RICO prosecution requires multiple acts wherein members set up an "illegal coordinated scheme or operation (a "racket") to repeatedly or consistently collect a profit" through coercion, fraud or extortion.
How in the hell is this going to apply to loosely organized voluntary protesters who are unarmed in the face of heavily armed police?
They were organized enough to form a 503c charity and then funnel money in and out of it, track expenses and receipts, and perform reimbursements for supplies for conducting what amounts to traditional terrorism. They also established both on-grid and off-grid communication networks to organize and strategize. They also created and internally published their own educational materials to indoctrinate new recruits to the inner core of the cause.
You and I have very different definitions for “loosely”.
You and I have very different definitions for “illegal coordinated scheme,” " repeatedly or consistently collect a profit through coercion, fraud or extortion," and also “conducting what amounts to traditional terrorism”
a 503c charity and then funnel money in and out of it, track expenses and receipts, and perform reimbursements for supplies
You mean a 501c3 charity. Those are all required activities for a 501c3. That is not an criminal enterprise.
conducting what amounts to traditional terrorism
Do you actually support our democratic government powers being corrupted into authoritarianism sprinkled with fascism?
They also created and internally published their own educational materials to indoctrinate new recruits to the inner core of the cause.
That’s what all organizations do, be they religious, charitable, or political.
The entire indictment reads like propaganda piece, carefully crafted as to focus on political ‘anarchist militant’ rhetoric like this is the late 1960s and 70s, to create a false narrative bubble so that it includes any and all of the community organizers involved.
This is an egregious abuse of power through the use of RICO, and it’s not the first time GA has employed it against activist types.
They created booby traps on public property and took at least one completely innocent nonrealted person hostage at gunpoint. Get the fiuck out of here with “egregious abuse of power”. Right to protest doesn’t give you a blank check to maim other people or hold them at gunpoint and it doesn’t threaten democracy to indict them for that.
The RICO case is literally targetting everyone it can and certainly will affect everyone willing to protest. Its called the chilling effect and its a common strategy of authoritarians in government. It’s not actually prosecuting the explicitly henious criminal activity you are trying to reference to justify your support of an obvious egregious abuse of power.
Your position is sophmoric cognitive dissonance, you are demanding to shrink the context of the discussion to justify your pitchfork waving.
RICO is intended to prosecute wealthy and powerful puppeteers who hide behind their disposable pawns to do their dirty work. If this case was only about lawful protest, you have a reasonable argument, but it wasn’t, and you don’t. The fact that they broke laws and harmed innocent bystanders and took action that could have harmed more is OK for you because they did it in the name of a cause you happen to support. Call me whatever you want, you aren’t going to be able to justify the coordinated misdeeds when it infringes on the rights of the innocent.
RICO is intended to prosecute any group of individuals attempting to profit from running a criminal enterprise. The charged individuals as a group having a 501c3 with verbose open records and a verbose paper trail of spending in the first place may even been seen as a possible mitigating factor against finding a RICO conspiracy.
Yes, the case is not about lawful protest, it’s about criminality, and in that context it’s being used to prosecute more than just criminality as it sweeps in leaders among the protestors not involved in criminality. It amounts to suppression of protestors and is a dangerous precedent to support from any level of government prosecution. This RICO case ends up being used in a way to prevent people from exercising First Amendment rights, a public protest is a form of petitioning the Government for a redress of grievances. What specific evidence has put all of these people into a category of criminality that isn’t just a sweeping catch all attempt using ‘anarchist’ activity (which is protected speech activity until acts occur, acts that are criminal activities done for protest are individually prosecuted)?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Who would or is actually profiting from the alleged criminal activity? That alone makes the RICO charges dubious.
You have no basis in support of prosecution beyond conjecture, and/or you are intentionally ignoring any larger context that doesn’t support your pitchfork desire for prosecution. There is nothing you have put forth that has any forethought or consideration of anything but the prosecutorial indictment claims alone.
I called out your position as bullshit, I didn’t call you an idiot asshole as a person. Learn to recognize the difference, and do better.
Your entire argument hinges on whether the organization had a role to play in the illegal activities vs whether the illegal activities were done by individuals in the organization. If someone in my company does something illegal, there should not be a RICO case against me unless I conspired with them to specifically do that illegal thing.
