Remember the list of suggestions by Bill Svelmoe for what to do about Amy Coney Barrett’s illegitimate nomination to the US Supreme Court?
The list went viral, as you may be able to read below.
I hope that Harris and other senators are taking those suggestions seriously.
The point being, Donald Trump is acting like a gangster. As usual. Pay attention to what this criminal actually says.
From The Bulwark (so I, Guy Brandenburg did NOT write this.)
| 1. A Piece of the Action |
| My favorite movie of the 2000s (non-Dark Knight division) is a British gangster film called Layer Cake. I highly recommend it. Layer Cake is a lot of things: It’s about class and ambition and history and generational conflict. But as much as anything else, it’s about business. I say this with all sincerity: Layer Cake is probably the best business movie ever made. Please permit a digression from the movie. Layercake revolves around a drug dealer called Mr. X who is a middle-tier operator. He buys from wholesalers and then sells the product to the regional distributors, who then split the parcels up and get them to local dealers. Who finally punt it to the end users. At each step along on the chain, one of the middlemen takes a bite. At the top of the pyramid is semi-respectable mogul named Jimmy Price. And Jimmy is the supplier who puts Mr. X in touch with the wholesalers. For this, Jimmy gets a cut of every transaction. At the start of the movie, Jimmy puts Mr. X together with a gangster called the Duke, who has one million tabs of ecstasy. When Mr. X discovers that the Duke has stolen those pills from a Serbian gang run by war criminals—who are trying to get them back—he decides that he should walk away from the deal, because it’s going to get him killed. And at this point, Mr. X tries to tell Jimmy’s right-hand enforcer, Gene, that the deal with the Duke is off. At which point Gene explains to him the facts of life: Gene: Between you and the Duke, you promised Jimmy a bumper payday. So you better get busy.Mr. X: I said I’d try and offload—Gene: He put you together. You and Duke. That’s his job. If you two can’t make music? He’s gonna want his whack out, either way. That’s business. I mention all of this because on Tuesday the president of the United States held forth on the prospective sale of the Chinese spyware engine TikTok to Microsoft. Here is what the president said: We set a date, I set a date, of around September 15th, at which point it’s going to be out of business in the United States. But if somebody, whether it’s Microsoft or somebody else, buys it, that’ll be interesting.I did say that if you buy it, whatever the price is, that goes to whoever owns it, because I guess it’s China, essentially, but more than anything else, I said a very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States. Because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen. Right now they don’t have any rights, unless we give it to ’em. So if we’re going to give them the rights, then it has to come into, it has to come into this country. I mean, this isn’t exactly what Gene tells Mr. X in Layer Cake. But it’s . . . close? The president of the United States has set a deadline for a sale and told the prospective buyer and seller that he expects to get his whack out. And that he believes he is entitled to do this because neither the buyer nor seller “[have] any rights unless we give it to ’em.”The only thing Trump isn’t doing here is telling Microsoft that they’re going to have to pay whether or not the deal gets done, because he did his job of putting them together. This is not normal. This is not how first-world governments work. It is, however, how gangsters operate. Do you remember the scene in the Mueller report where Trump flips out at his lawyer, Don McGahn, about his note-taking? The President also asked McGahn in the meeting why he had told Special Counsel’s Office investigators that the President had told him to have the Special Counsel removed. McGahn responded that he had to and these conversations with the President were not protected by attorney-client privilege. The President then asked, “What about these notes? Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.” McGahn responded that he keeps notes because he is a “real lawyer” and explained that notes create a record and are not a bad thing. (page 117) Or do you remember when Trump wanted to communicate a message to his attorney general, but instead of calling him, or drafting a memo, or dispatching his chief of staff, he called in a private citizen (Corey Lewandowski), dictated a note to him (insisting that he write it down), then dispatched him to deliver the message to his own AG, and the messenger refused to give the message to the AG over the phone or at DoJ, since either of those methods of communication would leave a trail. Again: This is not normal. America is being run like a banana republic. A kleptocracy. A criminal enterprise. And keep in mind this TikTok stuff is a subject where, as I said on Monday, Trump is right on the merits! But even when he’s right, his corruption is so total that everything he touches is toxified. |
There have been a LOT of DC charter school frauds. This one was published in the Washington Post on-line yesterday, and had to do with Options Charter School, where the founders used it as a source of private funding for themselves, instead of providing for their high-needs, often disabled students. Note, however, that the founders themselves will NOT be jailed, and will NOT pay the fines themselves. Instead, the fines will be paid by an insurance company. Also note that one of the principal fraudsters held an important position on the DC ‘Public’ Charter School board itself! What’s more, these crooks also still maintain that they did nothing wrong. Ha!
