Prosecute right-wing billionaires for SCOTUS bribery
While more and more keeps getting found out, the most notable “sugar daddy” relationships revealed so far between right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justices and right-wing billionaires are those between Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, and Samuel Alito and Paul Singer. By any rational assessment – this supposedly being a “nation of laws” after all – there should be comeuppance for all involved. But the bottom line does seem to be that Thomas and Alito really are “above the law,” since any actual, explicit quid pro quos cannot be proved. Which doesn’t mean that the matters shouldn’t be fully investigated, and the whole truth brought out.
That’s not true of those doing the bribing, though. Title 18 of the U.S. Code covers it. In fact, hypothetically Crow and Singer should be looking at up to 15 years per bribe. As should everyone else eventually implicated in all of this.
Incidentally, Singer is a particularly vile, loathsome, despicable creature, even by the utterly degraded standards of right-wing billionaires overall.
On Sunday, a neofascist candidate named Javier Milei, in the mold of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, shocked the political establishment by placing first in the preliminary round of Argentina’s presidential elections.
The reasons for popular frustration are not hard to discern. Argentina’s inflation rate has been running in excess of 113 percent. The real, black-market rate of the peso against the dollar keeps plummeting. After Sunday’s surprise result, the central bank raised the key interest rate from 97 to 118 percent…
While Argentina has itself to blame for some of its woes, the international financial system, including the IMF and U.S.-based hedge funds, share the blame. Argentina has oscillated between running up foreign debt, and then succumbing to IMF-enforced austerity programs to pay off or write off debt. None of this has rescued its economy, but it has enriched speculators.
Some U.S.-based hedge funds, notably Paul Singer’s Elliott Investment Management, bought distressed Argentine bonds at about one-sixth of their face value over a 15-year period. When creditors came together to negotiate a settlement at so many cents on the dollar, Singer was the holdout. In 2001, after Argentina defaulted on $131 billion of debt, 93 percent of the country’s creditors, in two restructurings, agreed to take 30 cents on the dollar. But Elliott held out for a sweeter deal. In the final settlement in 2016, Elliott netted billions at Argentina’s expense.
(The American Prospect)
Of course I know that there wouldn’t be any breezing to convictions. The kinds of lawyers these guys have, working within an all-too-often corrupted system that treats the very wealthy far differently than it would the rest of us if brought up on charges for anything at all, would certainly see to that. But there should still be massive criminal investigations and all the attendant publicity. Who knows what all might come out, and what positives, political and otherwise, might accrue. And we’d get to watch these repellent fucks get hounded to the very gates of hell.
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