Your entire argument hinges on whether the organization had a role to play
Well, let’s be real here. It’s the prosecution’s argument. And they obviously believe the organization played a role or they wouldn’t have named those individuals in the indictment.
After reading through it, it does appear that the prosecution believes that senior individuals inside the organization were promoting the illegal behavior without actually getting their hands dirty.
Then the war is against those who profit most from inflicting climate change.
As with pretty much any human caused problem in human history, you need only follow the money.
That’s the core problem, the perpetrators of climate change have become effectively untouchable, leaving us nibbling around the edges so as not to inconvenience our owners.
No amount of peasants sorting recycling or putting up private solar panels will even begin to address this cataclysm. The enemies are big oil, big manufacturing, and big livestock. Unless we magically become willing to slap the profiteers/significant shareholders of those industries back down to Earth, sharply reduce them without concern for their continued profits as we should, and change our lifestyles to adapt to less ridiculous levels of consumption, we’re all fucked.
We are all just fucked. The proven unsustainable, unending Capitalistic growth/metastasis needs to stop for the sake of civilization, and our civilization has proven we would literally rather burn then reign our capitalists in and say “no” to their insatiable, sociopathic greed. After all, they are our glorious, benevolent job creators.
How do we convince millions of true believer capitalism worshipping peasants who’ve been propagandized since birth to labor and consume as their sacred duty that what our species needs to do is abandon the idea of growing the footprint and consumption of our species without end and seek homeostasis/equilibrium with this world instead?
His lawyers are almost undoubtedly requiring retainer fees to cover everything. There’s no way they’d be stupid enough to work on contingency or expect to collect payment after the fact. He’s probably having to write them new checks for every single week that they continue working on his case, and I can guarantee that they’re getting the bank to verify those checks before they actually accept them.
Was gonna say, I’ve never had an issue booking a hotel in NYC as long as I plan ahead, and rates are generally reasonable as long as you, again, plan ahead. Obviously you’re going to pay more at the height of tourist season, weekends, whenever events are happening, etc. It’s been this way for pretty much forever. But if you book your stay a few months out, you tend to get better deals.
I live in a ski town that has a massive Airbnb problem, and the city is finally green lighting the building of more hotels. It’s everywhere. And while there is an expectation that holiday weekends and much of the winter is busy, it doesn’t help having morons going apeshit until 3am on a Tuesday when I have work the next day and our sheriffs can be pretty useless.
Where I’m at, cabin rentals were a thing long before Airbnb. People had their vacation cabins, and they’d rent them out through a local agency. It was fine for decades, and most people used them to supplement their vacation property. It wasn’t until Airbnb that people were actively scooping up as many properties as possible to rent them out exclusively and completely thrash the local housing market. And I know we’re not alone in this, ski/tourist towns all over the world are having this problem.
Looks like Florida chose to be the wicked son for Passover.
You should also “blunt his teeth” (speak harshly to him13) and say to him:
“It is because of this that I would fulfill His commandments, such as this Passover offering, matzah and maror14that G‑d acted for me when I left Egypt (Exodus 13:8)—for me, but not for him. If he [the wicked child] had been there, he would not have been redeemed.”
I thought it was mostly proven myth that any slaves or Israelites were building shit in Egypt. Also there’s zero record of any sort of Exodus or anything to corroborate the story of Moses
Yes, it might be a book of bullshit, but it’s a bullshit book we read every year and sing songs from about how we were foreigners and slaves and should be nice to foreigners and slaves. The fact that there’s even a part about “what if I question how trial and tribulation I’ve never known affects me?” And you’re supposed to essentially say, “bitch! God wouldn’t have saved you cuz you’re too much of a bitch!”
Eta: hell, there’s even a part where we’re like, “God killed the Egyptian oppressors, let’s dance and sing!” And then God, who could only speak to Moses, spoke to everyone all like, “look you ungrateful fucks! I may have made the Egyptians with my left hand while getting over a cold, but they’re my creations nonetheless! Quit celebrating and pour one out for your fallen homies.” Then we get rid of 10 drops of wine to resemble 10 drops of blood for the 10 plagues and how horrible it was that God made the Pharoh say no and then punished all the poor people for it.
On a yearly basis, multiple times per year, our parents dress us up and misinterpret the importance of all these holidays that are supposed to teach us empathy, apology, forgiveness, and patience. But fuck all that, right? Being a Jew is about… Checks notes …Banning books about actual slavery?
