The ugly fact is that the families of elites do not follow the same rules, or have the same opportunities as the families of the poor. A son of a mayor may run over and kill someone after spending a night clubbing and doing drugs and his daddy can use his political influence to pull some strings and get the judge to acquit his son, or to lessen his punishment quite significantly. Things like that happen. Itâs his son after all, but not only that, his own reputation gets on the line, too.
And we are supposed to what, envy and admire that?
The hacking and conspiracy case of West New York Mayor, Felix Roque, and his son Joseph Roque, which happened in 2013. His son was accused of hacking into his father opponentâs website, shutting it down, and harassing the people associated with website. The two are accused of working together, which Mayor denied.
In the outcome of the case, the Mayor is acquitted and his son gets misdemeanor (probation, community service and a fine). The mayorâs major opponent was/is Commissioner Count Wiley, who was exposing corruption in Mayorâs administration and trying to get the Mayor out of office.
During re-elections, Wiley and Mayorâs son get into a physical altercation, and after the Mayor gets re-elected, the Mayorâs son gets a clerical paid job at the County Department of Roads and Public Property.
Pre-trial:
The hacking and conspiracy charges:
nytimes.com/2012/05/25/nyreg ⌠-site.html
Mayor Roque on the Indictment, âI have the money, the time, and the people with me to fight the indictmentâ:
youtube.com/watch?v=9YPl2A0LDQI
Commissioner Wiley on the corruption of Mayorâs administration:
youtube.com/watch?v=GFctMxSjd5k
youtube.com/watch?v=YVuHRrBjyik
Post-verdict:
Mayor wins the case, "I have the best of lawyers, and the truth came out. Remember, Iâm the good guy."
youtube.com/watch?v=xs9-HEsfYgs
[u]Wileyâs comment - despite all the evidence provided, the Mayor came out clean, and made his son take the hit for him:
youtube.com/watch?v=TGHAlxdDSJs
Physical altercation during re-election, Roque Jr. vs. Wiley:
youtube.com/watch?v=FEy5LUir_HU
Mayorâs son gets a county job:
nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2015 ⌠s_son.html
That political leaders sacrifice principles and the pubic good for personal or family benefit will not be solved by removing the family. Those same people will always fail the test of good leadership. Poor character is not solved by the removal of temptation.
Instead of legislating to lowest common denominator, i.e. to treat everyone along the lines of the worst/least capable among us, why not put more effort into selecting/training/protecting the people in political office/leadership?
But that doesnât remove the liability, only ups the maintenance. Officialâs family can still have an undue influence. How much does it cost to make this happen? Looks like a lot.
Now, I donât know just how accurate this number is, but if the true number is anywhere in that price range, thatâs still pretty high.
[b]Obama family âcosts taxpayers $1.4BILLION per yearâ (thatâs 20 times more expensive than British Royal Family)[/b]
dailymail.co.uk/news/article ⌠-year.html
I wouldnât call this kind of strictly controlled environment âa familyâ in any traditional sense of the word.
Yes, youâve picked the most extreme example. Their dog handler is paid over $100,000 in salary. This is, of course, not the cost that is necessary to select/train/protect all government officials. Measures which can significantly minimize the âliabilitiesâ of family.
Let me follow up on a question I asked in my first post: How would you eliminate an officialâs parents, siblings, and extended family â any of whom might be targets â from the picture?
Well, the primary targets would be the closest and most immediate family members. I donât know if going after distant cousins or any family members the given official is not that close to anyway, will have the same effect. But I donât know, may be they could be taken as hostages as well. Some officials could attempt to protect them by distancing their association with them: i.e. sending them overseas and providing anonymity. So, the public may know their original name (and thatâs about the extent of it), but not their currently used name or whereabouts. The potential problem with that is any contact (sending money, phone calls, etc.) could place them in danger again. So, even this approach would take quite a bit of effort.
