American Idiots Abroad

Since it began in February 2022, the arrest and detention of American pro basketball player Brittney Griner for drug possession while passing through the Moscow airport has been a case study in the stupidity and selfishness of Americans. Griner was arrested on February 17, 2022 as she flew into Moscow when hashish oil was found in her baggage as she went through customs. In mid-March, Russia slipped her proceedings to mid-May, lengthening her detention. More delays eventually slipped her trial to July at which point she pleaded guilty but declared no intent to break the law.

So what else was going on at this time? (THINK…)

Oh yea, Vladimir Putin was telegraphing an invasion of neighboring Ukraine since some time in November of 2021 when satellite imagery captured a build-up of over 100,000 Russian troops on the Ukrainian border. President Joe Biden publicly threatened Russia with sanctions on December 7, 2021 if it invaded Ukraine. By the start of February, it was ABSOLUTELY clear Russia would be at war, it was ABSOLUTELY clear the stated rationale for that war directly reflected the criminal mind of Vladimir Putin and it was ABSOLUTELY clear Russia would NOT be a place to which any American should be voluntarily travelling -- for business or pleasure.

Yet Brittney Griner was stupid enough to travel to Russia during that period. To make a few extra bucks playing basketball off-season for a team in the Russian Premier League. And stupid enough to bring in a vial of hashish oil (marijuana extract) through customs. And expected to be released without incident cuz possessing hashish oil in America isn't that big a deal, it's legal in many parts of America.

American idiots take note…

Your rights and protections as an American are only a priority within the territory of the United States. And if you haven't been paying attention to the news over the last, oh, two hundred plus years, you might be shocked to learn those rights and protections are not always perfectly honored here within the United States. When you travel abroad, you are CHOOSING to subject yourself to much larger risks of arrest, detention, conviction and imprisonment for actions that might be completely acceptable in some or all of the United States but you are not traveling in a virtual bubble of US protections outside US borders. You're on your own.

What is particularly frustrating about the Griner case is the juxtaposition of her circumstances with another American being held by Putin in Russia, another private citizen Paul Whelan who was arrested on December 28, 2018 and subsequently charged and convicted of spying. Whelan's trip was ostensibly to attend a wedding of a Marine friend ( editor's note: what IS it with ex-military or active military personnel wanting to travel to Russia? Is there a Lee Harvey Oswald must-see museum somewhere?). Upon arrival at the airport, he had $80,000 in cash temporarily confiscated (uhhhh….) then a few days later suddenly encountered an old friend who gave him a USB drive with files containing details on Russian government security workers, after which Russian police arrived within hours to arrest him. Whelan was convicted by June 15, 2020 and has been serving a sixteen year sentence ever since.

Regardless of the circumstances of Whelan's case and his relative guilt or innocence, if you assume some metaphysical rule of first-in, first-out "fairness" should apply to freeing American citizens from foreign detainment and imprisonment, then clearly Paul Whelan had a two-year head start on Brittney Griner. In the first few months after her detention, it appeared as though American strategies would stick with a FIFO approach. However, as Griner's detention and trial mechanizations dragged on, stories began appearing in American media with themes ranging from:

• Griner's detention was an LBGTQ issue since Putin has a long-standing history of persecuting LBGTQ within Russia
• Griner's detention was an LBGTQ issue because the US government didn't care enough about her as a noted LBGTQ figure
• Giner's detention should be a rallying call for rationalizing American laws regarding marijuana to eliminate pot as a "gateway drug" leading minorities to a higher-than-normal rate of conviction / incarceration within the American justice system.

Finally, a letter written by Griner to President Biden was leaked on the July 4 holiday weekend (do you think that was a coincidence or driven by Putin?) then discussed in the news by her wife who directly accused Biden and the US government for failing to prioritize efforts to free Griner and others. Whether that pressure altered strategies or if events just moved at their own pace, it now appears a deal has been proposed to free both Griner and Whelan. But now we know the deal. And it doesn't sound remotely like justice.

