Recently, Rand Paul has been mocked by the US media owners for talking about anti-American globalists. He sent out a fundraising letter like his dad used to do, asking for donations because there is this ‘conspiracy’ to disarm Americans, 30% of whom have arsenals of guns. One thing that angers me about Rand Paul and the libertarians is how they misinterpret things due to their ideological leanings and thus, fall right into the hands of these very same globalists. Rand knows he dare not mention AIPAC ever and has studiously avoided mentioning this group but will talk about other groups even though the overlap of say, the Bilderberg gang and the Zionist war machine are very high.
Here is a snippet of the email he sent out: Rand Paul: Obama is working with ‘anti-American globalists plot[ting] against our Constitution.’
Dear fellow Patriot,
Gun-grabbers around the globe believe they have it made.
You see, only hours after re-election, Barack Obama immediately made a move for gun control…On November 7th, his administration gleefully voted at the UN for a renewed effort to pass the “Small Arms Treaty.”
But after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut — and anti-gun hysteria in the national media reaching a fever pitch — there’s no doubt President Obama and his anti-gun pals believe the timing has never been better to ram through the U.N.’s global gun control crown jewel.
I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick.
One of the most irritating things about libertarians is their disregard for huge sections of our civil rights. The far right has been against the UN since its inception. The UN used to balance power and keep wars confined mainly to pressure points between the US and Soviet Union. It never stopped wars. Then, the Soviets fell and the US ran the UN for its own purposes only these were not US purposes at all but international bankers and corporations interests.
Far from having peace, wars have proliferated after Russia basically surrendered to us and the communist Chinese ceased opposing us and began their long and well-planned march towards dominating the US via free trade. War tensions are shooting upwards all over the globe now that the US is economically distressed due to running our trade deep in the red while financing or fighting endless wars.
Rand Paul is yanking all the chains on the far right’s necks to raise money. End of story. He is basically exploiting anti-government voters who also happen to not like women and minorities all that much. He is doing the ‘they will take your guns away!’ gambit. This week, an FBI trainer trained his service revolver on his wife and shot her dead and then claimed she was trying to kill him with a small knife! The fact of the matter is, American males have to come clean about their guns. Statistics show the main function of these things is to kill family or selves. With blacks, it is to spray the community with bullets.
There are many good uses for guns. I own guns, my friends and I shoot guns but we also have to be aware of and discuss with each other, the TEMPTATION to use guns improperly. All of us store out guns safely. Yesterday, a lady with a loaded and unlocked gun in her purse threw it down carelessly and the gun went off with the usual bad consequence. I have lectured women since I was a teen not to carry a gun in a purse. One of the very first things a woman loses in a crime event is her purse. Fishing around for a gun when under attack is ridiculous.
The irritating thing about the Rand Paul boilerplate right wing scare tactics for money is that it is easy fodder for the Bilderberg/news media mogul gang to mock him for being stupid. And to pooh-pooh the obvious conspiracy of the very rich who have little regard for our nation since many of them consider Israel to be the #1 country to protect, it enables them to make fun of serious people exposing this game playing by the very rich. They DO conspire and they DO want to control us. And yes, they are increasingly nervous about poor people carrying guns in cities or elsewhere. They don’t want to be like John Lennon in Manhattan in a very private, rich building, shot dead at the entrance!
Since the WP is mocking Rand Paul about international conspiracies, I looked in the archives for articles explaining how the rich gather secretly and talk ‘frankly’ about our elections and what they want to do to us. From WP 2012:Is Bilderberg a conference on world affairs or a powerful global cabal? Depends on who you ask.
According to its Web site, the Bilderberg meeting was organized by leaders from Western Europe and North America in the early days of the Cold War, and it is named for the Dutch hotel where the first conclave was held in 1954. The current chairman of its steering committee is a French count. Participants include the neoconservative scholar Richard Perle, billionaire Peter Thiel, and financiers such as Roger Altman and Kenneth M. Jacobs, chairman and chief executive of Lazard.
About 120 people participate in “nearly three days of informal, off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern” in economics and foreign affairs, with the crisis in Syria, the euro zone and the U.S. presidential election probably taking center stage this time.
