CommentsONE MAN’S OPINION-The Problem: People who have too much want more at the expense of people who do not have enough.
Both Donald Trump and Eric Garcetti demonstrate how the powerful abuse the weak for their own personal aggrandizement.
Trump’s business modus operandi was pitting the bankrupt against the workers and suppliers in collusion with bankruptcy judges. In retrospect, one sees that Trump is a terrible businessman but a great cheater. Garcetti’s modus operandi is actually worse as his main predatory tool has been a criminalized city council to victimize the poor. Angelenos are so habituated to the criminal nature of the LA City Council that they don’t see anything wrong with it. Angelenos are like peasants who believe that the Lord of the Manor has the divine right to raid their fields and cattle. Garcetti’s most immoral transgressions against the poor has been manufacturing the homeless crisis in order to make his rich developer buddies wealthier.
Lucky for Garcetti, the mental defective histrionic in the White House has been caught soliciting the help of a foreign government to help him win the 2020 election. As remarked previously, Trump is crude and Garcetti is cool. Thus, Trump and his defenders draw attention away from LA’s homeless who are needlessly dying in our streets while Garcetti aggressively manufactures more homelessness by destroying more rent-controlled housing. For some reason, it does not occur to Angelenos that destroying the homes of our poor people in order to make a few extra dollars for billionaire developers is the Sodom and Gomorrah approach to governing.
The Problem did Not Start with Trump
Although Trumpy-Dumpy is a mentally defective, narcissistic histrionic who poses a lethal danger to the nation, he did not cause the problem any more than a surfer causes the wave on which he rides. For now, we’ll postpone another analysis of how we arrived at the present insanity.
Senator Lindsey Graham Wins the Oscar for the Dumbest Legal Defense in World History
While Rudy Giuliani may yet upstage Lindsey Graham, right now Graham’s clamoring about hearsay has to be the dumbest defense in world history. Graham is shouting that the impeachment inquiry cannot be based on hearsay. Unlike the word “hotdog,” hearsay actually means what its two parts mean. “Hearsay” means that someone says what they heard. (The legalese definition is “an extrajudicial statement offered for the truth of the matter stated.”) The whistleblower did say what he heard people say about the President’s phone conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine, but we are way beyond that point.
Trump himself has released the verbatim transcript and he has declared that what he said was “perfect.” As soon as we have the transcript, we are no longer dealing with hearsay. We are dealing with direct evidence of the President’s statement. Yet, Lindsey Graham, who has seized the title of Grand Doofus from LA’s Judge Michael Beckloff, keeps referring to Trump’s phone conversation as “hearsay.”
A President May Be Impeached for High Crimes and Misdemeanors
It is a crime for anyone to solicit a foreigner for a contribution to an American election. Per Federal Election Campaign Act, contributions may be cash or in kind, e.g., services or anything else of value. Asking anyone to undertake an investigation to assist in a political campaign is seeking a campaign contribution. President Zelensky is not an American and Trump asked that Zelensky’s government make an in-kind campaign contribution to Trump’s re-election campaign by undertaking an investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden. There need not be any quid pro quo. Whether or not Trump was promising to pay for the Ukraine’s Biden investigation by releasing the military funds is not relevant. Trump was still soliciting help from a foreign government in his re-election.
Why Is Anyone Surprised?
Trump has insisted that accepting the help of a foreign power in his elections is fine, so it’s not surprising that he finds his solicitation of such help to be “perfect.” Let’s go back to Lindsey, the President’s describing his solicitation as “perfect” is not hearsay. If a mugger says, “Your money or your life,” his demand is not hearsay.
Locally and Nationally, Our Country Has Devolved into a Dog Eat Dog World Where Only Power Matters
Not a single Wall Street felon went to jail for crashing the country’s economy, while tens of thousands of minorities remain incarcerated for minor offenses and often for no offense at all except being unable to fight a corrupt judicial system. LA’s streets have become worse than a Charles Dickens’ nightmare, and in response to the homeless crisis, we are destroying more homes of LA’s poor in order to construct more luxury apartments. A predatory society that specializes in victimizing the weak will continue undeterred to its own ruin.
In a way, America may be lucky that a fool like Trump is President as his corruption might force us to pay attention to how far we have strayed from our constitutional origins. Trump’s impeachment could be a revival of our moribund constitutional rights, and maybe, perhaps, if Americans wake up from their moral slumber and take action, we might then move on to reform the criminogenic judiciary.
Ha! Who am I kidding? There will be no judicial reform, just endless victimization of the innocent. While we have a forum to remove a President, there is no forum to fix a corrupt judiciary. What are we going to do, sue the judges? No matter what happens to Trump, the 1% will continue to abuse everyone else and there is nothing we can do about it.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch) Photo: Shutterstock Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