Usually you think of the extermination aspect, but yes there was some. But my point was that responding to me saying another book containing slavery with a historical event was kind of unusual. There’s been books written on it for sure by it’s mostly unrelated.
That is wild! I watched the videos in the linked article, and I’m shocked how easy it is to steal vehicles!
I guess what I see in the movies/shows if hot wiring and the time that takes isn’t the norm nowadays.
IMO I feel like the Shipping Ports need to step up their game as far as inspections and stop the cars BEFORE they’ve been shipped to other countries. I would hope that the car insurance companies would be willing to help the cost of this increased inspections, considering they have to pay the value of the stolen vehicles to the owners…
Port authorities do need to do that, but first the feds have to give them more money and raise staffing levels … cause right now there is not enough people or funding to do the job right.
The physical key and a keyfob is like manual vs automatic. It doesn’t fully prevent your car from being stolen, but it does make it harder to steal said car.
I love to blame how terrible software and ux is in cars as theyre very unreliable, but yes, a lot of this is a port problem
For non-UK readers: UK councils have limited revenue-raising powers compared to local government in other countries, and rely on 3 sources of income:
Central government grants
Council tax (on residential properties)
Business rates (on commercial properties)
This amounts to c. 7% of the total UK tax base, versus c. 32% collected locally in Germany or 50% collected locally in Canada.
Central government grants were cut by 40% in real terms between 09/10 and 19/20 from £46.5bn to £28.0bn.
Council tax has gone up 30% over the same period, but it can’t go up more than 2% annually without passing a referendum (unlikely). Some councils in dire straits have recently been allowed to raise it 5%.
Local authorities have been underfunded for over a decade. Other UK councils which have already declared bankruptcy, either through running out of money, or through losing vast amounts of money in risky schemes attempting to replace missing central funding:
Equal pay is something women have had to fight for.
In this case,
the court found hundreds of mostly female employees working in roles such as teaching assistants, cleaners and catering staff missed out on bonuses which were given to staff in traditionally male-dominated roles such as refuse collectors and street cleaners.
Women in the UK only gained the right to equal pay in 1970.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing that they get equal pay, they’re blaming it on that when it sounds like the poster I was speaking to said it was corruption, risky schemes and decades of underfunding by stealing it for other things that was the problem.
You can only starve a government body of funding – making it muddle along depleting its reserves and selling off assets – for so long until a final bill tips it over the edge, so I’d argue that if it wasn’t this bill it would be another bill.
Other councils took risky approaches to replace money cut under Austerity:
Woking said that against its available core funding of £16m in the 2023-24 financial year, the council faced a deficit of £1.2bn.
Racked up to finance the building and acquisition of a vast empire of commercial assets, its investments included a complex of sky-high towers – standing as the tallest buildings outside a big city in England – including a four-star Hilton hotel, public plazas, parking facilities and shops.
Many councils piled into property and other commercial enterprises to raise money to fill gaping holes in their budgets and to undertake regeneration projects after sharp cuts to central government funding introduced under the Conservatives’ austerity drive.
Well, it sounds like if they hadn't violated the law by deciding that women didn't deserve equal pay, and hadn't underpaid what seems to be a lotof women for a long period of time (seriously, almost a billion dollars in claims they have to pay out?!), then it seems like they wouldn't be having this problem.
I'm not saying that underfunding government isn't an overall issue, but it really seems like the immediate issue is that they decided to systemically underpay people for an extended period of time. And that's on them.
Waiting for Trump to be all “When we retake what’s rightfully ours, I’ll make sure those who were wrongly imprisoned by Crooked Joe Biden are exonerated as the patriots they are!”
He’ll do it, but he’ll charge them a few mill to get a pardon, then they’ll start a pateron/GoFundMe/Kickstarter to fleece their rubes for more money, and then they’ll split the cash.
If Trump was literate, he could write a masterclass on getting fucking morons to send you money.
At least 521 U.S. towns and cities with populations of 1,000 to 200,000 disbanded policing between 1972 and 2017, according to a peer-reviewed 2022 paper by Rice University Professor of Economics Richard T. Boylan.
In the past two years, at least 12 small towns have dissolved their departments.
That works out to an average of 11 per year. I haven’t needed to think about numbers in a long time. Did I fuck that up? Cause if not, this sounds like a lot of panic over losing fewer police departments than the norm.
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