They talked about Syria! HAHAHA. You bet! ‘How can we fool the US public into allowing an invasion?’ was the topic. The media moguls from America are nearly uniformly Zionists so they probably talked about how to cook up scary stories showing the Syrian government as evil. Alas, the Bilderberg conspiracy to make Assad look evil is continuing to collapse: Video: Syrian rebel cuts out soldier’s heart, eats it – CNN.com. There is a ton of proof that the ‘rebels’ are committing grave crimes and this is a very dirty war but then, the arms flowing INTO Syria from the internationalists is HUGE.
Going back to Rand Paul, how does THAT fit into his bizarre email? Even here in the US, the elites don’t mind white men having guns since they mainly use these to shoot themselves or family. Thus, the failure for any reasonable gun laws. If the elites want something, our Congress gives it. Obviously, this matter doesn’t bother the elites all that much and in addition, the stupid UN small arms treaty is GARBAGE due to the fact the US and European elites pour small weapons into countries they wish to destabilize in the first place.
That is, the main violators of this small arms treaty are the NATO countries and the bill’s sponsors! This is total hypocrisy. Indeed, it is racism. The people who are being disarmed via this treaty are NOT Americans but Africans and Muslims ruled by US buddies like the extremely vicious Saudi royals. The Bilderbergers want to disarm Afghanis, not Alabamians (deliberate misspelling) in the Deep South.
Vin Weber, a Washington lobbyist and former Minnesota congressman who has been a presenter at Bilderberg twice, laughs at such talk. He recalled a vigorous disagreement over presidential politics at a Bilderberg meeting, with Barack Obama supporter James A. Johnson advocating for his guy and former Bill Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan speaking up for Hillary Clinton.
“Everybody talks about this great conspiracy, but it’s really not. It’s fun to be able to talk about it,” said Weber, who is a Romney adviser.
Vin Weber is a REPUBLICAN and he is a LOBBYIST and he is…hanging out with his Democratic buddies at a SECRET Bilderberg meeting, talking about how our increasingly fake elections will be run. It IS a conspiracy and note that Weber was a Romney aid on top of all this. Romney knows who butters his bread and makes his rich lifestyle possible and ditto with Mrs. Clinton who had virtually no wealth leaving the White House and now is a multimillionaire, too. These guys are all multimillionaires and parties in the EU are taken over by rich people and note how poorly they serve their voters! Hardly at all!
The right plays off of the gun nut fears, the left has an easy ride due to the right’s constant push to eliminate basic civil rights we won so hard in the past. Thus, none of the real issues facing us especially regulation of predatory and offshore banks as well as international trade rules that have destroyed our economic home base in the US, none of these things are even mentioned during elections.
From WP 2011: Bilderberg meetings help avert crises is the only other article in the last decade the owners of the WP who are Bilderberg gangsters, allowed into print. And note how this goofy conspiracy gang is AVERTING a crises! HAHAHA. They EXPLOIT these, not advert them.
Then there is the spying by our government: 12 hUS SenateUnder sweeping subpoenas, Justice Department obtained AP phone records in leak investigation which is typical today. In Nixon’s day, this was impeachable offense but has not been this since Reagan. Republican or Democrat, they all spy on us, spy on reporters and then the Bilderberg gang clears out anyone who is a reporter or TV personality if they rock the boat. They spy on us. They have been spying on us since WWII. Infiltrating news has been ongoing since then, too and its aim is to warp the news so that it serves the Bilderbergers.
More Nixonian game playing: Washington IRS officials probed conservatives and this is due to the swirling mess of the Supreme Court ruling that there are now no more campaign finance laws, basically. The IRS was trying to winnow out any front organizations using politics as a way of avoiding taxes. But the real problem here is, the right ONLY gets pissed at this when it happens to them. Not to the rest of us.
The left knows the IRS does this all the time…to us. And when we complain about this, the news media pretends nothing is happening and ignores us. I am happy to see this in the news today but it is not a new thing, this is old hat. This is NORMAL. And this is what is so irritating. During the Bush years, the right wingers laughed at us and danced on our graves and mocked us and when the tables are turned even a tiny bit, they howl about civil rights and privacy.
