Saw the comment further down in the thread.
Fascinating stuff.
It’s understandable though. I don’t think US oligarchs are too concerned about security per se (US is sufficiently wealthy, on a compative basis, for anything approaching a real rebellion), but the whole situations does raise uncomfortable questions about their regime.
Curious if this a reddit-wide thing (i.e. implemented by oligarchs) or something specific to that community.
I tried to keep the discussion somewhat measured.
And yet you come up with “Admit you are wrong and stupid!” What? How? What is going through that head of yours? Are you a teenager? Do you really expect anyone to go through with this?
I guess it’s on me that I expected something different.
You can fuck righ off, you shit eating lemming!
We are going in circles. Short sentence on what you think I need to admit to. This shouldn’t be difficult.
I made a relatively calm (considering your shit eating lemmings rant), jovial remark about how a clear case of corruption (on an outcome basis) might undermine people’s view of legal proceedings against a rich, well-connected celebrity/businessman.
You then went on a rant about how I am wrong to view the sackler case as an example of judicial corruption and that it was no big deal that some oligarchs who engaged in mass killings escaped criminal liability.
Where is the strawman?
You said I am not making sense. Can you in one (somewhat short) sentence say what I need to understand or admit to, in order for my agreement to make sense?
Because I don’t like ignorant Americans calling Ukraine (or any other country) a “corrupt shithole” while arguing that’s it’s OK that criminal oligarchs (who organized a massive drug cartel with deaths in the 10s of thousands) should avoid all criminal liability and retain enough money to live opulent lifestyles. You are really in so deep that you can’t understand this?
I also don’t like people who call others lemmings who like eating shit just because they happen to be be a more sceptical and are more critical about proganada polemics.
P.S. I said I currently live in Ukraine. Does that mean I haven’t lived/worked/studied in the US for many years? I’ve even been to Flint multiple times! I loved how well the US judicial system worked when all those poor black people got life long poisoning.
Not very “free speech” of you I must add.
I am assuming you mean $4B not $40 B (was not able to find anything around a $40B). The exact number is irrelevant if it allows the criminal organization to retain enough money to live an opulent lifestyle on a “generational” basis. This is not a controversial statement.
Not really, no. What do you mean by compromised? The American judicial system is set up in such a way that it’s largely transparent, so large scale corruption would be nearly impossible to sustain.
Remember when I said in Ukraine the criminal do things in a direct manner, while in the US it is done with lots of pomp and in a roundabout manner? With the actual outcome being the same. Why do you think I mentioned this?
As far as the legal system is concerned, that money doesn’t exist, because it can’t be proven that they possess it. This is frustrating, but it’s legally sound.
This is just an excuse. If anything a country like the US can very much resolve this issue. There is a lack of desire. In another case the issue would be solved and there would no pretend BS about “legally sound”. Imagine if something similar was relevant to a terrorism case on the scale of 9/11. They would resolve this without any pretend excuses, they would find a way.
You have a very naive view of the world if you think the judges are merely implementing the law. There is a massive feedback loop between the oligarchs, politicians and the judicial system. It’s a bit supremacist to think that Americans are inherently incapable of such corruption constructs.
Getting the Sacklers sent to prison would feel good, but it wouldn’t directly help anyone suffering from opioid addiction.
So you believe that if you are an oligarch, it is a reasonable for a “non-compromised” (your implied words) judicial system to allow them to skip prison for their crimes (in this case organizing a massive drug cartel with probably 100K+ deaths)? Do you even read what you’re writing? You’re basically saying it’s good that criminals don’t get any liability as long as they are rich and well connected.
How do you know what was the goal of the original ruling being overturned (and subsequent the outcome)? And I didn’t see anything about liability for the Sackler family.
I will give you an non-US example. There was a really corrupt court (with scandalous behaviour) in Ukraine that was scheduled to be shut down following the passage of new laws to improve the judicial system. This move was overturned by another high court. Can you guess why this happened? They eventually shut down the court following the fullscale russian invasion because the corrupt judges got scared (angry population) and due to the state of emergency.
