Posts Tagged ‘extortion’
Laws are more important than constitutions, get it?
Watching proceedings from afar against Trump and his blundering bovver boys, I become more agitated than I probably need to, but I quite often find my frustration directed more at the prosecutors than at Trump’s mostly contemptible allies. For example, MSNBC commentators and many of their guests, not to mention Nancy Pelosi, are still claiming that the crime here is bribery, when it’s clearly extortion, which is generally considered a more serious crime.
So what’s the difference? It should be obvious. A bribe generally involves appealing to a person’s venality. It’s usually presented in positive terms, as in ‘I’ll make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice if you just do this dirty job for me’. Extortion however is presented in more menacingly negative terms – ‘if you don’t do this dirty job for me, you’ll really really regret it’. Now, it’s notable that the infamous phone call from Trump was relatively polite, which is why he’s trying to characterise it as ‘perfect’. After all, by his boorishly bullying standards, it probably was. The near-polite asking of a favour, then, might be characterised as a bribe, but what was happening behind the scenes, directed by Trump, was definitely extortionate. That’s why focussing on the phone call as the main incident is definitely a mistake, and that’s why Giuliani, Mulvaney and Trump himself need to testify, and should of course be made to, and jailed immediately if they refuse, as should happen in any nation worthy of respect.
But this would only happen if the matter was being dealt with in court – where of course it should be dealt with.
Americans are profoundly worshipful of their constitution and their founding fathers. Indeed they seem to have been fine, upstanding, as well as colourful fellows. It’s my view, though, that given current circumstances, they’d have been the first to realise that the constitutional provisions for dealing with a law-breaking, rogue President were wholly inadequate. This isn’t surprising – experience is the best teacher in these matters, and the US experience has been mostly of Presidents priding themselves on being ‘gentlemen’. This is the only silver lining of this presidency, that it has exposed manifold inadequacies of the constitutional presidency system.
Constitutions are guides to how governments are to be constituted. I don’t think the framers of this or any other constitution ever imagined that later followers would expect that it constituted the entire law under which the head of state operated. That, to me, is virtually proven by the vague and minimalist treatment of the legal liabilities of the President in the US Constitution. Surely the founding fathers took it for granted that the President would be subject to all the laws of the land that any other citizen would be subject to. How could it be otherwise for someone in leadership, someone expected to set an example? Even minor infractions would be seen as ‘the thin end of the wedge’, and generally this is the case under the Westminster system.
The worst argument that could possibly be given for the kind of immunity granted to the US President is that he’s too powerful to be charged with a crime. You might call this the Putin argument (or the Stalin, Ghengis Khan or Ramses II argument, or name your favourite dictator). The argument hasn’t improved over the last 3000 years.
USA – suffering for its own failure
The commentariat is divided, though perhaps not entirely on partisan lines, on the treatment of the American President.
It’s becoming clear that, in the USA and elsewhere, people are inhabiting their own social media bubbles. There’s no doubt this is a massive change. Twenty years ago, the term ‘social media’ didn’t exist. Today, when you walk down the street, or catch public transport, you will see people clutching their social media connection machine in their hands as if their life depended on it, and much of the time they’re fully engaged with it. I’m not sure that this social media world can be divided clearly on left/right political lines, but it’s fairly clearly affecting the political understanding of vast numbers of people.
The commentariat, however, more or less represent the intelligentsia, and we expect them to be less in thrall to social media. Yet the division is striking, even if, it seems, uneven. I may be biased, I’m not sure, but it seems to me that those disparaging and mocking, or claiming to be bored by the career diplomats testifying to their frustration and alarm regarding the covert operation to extort the Ukraine government, are in a minority, though a loud one. At the same time, the US President was smearing, via Twitter, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, as she was about to testify. As all the evidence shows, Yovanovitch was removed from her post by Trump, and threatened by him in a phone call to the Ukrainian President, saying ‘she’s going to go through some things’. The President described this phone call as ‘perfect’.
All of this is well known, as is the reason for Yovanovitch’s removal. She was a hindrance to the extortion plot.
So why isn’t the President in prison, as should and would occur in every reasonably regulated democratic country? The case is easy to prove, it is admitted by the culprit, and involves a number of first-hand witnesses. This morning I heard a member of the commentariat lay this all out in some detail, then lament that it’s ‘very unfortunate and appalling’, and so forth. And of course many others agreed. Their helplessness is sad, indeed tormenting, to behold.
The President should be held without bail, because of his known compulsion for witness tampering and intimidation, until the date of his trial, but of course this isn’t happening, not because the President is immune from prosecution while in office, but because – despite the massive opportunity for any holder of presidential office to pervert the course of justice – there is no clear law regarding how to treat a criminal President. That this is so, is damning. Waiting for that President to leave office is not a solution, as should be abundantly clear, even to a ten-year-old.
What continually astonishes outsiders like myself is that the commentariat within the USA seems perversely unaware of this failure in the US politico-legal system. With great power – and the power of the US president is, IMHO, far too great – must come great legal responsibility. It’s one of the many failings of the American presidential system that this is not made abundantly clear though black letter law, and plenty of it. Depending on the Constitution, brilliant and wondrous though it might be, is insufficient.
The boy in the white palace 4: extortion for dummies
Beneficence is always free, it cannot be extorted…
Adam Smith
Jacinta: I’ve been bemused by the sloppy way, IMHO, that the boy king’s adversaries – the Great Patriots – are handling their strategy for the defence of the realm. Some are still using the Queer and Daft (Q&D) term quid pro quo, as if that’s going to be an effective rallying cry for the country’s GPs. In fact it’s so feeble that the boy’s courtiers and epigones are happy to use it themselves, saying quid pro quos are great things, very handy for the MAGA cause….