Just as privacy flies out the window when women demand our civil rights be respected. Suddenly, our privacy is public matter and medical care and access to contraceptives vanish. And then the same dudes whine about child support payments! Duh! We can’t fight the Bilderberg gang if one can’t reason sanely. Falling for scams like the Rand Paul stuff is a great set-back for prying open the doors to the rich chambers where the GOP, DNC and global rich meet to conspire to control us.
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Elaine, has the NYT ever mentioned AIPAC?
Rand Paul recently told a bunch of evangelical ministers that he has no intention of ending the War on Drugs, too. One of two things is happening here. Either he’s telling the special interests what they want to hear, and once in office he’ll do what he’s always advocated doing, or else the Bilderbergers got to him, and he’s purposely destroying his credibility to pave the way for Hillary in 2016.
None of that changes the fact that there is a sincere push to disarm America – but only of high-powered rifles. I’ve been told several times on this blog that my assessment of the reaons for this push (a martial law crackdown is in the works) are wrong; however, I fail to see what else it could be. If they really wanted to cut down on gun crime, they’d either go after pistols as well, or advocate more people get proper training and concealed carry permits (a better idea, statistically).
Gun control is hitting only what you are aiming at.
Like New Orleans on Mommies Day,
one diverse shooter hit thirteen diverse party watchers and failed to kill any of them.
“The fact of the matter is, American males have to come clean about their guns. Statistics show the main function of these things is to kill family or selves. With blacks, it is to spray the community with bullets.”
80% of gun homicides are committed with pistols. 90% of non-lethal gun assaults resulting in injury are committed with pistols. I’m sure simple assaults are in the high nineties. These nut jobs are not using rifles, and they’re not using high capacity magazines to kill their wives.
As far as your comment about blacks. Poor people in ghettos can’t shoot straight because they don’t go to shooting ranges. Because they have to be furtive about their firearms (since they are illegal in the city and for felons), they choose pistols because they are concealable and the media tells them they are cool, but they don’t understand that they are wildly inaccurate (particularly under stress) beyond 25 yards, even for a trained marksman. Hence the spray. But again, these are pistols, not rifles, for the most part.
Yet liberals have fixated on semi-automatic long guns and high capacity magazines. Why? Chances of getting shot in a mass shooting are rarer than being struck by lightning. It seems liberals can’t come clean either.
My suggestion is that they got the whole thing backwards at the turn of the 20th century when they didn’t try to ban handguns and leave militarily useful rifles un-regulated. They probably could have squared that with the founder’s intent, and with the wording of the second amendment.
Now, we have a reality warp bill of rights where we only see the ones we want to see. Now, no one trusts the liberals on the issue any more than they trust the wife beaters.
Better yet, we can all argue about it while the man behind the curtain helps himself to our stuff.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!!
Off topic … but funny:
http://gizmodo.com/5890507/police-drone-crashes-into-police
I probably shouldn’t have called your attention to it, now you’ll just make fun of Texas.
Elaine – a question or two.
Are there any US Federal laws that prohibit government office holders conducting or participating in secret meetings? Or is the Californian Brown Act the closest thing? I’ll need to research this, but I vaguely recall some (old) English laws that may still exist. If anyone wants to change anything without unleashing the furies, the illegal machinations of ‘law makers’ is likely a good angle of attack.
“Are there any US Federal laws that prohibit government office holders conducting or participating in secret meetings?”
Whoa! Wait… uh… where to begin?
First off, even if there are laws against this, they don’t come into play because the meetings cannot be proven to have taken place. They were SECRET, remember?
Secondly, government officials have been participating openly in secret or semi-secret meetings all the time. In fact, each time they meet at work, the meeting is pretty much secret. It is not shown on TV, so… what did they say or do? We don’t know.
Attacking Congress with one of its own laws? I know DM is new here, but this is still a bit naive. As for Old English Laws (common law?), our politicians don’t give a hoot about those and neither does the judiciary.
