama Presidency, but it does hurt him. He came into the Oval Office with the noble goal of being a President for both Black America and White America, a President that would try to heal racial divisions. Now, he has helped to open another racial wound in this country. He “acted stupidly” in doing so, and it may well end up costing him politically at a time when he’s already starting to take political heat.

Race And The Justice System

Heather McDonald takes a probing look at whether America’s criminal justice system truly is racially biased. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the objective evidence does not match the conventional narrative:

Backing up this bias claim has been the holy grail of criminology for decades—and the prize remains as elusive as ever. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. A 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions, for example, found that blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient punishment. A 1990 study of 11,000 California cases found that slight racial disparities in sentence length resulted from blacks’ prior records and other legally relevant variables. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, however—an outcome that reflected the gravity of their offenses as well as their criminal records.

Another criminologist—easily as liberal as Sampson—reached the same conclusion in 1995: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Michael Tonry wrote in Malign Neglect. (Tonry did go on to impute malign racial motives to drug enforcement, however.)

There’s no doubt that the incarceration rate in this country is shockingly and troublingly high. However the solution to this problem is not to pretend that it is the fault of the justice system, but to recognize that it comes from a culture of lawlessness. At some point, the crisis becomes self-perpetuating. A culture in which criminal activity is common is likely to be a culture that produces more crime. People live to the norms they see, and when violence, drug use, and crime become endemic, there is more likely to be more crime, violence, and drugs.

The problem with the idea of less vigorous law enforcement is that the ones who are hurt by increases in crime tend also to be disproportionately members of minority groups. Gang-bangers and drug dealers victimize their own communities, not the suburbs. The effects of out-of-control inner-city crime are not helped by efforts to concentrate resources in places where crime is not such an immediate and pressing problem.

What then is the solution? The neglect of America’s inner cities is a travesty made worse by a false sense of noblesse oblige on the part of well-intentioned outsiders. The only lasting solutions will have to come from within. The problem is not who is getting caught, but who are committing the crimes. Trying to solve the wrong set of problems helps no one.