As of July 28, it appears as though the US is proposing to gain the freedom of Griner (arrested for a drug violation) and Whelan (for at least a couple of suspicious events) in exchange for returning convicted international arms dealer Viktor Bout to Russia. Bout has a lengthy resume of arms trafficking including sales to the Taliban in the early 2000s, selling surface-to-air missiles to Kenya used in an attack on an Israeli jet in 2002 and operating a fleet of over 60 planes as part of an organized money laundering ring. He was arrested in Thailand in 2008 and eventually extradited to the US where he was charged and convicted on numerous trafficking and money laundering charges. Between the weapons dealing and money laundering, it seems pretty obvious that Bout contributed to the deaths of hundreds if not thousands around the world.

Negotiations for prisoner swaps among government and military personnel are fraught enough. American private citizens should not be complicating matters by becoming additional bait for remote powers to gain bargaining chips due to their stupidity or cluelessness. Compare the public statements from Brittney Griner's family versus the families of Americans who volunteered to go to Ukriane to train Ukriainians or fight alongside them… Several have been captured or killed but they stated clearly to their families beforehand they expected no special favors or promises of protection from the US government by engaging in the war and their families have publicly reiterated that stance.

If an American citizen is going to serve time anywhere for a crime committed (or alleged) anywhere, I would certainly prefer that time be served in America rather than a foreign country. However, if an American is going to be arrested, tried and convicted for a crime that would also be a likely crime in the United States, it is not serving the interest of justice or security for the American government to bargain away another convicted felon involved in crimes several orders of magnitude worse to improve the plight of someone who could have used far better judgement and avoided their plight entirely and chose not to.

WTH

Abortion, Language and the Law

On July 14, 2022, a House committee hearing included a discussion between a witness and Representative that highlighted the blatant hypocrisy and danger of the so-called originalist philosophy of justice espoused by The Federalist Society. The hearing involved a case of a ten year old girl in Ohio who was raped, became pregnant and -- due to the elimination of Roe protections nationally and subsequent banning of abortion in Ohio -- required the girl to travel to bordering Indiana to obtain an abortion. The witness was Catherine Foster, who is President and CEO of Americans United for Life, a prominent anti-abortion organization across the country. The Representative was Eric Swalwell, who asked Foster if a ten year old could make a choice to have a baby. The point of the question was to highlight the inherent cruelty of the "zero tolerance" stance of anti-abortionists who want to ban ALL abortions, even for rape or protecting the life of the mother.

The witness, knowing she was on camera and realizing any answer saying a ten year old girl should be forced to carry a baby to term, much less the baby from a rape, would make her and her organization appear to be monsters, answered with what to her seemed a totally logical answer.

“I believe it would probably impact her life, and so, therefore, it would fall under any exception and would not be an abortion.”

Read that response CAREFULLY. SEVERAL TIMES.

Americans United for Life is most noted for assisting anti-abortion efforts by crafting boilerplate language for anti-abortion laws proposed in state houses across the country. It is safe to assume that the organization is behind the terms enacted by MANY states that are prohibiting abortion for ANY circumstances, including rape and incest.

Yet here, caught in the glare of cameras with the entire country watching, a key anti-abortion leader appeared to blink.

This is not a sign of reasonableness. This is not a sign of encouragement that a middle ground might be reached. Go back and read her response again, word for word. Her response is a sign of dangerous caprice poisoning the legal system.

Her rationale for her answer involves a situational redefinition of the word abortion. In some situations, abortion is bad and should be stopped regardless of the opinions of others. In OTHER situations, the act being described is simply no longer abortion. By defining the act as something else in that specific scenario, Foster allows her mind and the minds of her organization's members to continue believing their morality and logic are ironclad and are not in conflict.

But stop and contemplate the illogic of that thinking. These laws are being drafted and enacted by people thinking in absolutist terms with wordings that -- to the average literate adult -- appear to have ZERO wiggle room and -- knowing the aims of the people crafting the laws -- appear to meet the goals of those enacting them to impose draconian restrictions perfectly. Yet proponents of these laws immediately revert to alternate definitions of KEY WORDS in the laws which exist ONLY IN THEIR HEAD and NOWHERE ON PAPER that an independent, rational, literate third party could reasonably and consistently interpret. Like a judge. Or a member of a jury. Or a defendant. Or a doctor or patient trying to avoid becoming a defendant.

