Trump was recently found liable for fraud for inflating the value of his properties. I'm not particular interested in disputing whether Trump committed fraud. Whether he committed fraud in this instance is irrelevant to whether he is in general, a fraudster--a charlatan. I believe he is. Among many things, I believe Trump University is one of the most exemplary instances of his habit of charlatanry. But I also consider his fraud, in the greater view of political actors, to be ordinary. What is exceptional is that he has been convicted of it, not that someone of his wealth and power participate in fraudulent behaviors. I actually find the various lawsuits he is facing to be more concerning than the fact of him being a charlatan. I find the lawsuits so concerning because they are in my view clear instances of the law being used for naked political warfare, rather than as a tool that is used fairly toward everyone. Democrats, and people in general who are just hostile to Trump (that includes many Republicans and independents) are using the legal system to egregiously harm their political opponent. It isn't as if the the laws are being executed in a politically neutral way; they are being executed for particular political ends; and they are *not* being executed for particular political ends as well.
The current legal imbalance between what is happening to Trump and what is happening to any of Trump's powerful opponents, Biden being the supreme example, is worrisome to me. Fraud is ubiquitous in our society, yet it rarely is prosecuted. And when it is prosecuted, it is very very difficult to convict, as the conviction requires proving the *intent* to deceive. So even if it could be very hard to imagine how one could do certain things without having the intent because its so outrageous, for example pulling a fire alarm, as Democratic Rep Jamal Bowman recently did, not to disrupt an official proceeding as is obvious to any rational human, but because he thought it would open the door, there is still the possibility a person was just a fool, and not a fraud.
Much of the fraud we routinely witness is just accepted as part of ordinary business-as-usual. When a product claims that it can "burn fat", even though the evidence for it is absolute garbage, the creators of these products are rarely brought to court and convicted for fraud. If the creators claim they believe it does, that seems to be sufficient for the law to ignore them. Prosecutors don't typically go after bullshit products because they inflate the value of those products. The products are worthless, yet they are still allowed to be sold, and the creators become rich off of them. Such people are rarely brought to court in any meaningful way; and their punishment is often negligible if they are. When a restaurant claims that their pancakes are the "best in the world" -- well, good luck on being able to bring them to court for fraud. A used car salesman prices a junker at a price most people would consider high. If a person buys the car -- are they going to bring the salesman to court for inflating the value of the car? Very unlikely when the chances of winning is so minimal, but the chances of the lawsuit costing time and money being certain.
When it comes to the inflation of value, proving fraud probably *should* be very difficult. While I despise charlatans, I despise frivolous lawsuits as well. If fraud was something that was easy to prosecute, then it would incentivize the accusation of fraud -- and having to deal with lawsuits can range from being annoying to life destroying.
Fraud being so infrequently prosecuted in relationship to how ubiquitous it is though does incentivize fraud. It is something that lots of people can get away with; they can make a career out it. Perhaps the most successful people who build their careers on fraud tend to be politicians. They commit fraud when they sell promises of hope and change, when what they deliver is corruption and the status quo. They commit fraud when they promise something like "democracy", when they in fact rig the system so that that people who vote have little control over what they are voting for or the outcome of the system.
"Democracy" in the US is largely a fraudulent notion. We are certainly a republic, but democracy plays a very limited role due to the electoral system and the wealth and power distribution. And when it comes to the "Democratic" Party particularly, "democracy" is a complete fraud. The Democratic Party rigs its primaries quite explicitly so that freakish candidates like Trump cannot in fact win in a primary. Rather, those who rule the DNC -- whoever the leaders are -- the oligarchs bound to the party, the politicians with their hands in a thousand pockets -- choose the candidates, and they systematically collude and *conspire* to prevent the candidates they do not want. This was publicly revealed in court.
After dismissing the lawsuit on questionable grounds, the court that reviewed the case made this statement:
“For their part, the DNC and Wasserman Schultz have characterized the DNC charter’s promise of ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ as a mere political promise—political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts. The Court does not accept this trivialization of the DNC’s governing principles. While it may be true in the abstract that the DNC has the right to have its delegates ‘go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way,’ the DNC, through its charter, has committed itself to a higher principle.”
When the DNC rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders they argued in court not that they didn't rig the system, but that they had no legal requirement to run a democratic primary. They basically argued that they were legally free to defraud the public and people who donated to campaigns of candidates who were under the impression that the primaries were fair and democratic and not rigged against those candidates by the DNC. And they were able to get the lawsuit dismissed. I'm not sure how it has become a victory though. I'm bewildered why democrats do not abandon the Democratic Party when they learn of that 2017 court case.
If the trial were anything like what Trump is receiving in his lawsuits though, I can't imagine that the DNC would have successfully had that lawsuit dismissed. The rules sometimes seem to apply selectively based on what a person's or organization's political views are and whose making the judgements about the rules. And that makes *justice* in the US fraudulent. We are promised, by our government, equal treatment under the law, but too often, especially when the stakes are the greatest, that promise turns out be fraudulent. It is fraudulent with regard to the [un]equal application of justice by the government when it decides who or what to prosecute, but it is also fraudulent with regard to the access to justice, since the law is a very expensive tool, and people with more money can more readily use that tool effectively.
