Tag: corruption

Ex-Florida county tax collector faces child sex-trafficking charge

A Florida county’s former tax collector allegedly paid for sex with an underage girl and tapped the state’s motor vehicle database for records on people with whom he was engaged in “sugar daddy” relationships, federal prosecutors said Friday.

Joel Greenberg, a Republican, was the elected Seminole County tax collector until his resignation in June.

Prosecutors leveled the charges in a new indictment unsealed in Orlando Federal Court that accuses Greenberg of sex trafficking a child.

The charge involves a girl, age 14 to 17, WESH-TV reported, citing an attorney representing Greenberg. It is punishable by a 10-year prison sentence.

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The DNC and the Politics of Betrayal

The political and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party was on full display last week. First it was the convention of the Democratic Party, where the progressive wing of the party was pushed to the margins while the victorious, neoliberal right wing engaged in a surreal spectacle that came off oblivious to the economic, social and political crisis the country has been experiencing. The second thing that happened was the emergency reconvening of the U.S. House of Representatives to “save the post office.”

On the night Kamala Harris accepted the nomination as vice president, the Democratic Party devoted itself to demonstrating it was more militantly aggressive in its commitment to military threats, in the use of force and in reclaiming the U.S. global dominance that Trump supposedly has squandered. Neocons from the Republican Party also spoke to assure the country Joe Biden would commit to a stronger NATO, to completing the military pivot to Asia, and to standing up to the demon of the moment—Vladimir Putin.

The inspiring stories of democratic renewal and of happy days being just around the corner once Joe is in office seemed strangely disconnected from the fact that Congress had gone on vacation, leaving millions in economic limbo because the federal enhanced unemployment benefit had expired. Yet the House was called back by Nancy Pelosi not to pass a bill to end the confusion around extended unemployment and to protect against evictions, but to save the postal service so nothing would get in the way of electing the political class.

The racism, militarism, and materialism that Dr. King warned would be the diseases that would kill the body politic of the United States have created a zombie democracy.

War, the political betrayal of the working class, and an inane political posturing in the face of an intractable crisis are the politics of a society beyond salvation.

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School Reopenings Linked to Union Influence and Politics, Not Safety

School closures have affected over 55 million K–12 students in the U.S. since March as the nation deals with the coronavirus pandemic. Although numerous private schools and day care centers have adjusted to the pandemic and reopened, many public school districts and teachers unions are fighting to remain closed in the name of safety. In fact, 85 percent of the country’s 20 largest public school districts have already announced that they will not be reopening schools for any in-person instruction as the school year begins.

Some have noted these reopening decisions often appear to be driven by politics rather than public health. Unfortunately, many teachers groups are contributing to this appearance. In their report on safely reopening schools, for example, the Los Angeles’ teachers union went beyond detailing the safety needs of teachers and students, also calling for politicians to enact a wealth tax, Medicare for All, and a ban on charter schools. 

Similarly, 10 teachers unions across the country joined a coalition that included the Democratic Socialists of America to “Demand Safe Schools.” But rather than focus on student and teacher safety, they demanded a ban on new charter schools and voucher programs as well as the cancellation of rents and mortgages. 

When a reporter asked Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser if trends in the city’s COVID-19 cases justified the all-virtual start to the school year, Bowser responded, “No. I wouldn’t say the attention to the health metrics is the only thing that’s leading to our decision today” and that “clearly we want to work with our workforce.”

New data suggest these anecdotes—and the underlying theory that reopening has more to do with power dynamics than safety—have some merit.

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Are You Ready For The “No One Could Have Known” Routine?

Ready for another rendition of the “no one could have known” routine made famous by all the self-proclaimed liberals who shamelessly went along with the Neo-Cons planned and lie-supported destruction of the Middle East nearly two decades ago?

As in “no one could have known” that by shutting down life as we know it to focus obsessively on a virus mostly affecting what is still a relatively small number of people at the end of their lives (yes, oh squeamish ones we must summon the courage to talk about Quality Adjusted Life Years when making public policy) we probably would:

1. Cause economic devastation and hence excess deaths, suicides, divorces depressions in much larger numbers than those killed by the virus.

2. Provide an already monopolistic and predatory online retailing establishment with competitive advantages in terms of capital reserves and market share that will make it virtually impossible at any time in the near or medium future for the country’s and the world’s small and even medium-sized businesses to ever catch up to them. And that this will plunge huge sectors of the world-wide economy into serf-like ruin, with all that this portends in terms of additional death and human suffering.

3. Cause greatly increased misery and countless additional deaths in the so-called Global South where many people, rightly or wrongly, depend on the consumption patterns of us relatively fortunate sit-at-homers to make it through the week.

4. Destroy much of what was attractive about urban life as we know it and lead to a real estate collapse of extraordinary proportions, turning even our few remaining showplace cities into crime-ridden reserves of ever more desperate people.

5. Force state and local governments, already struggling before the crisis, and unable to print at money at will like the Feds, to cut their already insufficient budgets at a time when their broke and stressed constituents need those services more than ever.

6. Push “smart” monitoring of our lives, already intolerable for anyone still clinging to memories of freedom in the pre-September 11th world, to the point where most people will no longer understand what people used to know as privacy, intimacy or the simple dignity of being left alone.

7. Train of a generation of children to be fearful and distrustful of others from day one, and to view bending to diktats “to keep them safe”, (no matter how empirically dubious the actual threat to them might be), rather than the courageous pursuit of joy and human fullness, as the key goal in life.

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Company Set To Manufacture COVID-19 Vaccine For US Intentionally Sold Faulty Biodefense Products

Evidence of the corruption of the company Emergent BioSolutions has emerged yet again as the firm, set to play a key role in the manufacture of four leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates, has been caught selling the US government a biodefense product it knew was non-functional.

Internal documents and e-mails from the “life sciences” company Emergent BioSolutions reveal that the company was aware that its biodefense product for the treatment of nerve gas exposure, sold under the brand name Trobigard, was both non-functional and untested for safety or efficacy while it was actively marketing the product to the U.S. government.

The firm was well aware of the fact that Trobigard’s functionality and safety in humans had never been tested several months before it was awarded a no-bid $25 million contract in October 2017 and a subsequent $100 million contract in 2019 to supply troves of the product to the State Department. Indeed, the results of the company’s first study on Trobigard’s efficacy in treating exposure to nerve gas were not even available until six weeks after Emergent had won the contract with the State Department and, even then, those results could “not be directly extrapolated to the human situation,” per the study’s authors.

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