DM does not understand the concept of “immunity”, which is what all of our government workers have vis-a-vis ordinary citizens. If they get into trouble, it is because they peed in someone’s cornflakes. In this respect, it is not much different than the old Soviet Union.
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. . . . . . there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control.”
-Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961
Off topic, but USGS finally closed the old Earthquake map site. It is no longer available. The new one is no good.
ΩΩΩ
ELAINE: ARRRRGGGGHHH! And so it goes. This was done to ‘save money’ due to sequestration of funds.
In a parliamentary system, cabinet meetings have to be minuted. Kennedy’s inaugural address, and existing statutes can certainly be used to fight conspiracy and corruption. I didn’t say it would be easy. The line of least resistance is to roll over and let the schmucks run amok, but if no one has the balls to tackle the secret government, then there may indeed be little value in insuring the survival of the nation.
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ELAINE: I grew up in a CIA household. I fought my dad on the secrecy issue all my long life to the bitter end of his life and he died carrying his many, many secrets to his grave (he operated all over the planet earth and was one of the first to enter China with Nixon).
We don’t have a parlimentary system, and minutes are subject to redaction, rewriting, and just no note-taking whatsoever under our system. We would have to have a drone disquised as a fly sitting on the wall to catch them red-handed having a “secret” meeting or conspiring against the common good.
Do you think you could have saved the USSR in 1989? I doubt it.
The same goes for our empire. No one person can save it, and the inertia of those who will not reform it is far greater than the energy of those who push for reform — just like in the old USSR, in Rome, in Byzantium, in the United Kingdom, and well, every empire you care to point out.
In fact, as Elaine’s latest article points out (I have not even read it yet, but I was wondering if she would write about the pattern of second term scandals), or might point out, any attempt to change things is overwhelmed by those who profit from the status quo. Obama, like Clinton, and possibly even like Reagon, will not be allowed to change anything they were forced to allow in their first term in order to get elected. Their time will be consumed by “damage control” and PR nonsense while those who milk the status quo continue to do so for another four years.
The schmucks have been running amok since 1980, when our entire empire chose the fork in the road that leads straight downhill.
So if we start with Kennedy’s “Secret Society Speech” during his Inaugural Address in 1961, we get to 18 USC 1961, “Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations.”
In relevant part, for secret meetings with legislators and/or between their putative corruptors, we need to show two acts of 18 USC 201, Bribery, including indirectly promising something of value to the official or to anyone else in order for the legislator:
1) to collude in or make opportunity for someone else to commit fraud on the United States. (Common law fraud needs to plead with particularity, i.e. lots of evidence)
2) to be influenced in an official act or violate an official duty, including by omission.
1961(1) also brings into civil RICO jurisdiction, two state law violations of bribery carrying penalties of one year or more.
Unlikely federal prosecutors would pursue your Bildergergers (at least they haven’t so far).
However, RICO allows civil suits (with treble damages). . .
Big problem is that for a civil suit, standing requires a plaintiff with direct damages. Pretty hard for (1), given the United States is the stated “victim”.
For (2) Courts generally brush aside these civil cases by using the doctrine of standing, followed by lots of mumbo jumbo about “proximate cause” “foreseeability” “indirect damages” “intervening,” all words that basically mean whatever they want.
In short such a civil RICO lawsuit would require all the evidentiary stars to be aligned, as well as fair seas and following winds in court. And still, the Supreme Court or the Legislature itself could make quick work of it.
But it is interesting. Lots of their little toadie lawyers are told to keep themselves specifically spun up on RICO (much more so than I am) because they fear it.
The “loop hole” in the Bribery statute is that it doesn’t cover politicians who are kept in the dark and simply told what to do by their major campaign contributors. Nor does it cover “deals” between those campaign contributors, as long as the politicians are not in the loop.
The bribery issue: Reagan began this by going to JAPAN a week after leaving office to collect a $2.5 million bribe!!
Via a ‘speech’ and this ‘speech payment’ garbage is now universal. All bribes are pay for speeches about nothing delivered to audiences of rich people.
Or “donations” — a code word for bribes here in America.
Just Ice,
You misunderstand RICO. It is not about the federal or state governments. It is, in fact, a tool used by them against private criminal cartels. In all the years I have worked as a law clerk, I have never seen RICO used against the government, and our litigation department handles quite a few RICO cases.