The 14th amendment to the constitution promises citizens the "equal protection of the laws" -- but that is clearly an absurd promise to make when the effective protection of the laws is largely affected by a person's status and wealth. The lawsuits against Trump are a wonderful example of this. Both the prosecutors (various bureaucrats of the US Government) and Trump have access to very uncommon amounts of wealth -- in case of the prosecutors, millions(billions?) in tax money, and in the case of Trump, billions in private funds. If either the prosecutors or Trump were to run out of wealth, they would be unable to continue the process of litigation, and it would dramatically weaken their cause. And of course, those people who are politically connected to the levers of power in the judicial system choose who and what to apply the billions of dollars that are flowing through the US government bookmarked for legal fees. "Equal protection of the laws" is farsical. Can I sue the government for fraud in its constitution? Politicians want to sell "equal justice" to citizens though; otherwise the citizens will seek other means to address their grievances; but people generally aren't fond of vigilantism. Batman is a super hero, but most people don't trust people to be so noble.
Could the US have a legal system that consciously acknowledged its bias and flaws? Or is that an absurd aspiration? Is "equality and justice for all" a noble lie? Is that fraud justified? Or could the US have a system that acknowledged its imperfections, was honest with its limitations, yet still provided more justice than the system it has now? Before it could a lot of people would have to acknowledge the fraud of the system we have now. Many people worship the contents of the constitution like it is holy -- even though the framers themselves viewed it as a document to be amended. Perhaps its a decent start, but it is nowhere near being finished. Some of it is just vague bullshit. Some of it is fraud.
And this is just tip of the iceberg when it comes to fraud that is commonly unacknowledged in our society. If we take our view to an international level -- consider the war in Ukraine right now. Invaded by a despot-- yes; I don't care to dispute that. But is the US government contributing to that war to protect "democracy"? No, such a narrative is a fraud. Currently, young men in Ukraine are punished if they try to leave. Young men in Ukraine are being violently coerced to fight a war they may not think is worth their lives or the lives of those who they love. I find that to be evil. Whatever "freedom" Putin destroyed by invading Ukraine, Zelensky, with his actions, is adding to that destruction.
From my view, it looks like a war between two despotic fraudulent democratic governments -- and it is being financially supported by the US government with the primary purpose to weaken a hated political enemy and profit the military-industrial complex: not to save a democracy. When the US invaded Iraq, the same democrats who are now supporting the prolonged destruction of Ukraine were contemplating the theory that the Iraq war was a sinister plot by Cheney, et. al, to make money off of the rebuilding of Iraq via Halliburton (which was quite plausibly part of the motivation). The same sort of vultures who circled Iraq are now circling Ukraine. While I observed a meaningful degree of cynicism and skepticism around the Iraq war from “liberal” democrats, I don’t observe that same cynicism around the Ukraine war. Most of that cynicism I see seems to be coming from “MAGA” republicans. Even Bernie Sanders has been voting to continue funding the Ukraine war, without financial oversight.
Apparently, it is urgent that we send billions of dollars, without oversight, to a despotic, corrupt government so that it can continue to defend itself from the invasion from another despotic, corrupt government by using forced conscription of young men, many of whom have no desire to die for the defense of that despotic government. If for some reason you are not convinced that the Ukrainian government is corrupt and not worth dying for — just read what Zelensky himself has to say about the corruption in the conscription system of Ukraine:
"We are dismissing all regional military commissars," he said.
"This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery at a time of war is high treason."
He said the conscription system "is not working decently", adding: "The way they treat warriors, the way they treat their duties, it's just immoral."
Zelensky of course has no problem with the immorality of imprisoning and punishing men who don’t want to die for such a despotic and corrupt government — he is only concerned about the supposed immorality of commissars not being honest in their dealings with such an immoral system. The US government has been funding a government that has been forcing its poorest men, those who cannot afford bribes, to fight in a plausibly futile war that has already killed or maimed over 100000 Ukrainians. For what? “Democracy”?
Calling Ukraine a democracy is a bold stretch of the imagination, but even if a democracy did vote to force a minority of its citizens to die to preserve its corrupt government, it would not be a democracy that anyone should voluntarily financially support—other than possibly with humanitarian aid. Being a "democracy" doesn't magically create a country whose government’s military should be financed without any discrimination and with disregard for its political minorities or the alternative possibilities of the wealth being used. But that seems to be sufficient for people to support this war: its to protect "democracy." Can I sue congress for using my taxes to fund a war for fraudulent justifications? Maybe if I had the money.
I'll leave the fraud of major religions and academia for a later article.
I found this cynical but factual. Human behavior runs the gamut from the lowest and meanest to the highest ideals. So how do we govern ourselves? The ideas in the US Constitution, while not holy, were an amazing advancement in the history of how humans govern. The law isn't necessarily fair, and I believe it's designed to solve problems even if the solution is unfair. I don't know how we can improve the legal system. I've considered what would happen if every single litigant was required to be represented by a randomly assigned attorney provided by the government. You mentioned frivolous lawsuits and I believe these would inundate the system in the case above, and those with the funds would find a work-around, hiring private advisers. Thought provoking piece!