Tag: corruption

AS SAN FRANCISCO DISTRICT ATTORNEY, KAMALA HARRIS’S OFFICE STOPPED COOPERATING WITH VICTIMS OF CATHOLIC CHURCH CHILD ABUSE

Fighting on behalf of victims of sexual abuse, particularly children, has been central to Harris’s political identity for the better part of three decades. Harris specialized in prosecuting sex crimes and child exploitation as a young prosecutor just out of law school. She later touted her record on child sexual abuse cases and prosecuting pedophiles in television advertisements, splashy profiles, and on the trail as she campaigned for public office.

But when it came to taking on the Catholic Church, survivors of clergy sexual abuse say that Harris turned a blind eye, refusing to take action against clergy members accused of sexually abusing children when it meant confronting one of the city’s most powerful political institutions.

When Harris became San Francisco district attorney in 2004, she took over an office that had been working closely with survivors of sexual abuse to pursue cases against the Catholic Church. The office and the survivors were in the middle of a legal battle to hold predatory priests accountable, and Harris inherited a collection of personnel files involving allegations of sexual abuse by priests and employees of the San Francisco Archdiocese, which oversees church operations in San Francisco, and Marin and San Mateo counties

The files had been compiled by investigators working under the direction of Terence Hallinan, the radical district attorney who Harris ousted in a contentious election campaign. Hallinan’s team had prosecuted cases of abuse that had occurred decades earlier and had gathered evidence as part of a probe into widespread clergy sexual misconduct.

Just six months before Harris took office, a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned a California law that had retroactively eliminated the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of child molestation cases. That shifted the focus to holding predators among the clergy accountable through civil cases and through a broader effort to bring attention to predators who had been shielded by the church.

Hallinan believed that the clergy abuse files were a matter of public record; Harris refused to release them to the public.

In her seven years as district attorney, Harris’s office did not proactively assist in civil cases against clergy sex abuse and ignored requests by activists and survivors to access the cache of investigative files that could have helped them secure justice, according to several victims of clergy sex abuse living in California who spoke to The Intercept.

“It went from Terence Hallinan going hundred miles an hour, full speed ahead, after the Catholic Church to Kamala Harris doing absolutely nothing and taking it backwards hundred miles an hour,” said Joey Piscitelli, a sexual assault survivor, who a jury found had been molested as a student while attending Salesian College Preparatory, a Catholic high school in Richmond, California.

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We Need a Principled Anti-Lockdown Movement

Shell-shocked is a good way to describe the mood in the U.S. for a good part of the Spring of 2020. Most of us never thought it could happen here. I certainly did not, even though I’ve been writing about pandemic lockdown plans for 15 years. I knew the plans were on the shelf, which is egregious, but I always thought something would stop it from happening. The courts. Public opinion. Bill of Rights. Tradition. The core rowdiness of American culture. Political squeamishness. The availability of information. 

Something would prevent it. So I believed. So most of us believed. 

Still it happened, all in a matter of days, March 12-16, 2020, and boom; it was over! We were locked down. Schools shut. Bars and restaurants closed. No international visitors. Theaters shuttered. Conferences forcibly ended. Sports stopped. We were told to stay home and watch movies…for two weeks to flatten the curve. Then two weeks stretched to five months. How lucky for those who lived in the states that resisted the pressure and stayed open, but even for them, they couldn’t visit relatives in other states due to quarantine restrictions and so on. 

Lockdowns ended American life as we knew it just five months ago, for a virus that 99.4-6% of those who contract it shake off, for which the median age of death is 78-80 with comorbidities, for which there is not a single verified case of reinfection on the planet, for which international successes in managing this relied on herd immunity and openness. 

Still the politicians who had become dictators couldn’t admit such astonishing failure so they kept the restrictions in place as a way of covering up what they had done. 

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UPenn Can’t Explain Mystery Donation From Chinese Company

The University of Pennsylvania pocketed a $3 million donation last year from a mysterious Hong Kong shell company that is owned by a Shanghai businessman with deep ties to Chinese government officials.

The donation from Xu Xeuqing, who has no apparent connection to the University of Pennsylvania and was previously embroiled in a Shanghai public corruption scandal, raises questions about the true source of the money. Documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show Xeuqing has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

China has poured money into American universities in recent years, in part to buy influence on campuses, experts say. The donation comes as federal prosecutors have increased scrutiny on the Chinese government’s influence-buying and espionage operations at American universities.

“Unequivocally they’re using the money they’re providing the universities to garner influence there,” said Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy. “It’s not the sole motive, but it’s one of a variety of motives.”

Foreign money has poured into the school over the past few years with a significant portion coming from China. The Ivy League school received $61 million in gifts and contracts from China between March 2017 and the end of 2019; over the previous four year period, it took in just $19 million from Chinese donors.

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