The Problem Of Fraud, Wrote Dante, Is That It "Gnaws Every Conscience"

So many New York state legislators and leaders of the legislature are currently in prison that when former state Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassu County) was sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday, most New Yorkers, inured, just shrugged it off. After all, Republicans are on the verge of nominating Donald Trump for the presidency and the level of Trump's self-entitled corruption is of a magnitude hard to measure compared to poor nepotistic Skelos'. The federal judge sentenced Skelos' rotten son, Adam to six-and-a-half years in prison, even more than his father's sentence and, addressing Dean, said "You sent a message that you, one of the three most powerful politicians in New York state, were in some measure corrupt, and that you used your official position for personal gain." The two Skeloses had been found guilty of conspiracy, bribery and extortion last December. A week earlier Skelos' Democratic counterpart, state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was sentenced to 12 years in prison after being convicted of fraud, extortion and money laundering. Too bad they missed Cuomo so far-- and Schumer.

Let's face it, the American political establishment stinks of corruption from top to bottom. Trump in office would make it worse. So would Hillary Clinton in office. Anyone who votes for either one of them is complicit in what they bring with them. A Democrat voting for Hillary as the lesser of two evil is on the same moral grounds as a Republican voting for Trump as the lesser evil. The lesser of two evils is, first and foremost, evil.



Dante's 8th circle of Hell, dedicated to fraud, includes 10 subdivisions-- bolgie-- and although there are politicians scattered throughout hell, the 5th bolgia of the 8th Circle is the designated home of corrupt politicians who are eternally being boiled in tar. No doubt a place is being prepared for 75 year old Michel Temer right this moment. He is a leader of the bloodless coup d'état against Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff. As a NY Times editorial asserted Thursday, "there is no evidence that she abused her power for personal gain, while many of the politicians orchestrating her ouster have been implicated in a huge kickback scheme and other scandals. Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled last week that Eduardo Cunha, the veteran lawmaker who has led the effort to oust Ms. Rousseff, must leave office to stand trial on corruption charges. Vice President Michel Temer, who took charge of the country on Thursday, could be ineligible to run for office for eight years because election authorities recently disciplined him for violating campaign finance limits." The same day a Times news piece by Simon Romero reports that Temer immediately went to work shifting the Brazilian government from a moderately center-left orientation to a dangerously right-wing one.

The new Brazilian president’s first pick for science minister was a creationist. He chose a soybean tycoon who has deforested large tracts of the Amazon rain forest to be his agriculture minister. And he is the first leader in decades to have no women in his cabinet at all.

The government of President Michel Temer — the 75-year-old lawyer who took the helm of Brazil on Thursday after Dilma Rousseff was suspended by the Senate to face an impeachment trial-- could cause a significant shift to the political right in Latin America’s largest country.

“Temer’s government is starting out well,” Silas Malafaia, a television evangelist and author of best-selling books like “How to Defeat Satan’s Strategies,” wrote on Twitter.

“He’ll be able to sweep away the ideology of pathological leftists,” Mr. Malafaia added of a conservative lawmaker whom Mr. Temer chose as education minister.

...To many of Mr. Temer’s critics, the shift is perhaps most evident in the role of women in his and Ms. Rousseff’s administrations.

The contrasts could not be more glaring. Ms. Rousseff, 68, was a former operative in an urban guerrilla group. She was tortured during the military dictatorship and eventually rose to lead the board of the national oil company before becoming Brazil’s first female president.

Until recently, relatively few Brazilians had even heard of Mr. Temer. When they did, it often involved references to his wife, Marcela Temer, 32, a former beauty pageant contestant who is 43 years younger than he is. They met when she was just 18.

A profile of Ms. Temer in Veja, a newsmagazine, caused a stir by glowingly referring to her as “pretty, demure and of the home.” It said Mr. Temer was “a lucky man” to have such a devoted, unassuming housewife as a spouse, especially one who wears knee-level skirts.

The magazine did not mention the tattoo on the nape of Ms. Temer’s neck featuring her husband’s name, but the message was clear: Mr. Temer, a law professor and career politician, embodies a more conservative approach than Ms. Rousseff in the corridors of power and in his own home.

Then there is the issue of race. After a long stretch in which Brazil pressed ahead with affirmative action policies, Mr. Temer’s critics point out the lack of Afro-Brazilians in his cabinet, especially when nearly 51 percent of Brazilians define themselves as black or mixed race, according to the 2010 census.

“It’s embarrassing that most of Temer’s cabinet choices are old, white men,” said Sérgio Praça, a political scientist at Fundação Getulio Vargas, an elite Brazilian university. He drew a contrast with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, who formed a cabinet in which half of the 30 ministers are women.