Can you spot the REAL problem here?

The United States is IN this new abortion predicament because the US Supreme Court and the larger judiciary has been corrupted over the last thirty years with judges who espouse an extremist philosophy that says the language of laws should only be interpreted using the interpretations of the time in which those laws were written. Current judges should not "interpret" old laws with modern nuances to find new interpretations the original lawmakers could not POSSIBLY have meant because the nuance didn't exist at the time.

If you believe the rationale for this concept as publicly summarized by its adherents, a goal of this philosophy is to put responsibility back on LEGISLATURES at the federal and state level to pass explicit laws if a new right is to be granted or if government is to take on some new function not explicitly identified in prior legislation. As many adherents put it, don't rely on the courts to do your dirty work to create rights or functionality that could not pass through legislatures.

One only has to look at two rulings issued by the Supreme Court within a week of each other to see this official rationale is a cynical fraud. Before overturning Roe v Wade on the grounds of pushing back decisions about abortion rights to the states, the SAME Supreme Court also overturned a law in New York imposing limits on assault rifles because the law conflicted with Second Amendment rights, which say nothing about blocking the ability of states to dictate procedures for citizens to follow prior to bearing combat weapons and related paraphernalia.

The true goal of this originalist claptrap is to provide a rationale for rejecting over a century of progress in civil rights, antitrust regulation, labor rights and criminal justice protections knowing that the special interests that will benefit from those rollbacks have perfected the art of paralyzing the existing gerrymandered, un-democratic legislative processes to ensure such protections cannot be re-enacted with explicit legislation -- quickly or perhaps ever.

The real problem with this originalist utopia we are entering is that in it, the enforcement of laws will inevitably revert to a mode in which the written word has no consistent meaning at all. Imagine a state enacting a law stating "Abortion is prohibited under criminal penalty for all cases." If subsequent cases arise in which a judge simply redefines the term "abortion" when ruling in case A involving the rape of a ten year old because that circumstance is horrid in the judge's mind but NOT redefining the term "abortion" when ruling in case B involving a twenty seven year old woman, then we are no longer operating under the rule of law. We are operating at the whim of whichever judge a plaintiff or defendant draws at trial and the whims of that judge from case to case which is a violation of the equal protections clause.

And, courtesy of the gang of five on the Supreme Court who were all promoted to their positions precisely because of their support for this extremist philosophy, this is not some futuristic, worst-case exaggeration of how things might turn out if we don't course-correct soon. This is the way our legal system is operating now.

WTH

Independence Day

At least six have been killed and twenty four wounded in a mass shooting in America, on Independence Day. The date, time, location and circumstances really don't seem to matter because NOTHING is altering the cycle of thought that is making the United States of America unique -- in all of the worst possible ways.

Unique in our unwillingness to provide medical care for the mentally ill, much less the wider population.

Unique in our unwillingness to address the extreme concentration of wealth that has left sixteen percent of children to be raised in poverty, with crippled educations and prospects to match, failing to contemplate how a child amid that sixteen percent MIGHT have been the person to cure cancer, solve a materials science problem accelerating the elimination of fossil fuels through more efficient batteries or become the next Beethoven or Beatle.

Unique in our perverse fixation on individual rights over our collective duties to each other.

Unique in our intellectual laziness that opts for tax policies based on jackpot fantasies (you could be rich too so don't soak the rich) which starve the funding for public institutions in education and justice that enable upward mobility.

Unique in our stupidity that fails to see how those decisions prevent us from acting collectively for the benefit of everyone and thus allow the status quo to continue enriching the already uber-rich.

Unique in our inability to understand the founding documents of our own country, which only declared independence from a tyrannical, remote king but did not declare the creation of 2.5 million individual one-person Americas with everyone living and acting at arm's length from one another, armed to the teeth, trusting no one.

Unique in our inability to learn from our own history and recognize we are already running USA 3.0. USA 1.0 proved completely unsuitable and melted down within five years of the British surrendering at Yorktown. USA 2.0 was corrupted in its first release by "three fifths" math that failed to recognize the full humanity of all Americans and took a war to trigger an upgrade. Our current operating system is always going to have flaws but downgrading to prior versions will NEVER solve today's problems.