Here is the entire article, with the HTML links, illustrations, and advertisements all removed:
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By Michael Alison Chandler September 23
The former leaders of a public charter school for disabled and at-risk teenagers have agreed to settle a District lawsuit alleging they sought to enrich themselves by diverting millions of dollars in taxpayer money meant for the school into private companies they created.
Donna Montgomery, David Cranford and Paul Dalton, all former managers at Options Public Charter School, agreed to a collective settlement of $575,000, which will be paid to the school that now operates under new leadership as Kingsman Academy. Jeremy Williams, a former chief financial officer of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, who allegedly aided the scheme, agreed to a settlement of $84,237 in a separate deal signed last week. The defendants agreed that they would not serve in a leadership role of any nonprofit corporation in the District until October 2020.
“This settlement ensures that more than $600,000 in misappropriated funds will now go to Kingsman Academy to serve disabled students in the District of Columbia, and will deter future wrongdoing,” said Robert Marus, a spokesman for the Office of the Attorney General. “As the referees for the District’s nonprofit laws, our office will continue to bring actions against any who would misuse funds meant for public or charitable purposes.”
A statement issued by attorney S.F. Pierson, who represents Dalton, said all three former managers “continue to contest the District’s claims and continue to maintain their position that they managed Options to the highest standards.” Pierson said the former school leaders are “not personally paying” anything to settle the District’s claims. It’s common that insurance plans cover litigation-related costs for nonprofit directors or corporate officers.
Williams could not immediately be reached for comment.
In a civil case filed in 2013, the D.C. attorney general’s office alleged that the former leaders of the school, as well as the senior staff member at the charter school board, created a scheme to divert $3 million in tax dollars to themselves and two for-profit companies they founded. The companies provided services including transportation and Medicaid billing to the school at a markup, with profits pocketed by the defendants, according to the complaint.
Williams, who had been in charge of financial oversight of the city’s charter schools, allegedly helped facilitate the scheme, before he left his job at the charter school board to work at one of the for-profit companies.
After the lawsuit, the school went into court receivership. The two for-profit companies also went into court receivership and ultimately paid $200,000, most of which went to the school.
The city sued another charter school founder for a similar scheme in 2015. Court documents from that lawsuit, which was settled later that year, showed that Kent Amos, the founder of Community Academy Public Charter Schools, paid himself more than $1 million a year to lead the schools via a private management company he established.
Such allegations prompted the charter school board to strengthen its financial oversight procedures and its policy regarding disclosing conflicts of interest.
Scott Pearson, executive director of the board said in a statement that the board takes its oversight role “seriously” and that it has worked closely with the Office of the Attorney General throughout the Options litigation. “We thank the OAG for their persistence in seeing this to a resolution,” he said.
The U.S. attorney conducted a multiyear investigation of the case that ultimately did not result in criminal charges.
J.C. Hayward, a longtime television news anchor at WUSA and former chairwoman of the board at Options Public Charter School was initially named as a defendant, but she was dismissed from the civil case a few months after it was filed. The station placed Hayward on leave when the lawsuit was filed in October 2013, and she retired not long afterward.
Shannon Hodge, co-founder and executive director at Kingsman Academy, said she was “grateful” that the settlement dollars would go to the school that replaced Options. “We will certainly make sure that the students benefit from that settlement,” she said.
Kingsman opened in the summer of 2015. It operates in the same facility in Northeast Washington and serves a similar demographic that Options did, with a majority of students receiving special-education services. But it has its own leadership team and educational philosophy, Hodge said. “We are a very different school,” she said.
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