Canto: Yes but I do notice that some of the more quick-witted GPs are almost at the point of considering, in a consistent way, a more obviously criminal term for the lad’s crimes. Whoduv thunk it? Unfortunately they’re not quite sure which crime to bruit about.
Jacinta: And Q&D terminology is still de rigueur for many, especially the courtiers and epigones. The two more serious, and accurate, terms for the crimes being particularly focussed on – re impeachment….
Canto: And impeachment’s a process we’re going to have to deconstruct – to use a shitty po-mo term most appropriate for the occasion – in another post.
Jacinta: Indeed – the two crimes being whispered way too softly by the GPs are bribery and extortion, with bribery being, unfortunately, the most favoured. But the Great Patriots are wrong.
Canto: That’s bad.
Jacinta: I think the only reason they prefer bribery is because, apparently, it’s in the SACUSA…
Canto: Scusi?
Jacinta: What? Oh yes, dummy, the Sublimely Awesome Constitution of the USA. Get out from under your rock, mate. It’s apparently mentioned in the SACUSA as one of the high Crimes and Mis Demenours you’re not allowed to consort with. We’ll look into that later. But I think extortion’s the thing, to set before the wee king, because, well, it’s much more nasty-sounding. I also think it’s more accurate. Off the top of my head, it’s about demanding money – or a thing of value – with menaces. And the boy king doesn’t need money – he’s been rolling in it since he was in his nappies, according to the New York Times. He’s far more in need of something to trounce his enemies, so that he can stay in the White Palace until he’s all growed up – and that’s a long long time.
Canto: Is he still in his nappies d’you think? I’ve heard rumours…
Jacinta: Well, I don’t think I’d have the stomach for that piece of investigative journalism, but it would certainly raise a stink if that were true. But here’s the thing. Ukraine has a new leader, with an overwhelming mandate to beat off Madame Putain and fight internal corruption. It’s a vastly important, and simply vast, country lying between La Putain and his or her designs on Europe, and it desperately needs an alliance with the USA, Europe and any other region it can ally itself with, but their President, when he came to office, hadn’t yet cottoned on to the fact that the USA is an ex-democracy and that its wee king had googly eyes for La Putain. ..
Canto: So he was ripe for extortion, I get it. The boy loves La Putain and wants to be like him, master of all he surveys, so he wants to have the Ukraine slay his rival, so he menaces them with a range of shite – saddling the country with being behind interference in his ascension to the throne in 2016, refusing to have an alliance with it, and with-holding funds and weapons, in the hope that La Putain will invade, slay the putative wrong-doers and share the spoils with the wee laddie.
Jacinta: Yeah, something like that. But let’s just get back to demanding a thing of value with menaces. I think it’s pretty straightforward.
Canto: Yes, others use the term coercion, but it’s the same thing, and it definitely applies in this case. The boy’s courtiers even drafted exactly what they demanded the Ukrainian Prez had to publicly say about the poor wee Biden boy and his nasty papa.
Jacinta: It’s time to look more closely at what the SACUSA has to say on the matter. Impeachment gets a mention very early on (Article 1, Section 2), but the nub of the matter is expressed, albeit briefly, in Article 2, Section 4, entitled ‘Disqualification’:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
So only two actual crimes are specified, which is a wee bit disappointing for dealing with the Most Powerful King in the Multiverse – but I don’t want to get into the impeachment disaster here, we’ll save that for another post. For now I’ll just say that ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanours’ however vague, was surely meant to cover more than nothing, and extortion sounds pretty lofty as crimes go. So let’s look more closely at extortion.
Canto: I have one dictionary definition here: ‘the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats’. Sounds like just the Right Thing.
Jacinta: Yes, and what the boy-king wanted to obtain was far more valuable to him than all the gold in Ukraine….
Canto: Encyclopedia Brittanica gives the definition as ‘the unlawful exaction of money or property through intimidation’, but in an article about white-collar crime it describes extortion as ‘a threat made to obtain a benefit from either a private individual or a public official’, and the threat here made by the boy and his courtiers, was ‘if you don’t invent something to besmirch the reputation of my domestic enemy, or announce that he has a reputation as a criminal, you will have no alliance with our mighty kingdom, no aid or support in defeating your enemy, La Putain (my own true love), and your people will die in great numbers, crushed by his or her mighty fist’.
Jacinta: Hmmm. A more clear-cut and extremely serious case of extortion could hardly be found. A girl-boy lawyer would win the case with a few hours’ training, except that the king is apparently above all law. He’s only subject to the law’s feeble sibling, impeachment.
Canto: I note that one of the Royal lad’s acolytes, one Nikki Hayley, has sought to churlishly dismiss the affair by pointing out that Ukraine finally received the aid, so no problem. However, the above definition points out that the threat is the crime, not the success or otherwise of the threat.
Canto: It also should hardly need pointing out that Ukraine finally received the promised aid because the scheme against the country was being leaked out – the lad’s courtiers had learned about the whistleblower complaint – not because there was a change of heart. In fact it’s widely believed that mirabile dictu, the withered boy has never managed to develop a heart, the poor sod.
Jacinta: That’s ridiculous, a piece of fantasy emanating from the Deep Kingdom….
Canto: We should operate on the boy to find out – we need real, pulsating evidence. I’m even prepared to do it under anaesthetic. I’d like him to do us a favour though…