New York's Top Republican, Dean Skelos, Convicted On All Counts

2 down-- one to go

When I was 2 my parents moved from Brooklyn out to the suburbs-- Valley Stream, the heart of Dean Skelos' state senate district 9. Hard to imagine this modest working family area, just east of JFK Airport, could actually elect a Republican... until I noticed the state Senate district also included Inwood, Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Woodmere, and Hewlett, the legendary-- and very wealthy-- Five Towns. Traditionally a Jewish-Democratic area, the Five Towns have strayed a little to the Dark Side in recent years. Harvey Milk was born in Woodmere but now one of the Five Towns' best known residents is fascist agitator and ugly racist sociopath Pamela Geller, who lives in Hewlett. [An aside, now that Skelos was booted from the Senate the second he was found guilty, is that Obama won this state Senate district 71,204 (53.5%) to 60,608 (45.5% against Romney and Kirsten Gillibrand won reelection there with 64.4%.] Skelos, was first elected to the state Assembly in 1980 from this area and to the state Senate in 1984, 3 decades of corruption that came crashing to a loud halt when he and his son were arrested on May 4 of this year on federal corruption charges, including solicitation of bribes, conspiracy, and extortion. He was the Republican Party Majority Leader of the state Senate. Yesterday he and the son were found guilty on all 8 counts.

The Skeloses were charged with using the father’s position as majority leader to pressure a Manhattan developer, an environmental technology company and medical malpractice insurer to provide Adam Skelos with roughly $300,000 via consulting work, a no-show job, and a direct payment of $20,000.

Dean Skelos had been one of the three most powerful men in state government until his arrest earlier this year, and his conviction close on the heels of his former colleague, the longtime Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, is sure to have repercussions beyond the courtroom. As in Mr. Silver’s case, which ended Nov. 30, the verdict resulted in Mr. Skelos’s expulsion from the State Legislature, where both men had served for more than three decades.

...Minutes after the verdict was given, a Twitter post went out on [United States Attorney Preet] Bharara’s account: “How many prosecutions will it take before Albany gives the people of New York the honest government they deserve?”

...The trials of Mr. Skelos and Mr. Silver illustrated how some lawmakers can wield their considerable power to extort benefits for themselves or others; how the weak enforcement of lax financial disclosure requirements gives legislators ample opportunity to mask bribes and kickbacks as outside income; how moneyed real estate interests spend millions of dollars in campaign contributions to influence legislation; and how power is concentrated in the hands of the so-called three men in a room: the legislative leaders and the governor.

Mr. Bharara, an outspoken proponent for reform, has characterized Albany as a “caldron of corruption,” and decried its concentration of power. Those sentiments prompted some to question the propriety of his statements.

In the trial of Mr. Skelos and his son, the testimony detailed how the senator’s power was leveraged in three separate schemes, aimed at pressuring companies-- all of them dependent on legislation that the senator in some measure controlled-- to provide benefits to Adam Skelos.

Skelos' dweeby midget-son, Adam, told his boss, who was concerned the spoiled brat was't coming to work "Talk to me like that again and I'm going to smash your fucking head in. Guys like you aren't fit to shine my shoes."

The Skelos' attorney says they'll appeal but this shakedown scheme was such an open-and-shut case, complete with wiretapped tapes of the two of them plotting, that it's unimaginable that there aren't decades of prison in front of these two. New York's Senate Democratic Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins:

"We need to implement a full-time Legislature and restrict legislators' outside income; we need to close the LLC loophole; we need to prohibit taxpayer reimbursement of campaign and legal defense funds and strip pensions from public officials convicted of corruption."

In all likelihood next up will be New York's even more corrupt governor, Andrew Cuomo.

The Stink Of Corruption In New York This Month Is Very Much Bipartisan

3 New York crooks-- 2 going on trial and the one in the middle on Hillary's Leadership Council

Sheldon Silver is from the Lower East Side; his Assembly district-- first won in 1976-- includes the world's worst cesspool of corruption, Wall Street. He became Assembly Speaker early in 1994 while Mario Cuomo was governor. He was Speaker during the terms of George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo and he was widely considered not just grotesquely corrupt but also a manipulative dictator. Last January he was arrested on federal corruption charges and a week later he resigned as speaker.

When federal prosecutors subpoenaed a law firm to learn what exactly Sheldon Silver, the powerful leader of the State Assembly, had done to earn the hundreds of thousands of dollars the firm paid him each year, prosecutors received just one file.

It was exceptional in two ways, they say.

First, Mr. Silver had performed a bit of lawyering on behalf of a client: He helped a legislative employee settle a private property dispute.

Second, Mr. Silver did not receive any payment for his efforts.

Other than that one instance, Mr. Silver “never did any actual legal work,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference Thursday. “He simply sat back and collected millions of dollars by cashing in on his public office and his political influence.”