I was going through S. Korean Choi scandal and was reminded of a point you made,
President Park has a very interesting biography. She grew up as a daughter of a president, but had to live through an assassination of both of her parents (her mother was killed in public during her fatherâs public speech). She isnât married and doesnât have a family, and âclaims to be married to the nationâ, but as it was found out, she did have a proxy-cult-like-family that exerted influence on her after her real family was killed. However, one of her notable features, to me, is a weak and submissive personality, a selfless person who dedicates her life serving others. I think it is this quality about her (her innate non-assertive and submissive attitude), combined with early trauma that made her vulnerable to exploitation by others. And that exploitation started quite early in her life, and allegedly was even allowed by her father (supposedly for her own good, which is one of the factors that were behind her fatherâs assassination).
Parkâs biography:
youtube.com/watch?v=sei0GCmF0Gk
Current Discussion on AlJazeera:
youtube.com/watch?v=Hp9-N7ywSpU
Her motherâs death:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuk_Young-soo
youtube.com/watch?v=-d-aVd57AKA
Another account of Park-Choi Scandal:
askakorean.blogspot.com/2016/10/ ⌠n-hye.html
I see Park as a victim of circumstances in this case, I believe her intentions were good, but her personality (if she had any) was too weak to resist outside influence, plus I donât think she really recovered from her parents public assassinations (her mother supposedly killed by a stray bullet aimed at her father). I donât see this as a case of someone who is affected by not having a family, but more likely as someone, who had a family and lost it in a violent way, and maybe even went a little bit crazy as a result. She should not have pursued a political life of her own, although she was born into it. But whatâs unique (and sad) about this case is that people actually expect politicians to be corrupt and self-serving, because they see this behavior as rational and predictable, and Park was completely selfless.
Yes. But it is not possible to completely avoid corruption. Animals already practice corruption.
Melania Trumpâs father, Viktor Knavs, was a member of Yugoslavian Communist Party:
The only problem with Communism, it has humans. On paper , it is pretty good.
Philosophically said, the Marxistic communism, which is based on Hegelâs dialectic, says that the capitalism is the thesis, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the antithesis, and classless equality and equal happiness for all is the synthesis. But if is right that history is class struggle (war), then it is not - or at least only without history - possible to get a classless equality and equal happiness for all. Okay, Hegel already claimed the end of history, also Marx who was a Left-Hegelian, and many others (mostly Hegelians, some Nietzscheans, some others). So, as long as there is history there is no classless equality and equal happiness for all, so that the classes, the inequality, thus the class struggle (war) remain.
I agree with this.
This relates to my Sins of Fathers thread, in that people often look to history to justify their aggression against others. The real reason may be just for resources, but people will still look to history for moral justification.
Thanks.
Now, because there is not less but more war (=> history), the conclusion must be either (a) the trial to finish history or (b) the search for other solutions. Ending history is theoretically possible. Maybe the machines, the genetic engineering, and the cyborgization will lead us to the capability of ending history practically in the future. At the moment there is more war than ever before.
Humans are bored, there are no frontiers or exploration left. War cures boredom in such species.
War requires weapons. Either they are part of the body, or they need to be made resp. bought from someone else. So war is a business too. This means that war becomes more and more lucrative and that nobody of the big war business has an interest in giving it up.
Especially in modern times the contradiction between the war business of a very few people and the wish of living in peace and harmony of the most people is very obvious. So the rhetorical lies are on top, since the few people of the war business are powerful, whereas the most people are powerless.
Incorrect. Mayors are not Mafia, they are Town. Mayors rarely get off easy. The Government is the Gang. The only difference is Russia doesnât even try to hide it, while America desperately tries to hide it in a cucky MSNBC family wrapping.
You misunderstood me here again.
I am saying that âit is not possible to completely avoid corruptionâ (in general!) and you are talking about âmayorsâ. I was not talking about something in special (e.g. mayors) but about something in general: corruption (in general!). And in that general case, it is relatively irrelevant whether mayors are also corrupt or not, although they sometimes or even often are (it depends on their social environment, its culture, its political structure).
Corruption map:
The governments are parts of the big gangs.
Well, now that Melania is an official public figure, all of the truth about her past is going to come out in the open. Does the US want a gold digger (with shady connections) as a leading lady of the United States?
From now on, no more lawsuits and no more sending death threats to journalists probing into your past, Melania!
I am supposed to believe a Corruption Map made by the Corrupt? Laugh.
Itâs obvious the map was made by Hillary Clinton shills who wanted to make Russia look bad.
No.