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union...

E pluribus unum

The founding fathers didn't found a cult focused solely on individual liberty. They created a system of government that recognized that emphasizing individual rights was the most effective way to keep a government in check while allowing a government of the people, by the people and for the people to act on behalf of the people more effectively to protect those rights in a virtuous circle.

Many Americans have completely lost the plot and never learned or are now ignoring the balance required between individual rights and collective responsibilities. Because of this, both our individual freedoms and our union are in peril.

WTH

BOOK REVIEW: Freezing Order

Quick trivia question. Who is the wealthiest musician on the planet?

Paul McCartney? Nope.

Elton John? Nope.

Jay-Z? Nope.

Kanye West? Close, but nope.

The world's richest musician is a cellist named Sergei Roldugin. Who played in St. Petersburg, Russia. Who grew up with Vladimir Putin. A man who -- based on data divulged in the Panama Papers -- controls companies that have shifted billions of dollars through bank accounts across the world since roughly 2000. He is one of likely dozens of such parties who act as "shell humans" to own the cash and assets reflecting the hundreds of billions Putin has grifted from Russia since taking power.

That's the most interesting factoid in Freezing Order but there are many more maddening anecdotes throughout the book. American-born and current British citizen Bill Browder founded a venture capital firm called Hermitage Capital Management in the 1990s that focused on investments in Russia and within a decade became the largest foreign investor in Russia. Browder was deported from Russia in 2005 after his firm made repeated public disclosures of fraud his firm encountered dealing with varous parties in Russia, including the government. Between 2005 and 2009, firms owned by Hermitage were accused of tax fraud and were investigated by a Russian lawyer named Sergie Magnitsky. Rather than finding fraud on the part of Hermitage, Magnitsky's investigations found confidential documents of Hermitage-owned firms were stolen then used to fabricate filings for tax REFUNDS worth the equivalent of $231 million dollars. At that point, Magnitsky and Browder were targeted with new fraud charges, leading to Magnitsky's arrest and retention in jail for over a year before he was finally beaten to death in jail in 2009. At that point, Browder devoted virtually all of his efforts to lobbying western governments to adopt freezes on public officials and businessmen involved in not only this $231 million dollar tax fraud but the entire money-laundering network created by Putin.

Browder's prior book Red Notice covered the history of Hermitage, the bogus tax fraud investigation into his firm, the subsequent investigation into the real $231 million dollar tax refund fraud and Magnitsky's murder and Browder's work to push for nations to enact "Magnitsky Act" sanction legislation. Freeze Order picks up where Red Notice left off, describing Browder's continued efforts to push for sanctions legislation across the world to combat money laundering but also his continual efforts to avoid arrest and extradition by Russia and NUMEROUS efforts Russia made across the world including within the United States to undo his efforts.

It is those efforts that merit a read of this book by the average American. Across the different chapters of the book, a few key themes emerge that hold true not only in America but most western countries:

• Thirty years of systemic grift throughout Russia has concentrated immense wealth that cannot appear to be concentrated in official records, creating enormous amounts of work in forging owersnhip records, purchases, etc.
• Creating forged paperwork on an industrial scale involves enormous fees for lawyers, which many law firms find impossible to resist.
• Many banks and real estate firms find it equally impossible to turn away tainted Russian dollars, willingly absorbing huge amounts of cash to yield profits otherwise unattainable.
• Russia has no difficulty in finding elected officials in numerous countries to do its bidding as well.

The key point in the book is that Putin's work to undo the Magnitsky Act within the US was perhaps his PRIMARY goal in interfering in the 2016 presidential race. Browder summarizes a few events that support his case.

After the US passed the Magnitsky Act of 2012, Russian began efforts to arrest Browder from multiple countries and extradite him back to Russia for trial for manufactured charges related to the $231 million dollar fraud turned up previously. At the same time, Russia had produced and was trying to promote a "documentary" outlining Browder's corruption in an effort to poison his reputation and ability to get additional nations to pass similar Magnitsky Act legislation and get existing countries like the US to either overturn their legislation or simply decide to not enforce it and stop sanctioning additional Russians.

