Corruption

#Corruption

Used to categorize content related to the abuse of power for personal gain or the manipulation of public resources for private interests. Discussions under this tag may encompass topics such as the causes and consequences of corruption, strategies for prevention and detection, and the impact of corruption on various aspects of society, such as economic development, governance, and public trust. The tag may also cover topics around the legal and ethical implications of corruption, such as the role of law enforcement and anti-corruption agencies, and the need for greater transparency and accountability in public and private institutions.

Total topics: 109

Why is this only a problem on the radical left?
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In an effort to make Brandon look good, Youtube has banned negative thoughts from its platform.

Will it work?
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Current events
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Biden's handlers motives for shuttering USA petroleum production (with laughter) while seeking OPEC oil are obvious.

A jumpstart kick in the nuts with the Build Back Better policies where the military industrial complex have a revitalized reason to be involved in the Middle East.

Let's go Brandon. Same as the old Brandon.
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Why would Bill Maher, a Democrat, say something so hateful?
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Politics
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What exactly is James Carville referring to when he talks about Woke Detox for the Democrat Party?
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Who is this guy?
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Politics
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MORE THAN HALF of POLICE KILLINGS are MISLABELED, NEW STUDY SAYS
Researchers comparing information from death certificates with data from organizations that track police killings in the United States identified a startling discrepancy.

By Tim Arango and Shaila Dewan
Sept. 30, 2021Updated 6:55 p.m. ET

Police killings in America have been undercounted by more than half over the past four decades, according to a new study that raises pointed questions about racial bias among medical examiners and highlights the lack of reliable national record keeping on what has become a major public health and civil rights issue.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Washington and published on Thursday in The Lancet, a major British medical journal, amounts to one of the most comprehensive looks at the scope of police violence in America, and the disproportionate impact on Black people.

Researchers compared information from a federal database known as the National Vital Statistics System, which collects death certificates, with recent data from three organizations that track police killings through news reports and public records requests. When extrapolating and modeling that data back decades, they identified a startling discrepancy: About 55 percent of fatal encounters with the police between 1980 and 2018 were listed as another cause of death.

The findings reflect both the contentious role of medical examiners and coroners in obscuring the real extent of police violence, and the lack of centralized national data on an issue that has caused enormous upheaval. Private nonprofits and journalists have filled the gap by mining news reports and social media.

“I think the big takeaway is that most people in public health tend to take vital statistics for the U.S. and other countries as the absolute truth, and it turns out, as we show, the vital statistics are missing more than half of the police violence deaths,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which conducted the study.

He continued: “You have to look for why those deaths that are being picked up by the open-source investigations, looking in the media and elsewhere, aren’t showing up in the official statistics. That does point to the system of medical examiners and the incentives that may exist for them to want to not classify a death as related to police violence.”

Researchers estimated that over the time period they studied, which roughly tracks the era of the war on drugs and the rise of mass incarceration, nearly 31,000 Americans were killed by the police, with more than 17,000 of them going unaccounted for in the official statistics. The study also documented a stark racial gap: Black Americans were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as white Americans were. Data on Asian Americans was not included in the study, but Latinos and Native Americans also suffered higher rates of fatal police violence than white people.

The annual number of deaths in police custody has generally gone upward since 1980, even as crime — notwithstanding a rise in homicides last year amid the dislocations of the coronavirus pandemic — has declined from its peak in the early 1990s.

The states with the highest rates of police killings were Oklahoma, Arizona and Alaska, as well as the District of Columbia, while the states with the lowest rates were Massachusetts, Connecticut and Minnesota, according to the study.

Researchers estimated that about 20 times as many men as women were killed by the police over the past several decades; more American men died in 2019 during police encounters than from Hodgkin lymphoma or testicular cancer.]

Unexplained or violent deaths in the United States are investigated by coroners or medical examiners, who use autopsies, toxicology tests and evidence like body camera footage to determine the cause and manner of death. The death certificate does not specifically ask whether the police were involved — which may contribute to the undercount identified by the study — but many medical examiners are trained to include that information.

The system has long been criticized for fostering a cozy relationship with law enforcement — forensic pathologists regularly consult with detectives and prosecutors and in some jurisdictions they are directly employed by police agencies.

Yet pathologists have also complained on occasion that law enforcement does not provide them with all relevant information, that they have been pressured to change their opinions, or that coroners, who are usually elected and are not always required to have a medical degree, can and do overrule their findings.

The researchers found that some of the misclassified deaths occurred because medical examiners failed to mention law enforcement’s involvement on the death certificate, while others were improperly coded in the national database.