For RICO to apply, you must show a “pattern” of criminaly activity. The bare essentials for this are now two (used to be three) separate acts of criminal activity, which together show a distinct pattern of activity that can be interpreted as “racketeering”.
That being said, by this definition alone, our entire government is a standing violation of RICO, but RICO only applies to nongovernmental organizations that violate state and federal laws as defined in the preamble. Bribery of government officials is not among them. That is handled by the Bribery statute (18 USCA 201) — a rarely used statute now.
Devaul,
Read the RICO statute 18 USC 1961!!! Bribery is the first freakin’ enumerated offense:
“As used in this chapter—
(1) “racketeering activity” means (A) any act or threat involving murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, dealing in obscene matter, or dealing in a controlled substance or listed chemical (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act), which is chargeable under State law and punishable by imprisonment for more than one year; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: Section 201 (relating to bribery), . . . ”
However, I agree with you that the federal bribery is little used in general because our system is corrupt. Although it requires two instances (as I did mention) to establish a “pattern,” the benefit of using RICO instead of straight bribery is that you can take down all the members of the “mafia”/club with RICO, not just the principal actors in the bribery, as long as you can connect the dots.
emsnews,
The bribery statute requires evidence that knowledge of the quid pro quo was conveyed. As long as nothing was stated, it’s hard to prove bribery, hence the “thank you” speech fee scam.
Some food for thought. . .
If the following FOUR WORDS were added to the Federal Bribery Statute Title 18 sec. 201, the whole secret club could be torn down using RICO, and one federal investigation: “OR TO ANY OTHER PERSON”
“(b) Whoever—
(1) directly or indirectly, corruptly gives, offers or promises anything of value to any public official or person who has been selected to be a public official [OR TO ANY OTHER PERSON], or offers or promises any public official or any person who has been selected to be a public official to give anything of value to any other person or entity, with intent—
(A) to influence any official act; or
(B) to influence such public official or person who has been selected to be a public official to commit or aid in committing, or collude in, or allow, any fraud, or make opportunity for the commission of any fraud, on the United States; or
(C) to induce such public official or such person who has been selected to be a public official to do or omit to do any act in violation of the lawful duty of such official or . . . ”
This would effectively criminalize, under RICO, two rich dudes horse trading the votes of their respective politicians, politicians beholden to campaign contributions but otherwise kept in the dark about the deals, deals that result in instructions to the legislators. In other words, it would criminalize much of the conduct of the Bilderberger meeting as “Bribery” and criminalize the whole group under RICO.
It would also leave the “ignorant” legislators free from criminal liability under “Bribery”. So, maybe they’d even think about passing the amendment.
Hmm… you are right. Sounds rather redundant, though.
My firm does not represent government employees. I have never heard of this statute being used against the government. Do you know of a case where RICO was used against the government? I would be interested in reading that.
Devaul,
I’m incredulous. These self styled “elites” we’ve been ranting about for so long are scared shitless of RICO. You’re a lawyer man; we really are going to boil like a frog in a watched pot, aren’t we?
Anyway, my four words are not redundant. Rather, the amendment would attach criminal liability to two non-governmental actors paying each other off with favors to influence the official acts of officials beholden to one or the other actor, officials who may be otherwise “unwitting” and thus not criminally liable themselves. That’s the crux of the corruption problem.
The RICO case would not be “against the government.” Rather, it would be against the non-state actors engaged in a pattern of racketeering by corruptly influencing certain officials. Think of a mafia gambling cell that pays off a corrupt judge for lenient sentences for non-violent crimes like gambling, pays a corrupt cop to bust their gambling competitors, and pays a corrupt legislator to keep gambling illegal. Obviously, such “typical” RICO cases envelope the judge, the cop, and the legislator. In the current case, the “mafia” is only interested in corruptly influencing official acts in the three branches, without necessarily breaking any other rules, in other words, running a shadow government. They trade favors to hook each other up and they trade favors because they need to coordinate, given that no one individual has the ear of every official. The officials evade responsibility by remaining ignorant of anything beyond the direct lobbying wishes of their major campaign contributors. After that they stick their heads in the sand and hold their fingers up to the political winds, along with their asses.