The story that unfolded in the federal criminal complaint filed on Thursday reads like a political thriller, a lurid tale of abuse of power whose main character squeezed a tidy fortune out of the obscure but lucrative legal niches of asbestos lawsuits and property-tax reductions, while capitalizing on his position at the front gate in Albany where lobbyists and special interests seek passage through the legislative process.

Juggling more than half a dozen bank accounts, Mr. Silver-- who went before a judge to hear the charges and was released on a $200,000 personal recognizance bond-- steered public money to help those who would privately help him in return, the complaint alleges. He also meticulously covered up his scheming, it said, even meeting at his office in the State Capitol to draft side agreements that hid his actions.

When an anti-corruption panel appointed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in July 2013 started asking questions about Mr. Silver’s income, the speaker fought the commission’s authority to do so-- deploying taxpayer-funded lawyers to do battle in court, and portraying the battle as a constitutional fight, not an effort at self-preservation.

Ultimately, Mr. Silver helped cut a deal with Mr. Cuomo to have the panel shut down entirely. But rather than ending the investigation into Mr. Silver, as the speaker had hoped, the panel’s disbanding inflamed Mr. Bharara, whose investigation culminated in the early morning arrest on Thursday.

Last April April 25, Silver was indicted on more charges-- making illegal investments, with money he had taken as kickbacks or bribes, through private vehicles, bringing him a profit of $750,000. He's still a member of the Assembly and his trial begins tomorrow This is going to be quite a month in New York politics, with a major politician from each party on trial. The Republican is Dean Skelos, former state Senate Majority Leader from southwest Nassau County, just east of JFK. The district includes the 5 Towns (Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Woodmere, Inwood, and Hewlett), Atlantic Beach, Long Beach, Lido Beach, Valley Stream (where I grew up), Malvern, Lynbrook, Oceanside, Rockville Centre, South Hempstead. He was arrested on his federal corruption charges, which include extortion and solicitation of bribes, last May. He was forced to step down as Majority Leader but, like Silver, he's still a member of the legislature.

Of course, the big media story in New York about the twin trials is that the fetid political culture in Albany is on trial.

Court papers in the two cases suggest that testimony in Federal District Court will expose in granular detail what watchdog groups say is a seamy world where big money and politics have long intersected with government.

There are accounts of kickbacks disguised as legitimate income; no-show jobs for a lawmaker’s son; and the use of state money to influence a doctor to refer clients to a favored law firm that, in turn, paid millions of dollars to a lawmaker.

The alleged acts are typical of a culture, according to the watchdog groups, that has made Albany practically synonymous with corruption and stubbornly resistant to reform, keeping citizens-- and even most lawmakers-- in the dark about much of the legislative work and spending done in their names.

For more than two decades, Mr. Silver and, for a lesser period, Mr. Skelos, have presided over the machinery comprising, along with the governor, the so-called three men in a room who have historically controlled much of the state’s policy, legislative and budgeting decisions.

The two trials-- Mr. Silver’s case is to begin on Monday with jury selection, and the case against Mr. Skelos, who is going on trial with his son, Adam, is scheduled to start on Nov. 16-- could run as long as six weeks each, so they will probably overlap for about a month. Never before have two lawmakers of their stature gone on trial at the same time in New York.

...The charges against the two men fall in line with generations of senior legislators in Albany, where corruption has endured for more than a century, with four previous Senate majority leaders and three speakers indicted. When Mr. Cuomo was elected governor in 2010, he vowed to restore integrity, a task that has eluded him so far.

The governor’s creation of the anti-corruption panel in 2013, known as the Moreland Commission, brought high hopes; it began to uncover what many of its members believed were the institutional problems forming the bedrock of Albany’s troubled culture.

Among them were two broad issues that are expected to figure prominently in both trials: ineffectual campaign finance laws that give moneyed interests-- especially large real estate developers-- outsize influence; and lax financial disclosure rules that allow corrupt lawmakers to list part-time jobs or consulting work to mask political payoffs. Often, this work is listed at law firms that represent clients with business before the state. These laws and rules, largely written by the lawmakers themselves, are seldom enforced.

Perhaps these trials will lead to some meaningful reform. Jesse McKinley writing last week for the Times suggested that "[w]ith corruption and the policing of government still pressing issues in New York’s capital, state ethics regulators have proposed that state elected officials be barred from accepting and asking for campaign contributions from any person or group under investigation by, or involved in legal action with, their offices. The proposal, made this week by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which investigates violations of state ethics and lobbying laws, would extend current conflict-of-interest policies that apply to state employees to also include the governor, the state comptroller, the attorney general, state legislators and their re-election campaigns."