While The Lancet study did not mention specific cases, there have been recent examples where the initial findings of coroners or medical examiners downplayed or omitted the role of the police when a Black man was killed: Ronald Greene’s death in Louisiana, for instance, was attributed by the coroner to cardiac arrest and classified as accidental before video emerged of him being stunned, beaten and dragged by state troopers.

In Aurora, Colo., the manner of Elijah McClain’s death was ruled undetermined after the police put him in a chokehold and paramedics injected him with ketamine, a powerful sedative. Almost two years later, three officers and two paramedics were indicted.

Even in the case of George Floyd, whose agonizing last breaths under a Minneapolis police officer’s knee were captured on bystander video, the police and the county medical examiner first pointed to drug use and underlying health conditions.

The National Association of Medical Examiners encourages the classification of deaths caused by law enforcement as homicides, in part to reduce the appearance of a cover-up (a homicide may still be deemed justified). But classification guidelines differ from office to office, and there are no national standards.

Roger Mitchell Jr., a former chief medical examiner of Washington, D.C., and an expert on investigating deaths in custody, has long said that death certificates should include a checkbox indicating whether a death occurred in custody, including arrest-related deaths as well as those in jails and prisons.

As long as medical examiners are not specifically asked to include that information, he said, he would not jump to conclusions about why they do not do so: “If it’s a function of training, a function of bias, a function of institutional and structural racism — all the things we can assume — we can identify that once we have a uniform system.”

A federal law passed in 2014 requiring law enforcement agencies to report deaths in custody has yet to produce any public data.

The paper’s top-line findings are similar to the results of a more narrow study conducted at Harvard in 2017 that examined one year — 2015 — and compared official death statistics in the United States with data on police killings compiled by The Guardian.

“It’s highlighting the persistent problem of undercounting of killings by police in official data sources, one of those being mortality data,” said Justin Feldman, a research fellow at Harvard who conducted the 2017 study and was a peer reviewer on the paper published on Thursday in The Lancet.

“This is an ongoing issue that we are still, after all these years, not doing a very good of keeping track of people killed by police,” he added.

The study lands at a time when America has grappled with one high-profile police killing of a Black man after another. But, as the study showed, there are tens of thousands of other deaths that remain in the shadows.

Rulings on the cause and manner of death strongly influence whether criminal charges are brought or whether families receive a civil settlement. The death of Mr. Floyd was classified as a homicide and the death certificate cited law enforcement restraint, but the medical examiner still faced criticism after prosecutors made public his preliminary findings that underlying health conditions and drug use had contributed.

The former chief medical examiner of Maryland, Dr. David Fowler, was also criticized after he testified on behalf of the Minneapolis police officer, saying Mr. Floyd’s death was caused by several factors and was not a homicide.

After an open letter by Dr. Mitchell said that Dr. Fowler’s testimony revealed “obvious bias,” Maryland’s attorney general began a review of in-custody deaths that were handled under Dr. Fowler’s tenure.

Dr. Murray of the University of Washington said that one of the starkest findings was that racial disparities in police shootings have widened since 2000.

The trend contrasts, he said, with other health outcomes, such as heart disease, in which the racial gap has narrowed in recent years.

The study, he and other researchers said, points to the need for a centralized clearinghouse for data on police violence, as well as more scrutiny of coroners and medical examiners.

“There’s been an attempt to limit the reality of what is,” said Edwin G. Lindo, a scholar of critical race theory and professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who examined the findings of the study but was not involved in putting it together. “And what I would suggest is, when we don’t have good data we can’t actually make good policy decisions, and I don’t know if that’s an accident for it to be so greatly underreported.”


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REPUBLICAN PARTY OPERATIVES CHARGED with ARRANGING ILLEGAL TRUMP CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION

By Jan Wolfe

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors on Monday unsealed criminal charges against two longtime Republican Party operatives, accusing them of illegally funneling a foreign campaign contribution to former President Donald Trump in 2016.

According to an indictment unsealed in federal court in the District of Columbia, Jesse Benton and Doug Wead "conspired to illegally funnel thousands of dollars of foreign money from a Russian foreign national into an election for the Office of President of the United States of America."

U.S. law bans foreign nationals from donating money to presidential campaigns.

According to the indictment, Benton and Wead helped a Russian national get a ticket to a fundraiser with Trump in Pennsylvania in September 2016.

The Russian, who was not identified in the indictment, donated $25,000 to political action committees associated with Trump in order to attend the event, according to prosecutors.