I see what you are saying. Yes, I can see individual government employees being caught up in a RICO case, but I cannot see it being used against the government in a general way, such that their normal, everyday “secret” meetings and money-grubbing from lobbyists and others could form the basis of a RICO action in and of itself.
Although, in principle, it should.
Ok here we go. Suppose the following:
Mogul is the primary campaign contributor to Congressman.
Tycoon is the primary campaign contributor to Senator.
Mogul wants a tax break for hotels.
Tycoon wants a subsidy for railroads.
Now, if Mogul promises Senator that he will give his railroad to Tycoon if only Senator will vote for the tax break for hotels, then that’s Bribery per 18USC201.
Likewise, if Tycoon promises Congressman that he will give Mogul a hotel if only Congressman will vote for the rail road subsidy, then that’s also Bribery per 18USC201.
But if Mogul and Tycoon agree to trade a railroad for a hotel (at a secret meeting without any legislators present) on the condition that both Mogul and Tycoon tell their respective Senator and Congressman to vote for both the hotel tax break and the railroad subsidy, again without telling Senator or Congressman about the hotel for railroad trade, then that’s NOT bribery per 18USC201. And, both laws pass both the House and the Senate.
So, I am not referring to a purely governmental RICO conspiracy.
However, I would add that nothing in the law rules out the possibility of a purely governmental RICO action, whether it be a drug dealing gang of corrupt police officers, or a cabal of intelligence officers extorting the president, or even a mastermind group of IRS clerks blackmailing everyone in the U.S.
Devaul,
With all due respect to your time as a law clerk, there are three reasons the RICO statute (among others) is rarely used, particularly when government officials are involved:
1) Mid level leadership in federal LE agencies are leery about drama from the following two reasons and simply tell their underlings not to rely on the elements of that statute.
2) Politically appointed agency heads can reach down and find some rationale to pull the plug on the investigation. They are rarely lifetime public servants so if there is any flap and they have to fall on their sword and resign, then they get hooked up with a six or seven figure job at a private equity fund, think tank, big consulting firm, big law firm etc.
3) Department of Justice has specific restrictions for prosecutors about the use of certain laws like RICO. Approval for use is only given at the national/headquarters level. See #2 above.
Sounds like you probably have it figured out.
Like I said, I never claimed to have knowledge about RICO cases involving the government, only those dealing with nongovernmental persons or groups. My firm does not represent government agencies. It is a private firm, so these issues would probably never come up, or if they did, I would not hear about them anyway.
I am surprised to learn that RICO, conceivably, could be used against the government — again, theoretically speaking.
Sometimes it’s easier to see what is “verboten” the further it is from one’s own paycheck.
Anyway, even once you discover that Bribery is covered by RICO (and Bribery by definition involves government officials), they’re still two steps ahead of you, because they can shut it down at both the investigative law enforcement level AND the prosecutorial level.
Best of all, law enforcement gets to take the moral high ground and say they didn’t investigate because the prosecutors wouldn’t have taken the case (true). And the prosecutors get to take the moral high ground and say they didn’t prosecute because law enforcement didn’t bring them the case (true). So, they both get to live in their righteous fishbowls tended by political appointees that never had any intention of letting the case go forward anyhow.
Noise of all this never reaches the virgin ears of the law clerks in their ivory towers or the federal judges in their perfumed palaces.
At any rate, the “normal, everyday ‘secret’ meetings and money grubbing from lobbyists and others” wouldn’t form the basis of a RICO prosecution unless there were two predicate offenses committed. Mostly, they are careful to avoid the Bribery statute by avoiding stating the quid pro quo and avoiding improper payments directly to the politicians.
Given two sloppy, greed legislators guilty of Bribery, if you take what I am saying to imply that all of Congress could then be charged, I think that’s ridiculous. Likely, that would become a political matter. Congress would (perhaps rightfully) conclude that it was a coup and try to pull the trigger with impeachment first. Perhaps we should differentiate between RICO that includes some government officials, and RICO that includes elected officials, and RICO that envelopes a whole branch of government. The first is regularly done (e.g. the drug dealer corrupt cops). The third is probably a political question.