Back to Jay-Z. Considering your own admissions that US criminals can and do go free as long as long as they are rich (and for starting a drug cartel that enabled 100K+ deaths, no less), it is reasonable to be skeptical of the overall process w.r.t criminal liability. Not to mention there are earlier examples where it was basically impossible to get anywhere with a criminal lawsuit.
Isn’t it reasonable to assume the judiciary in an oligarch run state is going to be compromised (I am referring to the US civil vs. criminal distinction and the inability of winning criminal lawsuits)?
I see a lot of parallels between the judicial corruption in my own country (Ukraine) and the US. Sure our goons are more direct, while American prefer more pomp and roundabout methods for corruption, but the outcomes is the same. My favourite US oligarch group is the Sackler family.
In a bankruptcy court filing on July 7, 2021, multiple states agreed to settle. Though Purdue admitted no wrongdoings, the Sacklers would agree never to produce opioids again and pay billions in damages toward a charitable fund. Purdue Pharma was dissolved on September 1, 2021. The Sacklers agreed to pay $4.5 billion over nine years, with most of that money funding addiction treatment. The bankruptcy judge Robert Drain acknowledged that the Sacklers had moved money to offshore accounts to protect it from claims, and he said he wished the settlement had been higher.
What I mean by this tangent is that is not unreasonable to assume that groups that are de facto protected are going to engage in criminals behaviour.
Definitely. This was more of a general comment.
I will copy/paste a thought I had about more a structured approach for dealing with corruption/oligarchs:
You need to put them on trial in a legitimate court (i.e. exclude compromised judiciary systems).
If the oligarch/senior lackey is found guilty, you could use real rehabilitation methods that would creates incentives for good behaviour for other criminals:
- Full asset seizure (every last cent, home, house, everything).
- Extended family and business partners being required to sign affidavits detailing their knowledge re: assets in [1], with an understanding that if the affidavit was found to have not been signed in good faith, they will be subject to full asset seizure and their own family and business partners will also have to sign similar affidavits for their own case. No statue of limitations for affidavits.
- 20 years mandatory live-in community service as junior support person at a hospice centre (minimum wage). Exact focus of community service would depend on crimes committed.
One could leverage fully independent courts/tribunals. I believe the ICJ has done something similar for countries with non-functioning judicial systems.
You could start with the corrupt members of the highest court. This would be a good “shit just got real” moment for the oligarchs and their senior goons.
I heard US supreme courts judges feel they are capable of working on complex cases past their 80s. They should be able to do a few more decades providing full-time community service para-legal support for honest pro bono lawyers as part of their rehabilitation program. 😀
I am being glib of course. I recognize the challenges with my proposal in context of the US. But then again, every movement towards progress typically starts with something very simple, sometimes as simple as formulating and brain-storming ideas.
Billionaires, and those like this guy who enable them, must face consequences
I would propose the following approach:
You need to put them on trial in a legitimate court (i.e. exclude compromised judiciary systems).
If the oligarch/senior lackey is found guilty, you could use real rehabilitation methods that would creates incentives for good behaviour for other criminals:
I am not saying this is currently possible. Just pointing out that there are “win win” approaches that do not require extra-judicial killings (albeit the nature of human history is such that sometimes people are left with no other options).
Edit: Also, nothing stops someone with a gigantic grudge, patience and high motivation from joining a private security company, getting training, a gun, and placed directly in the vicinity of a potential target. Really, there’s no good defense except not giving a ton of people reasons to want to get rid of you.
Not to mention the use of DIY suicide drones.
I will preface this comment by saying that due to my ethnic background and atheism, I would probably be one of the first in line for a theocratic equivalent of the gulag. I will also add I am not American, but I have lived and traveled in North America, Europe and Asia for many years.
The functional outcomes derived from the actions of US oligarchs and Osama Bin Laden are largely identical. Mass suffering, mass death, condemning many millions of people to a life of misery. If anything US oligarchs have an edge on Bin Laden due to the scale inherent to operating in the US and protection provided by the local judicial system and social attitudes.