But the true source of the donation was concealed from the Trump campaign, the indictment said, because the payment was secretly funneled through Benton, who acted as a "straw donor."

Benton, 43, previously managed campaigns for Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky before he was convicted for his role in a political endorsement scheme. Benton avoided jail time and received a presidential pardon in December 2020 from Trump.

Wead, 75, worked as a senior adviser on multiple presidential campaigns and ran for Congress as a Republican in 1992.

It was not yet clear if the two had engaged legal counsel.

Bachmann had narrowly defeated Paul to win the Ames Straw Poll in August 2011, an early measure of support in the state. 

A top aide in the 2008 Ron Paul presidential bid, Dennis Fusaro, provided several emails to OpenSecrets.org. According to the address fields in the emails, Fusaro was copied on the messages, which all date from late 2011.

Five days before the caucus, in late 2011, Sorenson abruptly switched his support from Bachmann to Paul, and the Bachmann campaign at the time charged that he had done so for money.
  • Benton is married to Ron Paul's granddaughter, Rand Paul is Benton's uncle -in-law.  Benton lived in Rand Paul's house for a number of years.
    • Benton ran Rand's run for Senate in 2010 and Grandpa Paul's 2012 Presidential Bid.
      • In an Oct. 29, 2011 email, a representative of Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson, a Republican, asks the Paul campaign to provide Sorenson with $8,000 per month in salary for him, $5,000 per month in salary for a Sorenson ally, as well as $100,000 in contributions for a newly created PAC that Sorenson planned to use to support conservative candidates for Iowa state office.
      • In exchange, the email, which was allegedly written by Aaron Dorr, executive director of Iowa Gun Owners, says Sorenson would abandon his support for Rep. Michele Bachmann‘s campaign, endorse Paul, campaign for him and provide access to an email list of Iowans who support homeschooling.
        • That is, the director of Iowa Gun Owners is so deep inside the pockets of the Pauls that he can offer six-figure bribes on the Pauls' behalf.
    • Benton was convicted of bribing Sorenson to throw his support to Ron Paul and given two years probation.  Just two days after his conviction, Benton was setting up the illegal meeting for payment scheme on Roman Vasilenko's behalf.
      • This sort of open corruption and graft was so appealing to Mitch McConnell that he hired Benton to run his 2014 Senatorial bid.  Benton was forced to step down after many reporters questioned such open corruption but to this day, Benton still serves as the primary channel between McConnell and the Pauls.
      • Trump pardoned Benton in January of this year, explicitly as a favor to Rand Paul.
    • Benton is accused setting up a meeting between Trump and Vasilenko in Sept 2016 at a Philadelphia Fundraiser.  Since the price of admission was a $25,000 donation to the Trump campaign and no foreign national should therefore be able to attend, Vasilensko mingled with his translator and had his picture taken with many top GOP officials without batting an eye.  It just wasn't that strange to have Russians openly loitering in the belly of the GOP in 2016, apparently.
    • Wead is a longtime GOP operative and consultant, whose ties to the Russian business magnate go back decades.
      • Wead is credited with authoring the Bush campaign phrase "Compassionate Conservative."
      • Wead has given lectures in Russia bolstering Vasilenko's self-help seminars and  in 2009, Wead appointed Vasilenko to the board of directors for a Christian boarding school where Wead was president.
    • Although the price of dinner with Trump was minimum $25,000, Wead and Benton's consulting firm took a check for $100,000 from Vasilenko.
      • Benton tried to tell the Trump campaign that he had already made his donation (that is tried to hold on to all of the money himself) until Trump's fundraisers insisted.  Benton paid the $25,000 minimum and we can assume Benton and Wead split the $75,000 remainder.  Whether Trump, the Pauls, and McConnell also all get a taste of that money is unclear but that's the way it works in Russia and other mob organizations.  Certainly, nobody in the GOP has bothered to condemn such fairly straightforward bribery by one of America's principle enemies.  I wonder what Vasilenko asked Trump for and whether that request came straight from Putin?  From what little  we can tell of Trump's presidency we should probably assume he got whatever he asked for.


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Tell me right now that the way she was treated in her trial and lack of representation she had would have happened if she were a Caucasian American.

Do not look '.co.uk' and tell me she was British, read the article. It was a British lawyer that saved her. That is irrelevant to the piece, I am just clarifying before people try to correct me on this. The British legal system also has needed a lot of work pushed forward by BLM protests and campaigns in order to improve, it's just further along the way, I believe.
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