In fact, what I am suggesting is going after the folks in the secret meetings without the legislators present. Then we get a government free from undue influence.
Isn’t that what everyone wants? Although, given the current cast of politicians, having been vetted as dupes, suddenly freed to do whatever crosses their minds, I’m not sure which is scarier.
Maybe this will make some Nazgul screech.
RICO also potentially includes two STATE LAW bribery violations as predicate offenses. Suppose there were a state bribery law that included what I suggest, specifically criminalizing as bribery a promise from one party to a third party to influence an official act by a government official in exchange for something else, regardless of whether the government official understood why he or she was being lobbied?
Such a law could form the basis of state bribery charges against any self styled “elites” thus corruptly influencing that state’s politicians. And, then RICO wraps up their whole club in federal court. After the carnage, all the legislators would still be left standing.
Anyway, I don’t have it all figured out. For all I know there already is such a state bribery statute; I haven’t bothered to check them all. I apologize. Maybe later. Maybe Kentucky would want to make sure it had a bribery statute that criminalized third party deal making for votes?
Bribers are very sophisticated. When Reagan ran to Japan to collect $2.5 million for a three minute speech at Disneyworld Tokyo, he opened the barn door for bribes.
ALL our politicians are invited to make fake speeches for honoraria of millions of dollars! And they know these ‘invitations’ won’t appear unless they make the rich much richer.
What about when Hillary got 8 million for her book?
emsnews,
Right. They go to great lengths to frame the ‘payout’ with a legitimate transaction. From the beginning, the politicians are vetted to hear no evil with their hands out. It’s awkward but they have to do it that way, because of the Bribery statute.
For the moment, set aside the individual politician in the dark with his hand out, desperately trying to figure out whose ass he’s supposed to kiss without being told. Because individually he doesn’t amount to much unless there is coordination at a higher level.
What I’m talking about is going after that coordination, with a four word amendment to the federal bribery statute, or with a state bribery statute that fits the bill, and thus bootstraps to RICO.
With respect to the “sophistication” of the basic Bribes, such as the “thank you speeches” and the sweetheart book deals, with even a shred of circumstantial evidence of intent to get past a motion to dismiss, put twelve jurors in a box, they’ll all have the same opinion as Lucky13.
Let me suggest that the “sophistication” of the Bribes is very much eclipsed by cowardice of law enforcement, prosecutors and political will to charge the offenses. No one wants to risk their budgets slashed or their own book deals someday.
As a future recipient of some of that “sophisticated” income, why would a current government drone/schlub cut off his future nose?
BartCop’s 2nd Law “Any time a person or entity makes a “mistake” that puts extra money (or power) in their pocket, expect them to make that “mistake” again and again and again.”
What the hell is a “schlub”?
The real question is why wouldn’t they? I think they are waiting.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/schlub
Anyway Devaul,
To close the loop, when DM suggested going after Congressmen having secret meetings, he wasn’t really suggesting attacking the secret government. The organized majority of ‘owned’ Congressmen and women have been trained like butlers to obey with imperceptible commands. The biggest fear of their ruling class masters is competition in Congress, whether that’s bribery from the mafia or drug cartels, or, nowadays, upstart groups of Congressmen doing whatever they want to do.
The net effect is that operatives of the ruling class will be chumming for another “stalking horse” to attack any upstart competition. Whatever you think of the Liberty Movement, at this point, application of laws like the Brown Act would be that stalking horse, because they would mostly affect the organizational abilities of autonomous Congressmen and women. Again, by comparison most of the ‘owned’ Congressmen and women just respond like maids to imperceptible commands to avoid Bribery, and, thus, they really don’t need to have secret meetings.
The vulnerability of the ruling class control of government is coordination of the “bribes” between third parties.
Waiting until the derivatives bubble bursts to crack that nut is a bit ridiculous. I mean, even if Bernie Madoff did have an evil split-personality that he vanquished just as his ponzi bubble popped, it still wouldn’t get him off the hook.