Consider Zuckerberg’s involvement in the Rohingya genocide.
Now I don’t think Zuckerberg had any direct malicious intent here (unlike say Osama Bin Laden, in a different context of course), but what does it matter? His actions, callousness and supremacist attitude led to a large number of people getting killed and many more getting their lives ruined. But because of the compromised nature of the local judicial system, not only did he not have to take responsibility for this actions, but he even had the gal to claim that this was an example of how effective FB was. Do you think we would see a similar reaction if FB was used in hypothetical ethno-religious mass killings (e.g. US Catholics vs Protestants) in the continental US? I think not.
Zuckerberg knowingly enabling the Rohingya genocide could be seen as a controversial argument. I do not. I think any real judicial authority should have seized all his assets (every last cent) and sent him for mandatory community service work for two decades as a junior latrine janitor on the island of Bhasan Char. What about a less “controversial” cases?
My favourite oligarch gang in the US are the Sacklers. These thugs set up what is essentially a massive drug cartel peddling one of the most deadly drug substance (we are not talking about LSD or MDMA). And yet all they got was a somewhat larger fine than usual that still allowed them to keep billions. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is got be pissed. 😆
Now where does Bin Laden play into this? Both Bin Laden and US oligarchs do horrible things. But unlike US oligarchs, Bin Laden was quiet open about his intentions did not try to hide behind PR or state that some US court in Texas leveraged the 69th amendment of the US constitution to prove that his actions were legal and were about “fighting for freedom”. On the contrary, he could have just been doing blow, driving fast cars, chilling on yachts, like all the other elite princes in Saudi Arabia, but instead he gave up that life to fight for something he believed in.
It was wrong, he was a bad person. I am not arguing against that. But how many US oligarchs have the guts to do something like that?
And if the outcomes of the actions of US oligarchs are actually worse than Bin Laden, is it a stretch to say they are worse than Bin Laden?
I often wonder how genuine such polemics are.
From my professional experience working with US companies, such attitudes are more of a cover. “It’s technically not legal, so my actions are just and fair irrespective of the real world impact.” There is a fair share of “true believer” types (not at the senior level though), but they are a lot rarer than the amount of public facing polemical copytext would suggest.
This is not a critique per se, more of an observation. I enjoy working with Americans, they are pretty laid back and can be relatively generous with comp if you know what you are doing (and you know how to sell yourself).
Have not read it. But does look interesting. I will add it to my to-read list.
Cheers! 😀
I don’t go to that degenerate hellsite. It makes me feel extremely misanthropic and despondent.
I am just saying Serbian independence movement in context of Austro-Hungary was only a small part of the buildup to WW1.
German unification and expansionism (but failure to establish colonies), weakness of the Ottoman Empire (this was going on for centuries), internal issues in Tsarist russia, changes in warship building dynamics in the early 20th century, general rise of socialism, rise of national self-determination, increase in literacy rates among the plebs, urbanization. etc.
Oh course Gavrilo Princip’s actions mattered. His name is still somewhat well known over a hundred years later. But there were many other very important moments w.r.t. start of WW1.
The insurance industry has pushed back against the outrage. “The people in our industry are mission-driven professionals working to make coverage and care as affordable as possible and to help people navigate the complex medical system,” said Michael Tuffin, the president of AHIP, a major trade group, on LinkedIn.
I am curious if Tuffin would support a single-payer system to make the US medical system less complex. Perhaps the savings from all that wasteful insurance company spend could be used to help bring down the cost of providing medicine.
A bit of a tangent, but Gavrilo Princip wasn’t really the cause of WW1 (and WW2 which was on some level is an extension of WW1).
His actions were the spark and he has gone down in history for his assassination, but in an abstract, analytical sense his actions had nothing at all to do with the beginning of WW1.
Putin will give a Trump a list of demands. The demands are likely exclude complete dealbreakers such as surrendering Zaporizhzhia and Kherson (I am from Ukraine, this doesn’t seem viable).
Trump will go with putin’s demand; his plan will be to come back to the US public and say “I stopped the war” even though he essentially submitted to putin.