Russia also announced an end to a program that allowed western families to adopt Russian orphans, most of which had physical or mental health issues and would NOT get the desired care in Russia. Keep this point in mind.

In 2016, a group of investigative journalists published millions of documents from a Panamanian law firm that provided cross references between thousands of shell companies and bank accounts worldwide that exposed the extent of international money laundering. Days before that Panama Papers event, a delegation of Republican Congressional leaders, including Dana Rohrabacher, visited Russia and met with numerous officials, including people who had led the effort to try Browder and Magnitsky. (By the way, the FBI had notified Rorhabacher that he was being groomed by Russian forces but he gladly took the trip anyway… In the House vote of 365-43 for the sanctions law, Rohrabacher was one of the 43 nays.) In that meeting, a Russian named Victor Grin handed Rorhabacher a two-page letter marked CONFIDENTIAL (and presumably in an envelope). Grin was notable for two things --- he was the party that initiated the second round of bogus criminal charges against an already dead Magnitsky and Grin was also a current member of the US sanctions list under the Magnitsky Act.

Two interesting things happened after Rorhabacher returned to the US.

New legislation, termed the Global Magnitsky Act was coming up for debate that allowed sanctions under the original act to be extended to ANY party in ANY country engaging in money laundering. Within a week of the Russian trip, consideration of the new legislation had been mysteriously wiped from the sponsoring committee's agenda. Browder found from various sources that Rorhabacher had triggered the removal and had shared that CONFIDENTIAL letter, which basically offered a quid pro quo --- eliminate the Magnitsky Act in the US and Russian/US relations could improve mightily, including the resumption of orphan adoptions.

On June 9, 2016, another interesting meeting was held between Russians and Americans, this one at Trump Tower. The most notable Russian in attendance was a woman named Natalia Veselnitskay, who at the time the story came out in 2017 was often caricaturized as a modern-day Natasha Fatale (famed partner of international intrigue with Boris Badenov in the Rockie and Bullwinkle cartoons). In reality, she was a key player in Russian efforts to overturn sanctions. On the "american" side (it's pretty clear no one present behaved as "Americans"…) were Donald Trump, Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. When the existence of that meeting came out in 2017, the Trump camp was quick to emphasize that the meeting talked about "adoption", hoping to convince people it was a humanitarian discussion. For EVERYONE involved on both sides of the table, "adoption" was shorthand for the larger tit-for-tat battle between sanctions and adoption restrictions -- in other words, shorthand for eliminating sanctions against Putin's money laundering network.

That June 9, 2016 meeting had another interesting coincidence. Earlier on that same day, Browder's legal team had scored an important victory in a New York courtroom that excluded a law firm that had previously represented HIS firm from now representing RUSSIA in their US legal actions against Browder. In that courtroom representing Russia was the same Natalia Veselnitskya. Also in that courtroom sitting with the Russian team was Glenn Simpson. Simpson operated Fusion GPS, which had originally been linked to the "Steele Dossier" allegedly summarizing thirty-plus years of compromising information Russia had gathered on Trump.

Browder's outline of these events lays out a crucial point. The SAME actor was working BOTH sides of the fence. Simpson was said to have offered the dossier material to the Clinton campaign to HELP defeat Donald Trump in 2016 -- a result presumably NOT helping Putin. At the same time, Simpson was also involved in other activities directly with Russian officials OBVIOUSLY for Putin's benefit. Sources had provided Browder details of some of the alleged activities in the dossier material well before they were public. He concluded that even if a large portion were true, they were likely tainted with enough that WASN'T true so that even if someone attempted to leverage the material, at least part of it would blow up in their faces, further sowing doubt in the public about their ability to trust ANYTHING related to Russia, thus helping Putin's larger goals of defeating sanctions.

There are more twists and turns in the book that make for an interesting, if not infuriating read. Perhaps the key takeaway is that the extent to which Russian money has already infiltrated America within the legislative, judicial and administrative branches. Even if the specific Trump cancer is exorcised, there are enough willing takers of ill-gotten booty to warrant additional investigations and legislative action to further limit money laundering avenues. Our democracy depends on it.

WTH