Justice Arthur F. Engoron of the New York Supreme Court ruled yesterday that Donald Trump repeatedly inflating the value of his assets, thus constitution fraud on banks and insurers. Thus New York Attorney General Letitia James will no longer have to prove fraud in her lawsuit against Trump. She is seeking a penalty of $250 million in a trial scheduled to begin next week. Justice Engoron ruled that the annual financial statements submitted to banks and insurance companies by Trump agents “clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business.”
He also fined Trump’s lawyers $7,500 each for persisting in making arguments that he had previously rejected, and warned them that the arguments in question bordered on being frivolous. The former president, the judge wrote, ignored reality when it suited his business goals. “In defendants’ world,” he wrote, “rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air.” Trump’s defense was that the banks made large profits in their dealings with the Trump Organization and could not be called victims, and that valuing property is subjective. This is the classic and often successful defense offered in many tax fraud cases.
Clarence Darrow would have loved the resolution of the Jennifer Nelson case in Suffolk County, New York yesterday. The U.S.’s most famous and iconic defense attorney achieved many of his most important victories by slyly arguing for jury nullification, which is now grounds for a mistrial and ethics sanctions in all states but one (New Hampshire) See Note below. Of course, Darrow never used that term, but when he told juries to “send a message” with their not-guilty verdict, that’s what he was talking about.
Jennifer Nelson, 36, a Long Island mother, faced up to 25 years in prison for driving her car—twice— into a 15-year-old boy, the leader of a pack of bullies that had plagued her teen son last October after she concluded that he had taken his Adidas Ye slides . The jury deliberated less than four hours to declare her innocent of an intentional attack, instead finding her guilty of leaving the scene of an accident when there were serious injuries. Her attorneys say they will seek a sentence of just probation, and if they get the right judge, that may be all the punishment Nelson gets….for attempted murder.
New York Times columnist David Brooks and powerful Democratic SenatorRobert Menendez both thoroughly embarrassed themselves over the weekend. Brooks subsequently took the ethical approach and admitted that he had behaved badly. Menendez took the opposite approach, and topped his previous unethical response to a scandal with a response that was even worse.
Brooks had complained via Twitter that his $78 airport dinner highlighted the everyday struggles American families face amid ongoing inflation. omitting the fact that most of his charge was for whiskey. The tweet drew widespread mockery and this Ethics Alarms rebuke. Brooks didn’t hold back in his condemnation of his own actions, and said on PBS, “The problem with the tweet — which I wrote so stupidly — was that it made it seem like I was oblivious to something that is blindingly obvious: that an upper-middle-class journalist having a bourbon at an airport is a lot different than a family living paycheck to paycheck. I was insensitive. I screwed up. I should not have written that tweet. I probably should not write any tweets … I made a mistake. It was stupid.”
Got it. It was stupid. Now explain your columns over the last few years…
Some lines need to be established, and the sooner the better, but boy, I am having trouble drawing them.
Ethics Alarms has consistently taken the position that it is wrong to discriminate against people for their beliefs and opinions. The idea that business establishments would refuse service to customer based on their political affiliations (or because they wear a MAGA hat) is repugnant to the the value of pluralism and individual liberty, both central to the founding principles of the United States. Similarly, EA has taken the position that corporations should be judged solely on the basis of how well they deliver the services they render and the quality of the products they introduce. How those companies or their owners use their profits, as long as what they do is legal, should not be the consumer’s concern. Investors have a different perspective: investing in a company makes the investor a participant in that company’s activities beyond producing products and services.
Starting with these basic principles, Ethics Alarms opposed the efforts in several cities to punish Chic-Fil-A because its owner was a prominent supporter of groups that opposed gay marriage. I regard this as economic extortion to bend an individual (or his/her company) to the majority’s will, and dangerous to democracy.
The key distinction is whether the company itself, in delivering good and services, connects its business to political and social advocacy. Nothing in the Chic-Fil-A restaurants hinted at any position regarding gays or same-sex marriage, and the company’s owners (or its foundation) should be allowed to support whatever groups and political positions they choose, just like anyone else. But what if a company starts using its products and services, marketing and public visibility to promote political positions, public division, and questionable social engineering?
This is a lousy way to start a Sunday morning, but so be it…
From Law and Crime regarding an incident in Indiana:
…According to a probable cause affidavit, officers with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department shortly before 11 p.m. on Tuesday responded to a call regarding an injured toddler at the Days Inn located in the 8300 block of Craig Street. Upon arriving at the scene, first responders said they immediately located a 1-year-old girl who was suffering from what appeared to be a stab wound to the neck.
Emergency medical personnel rushed the child to the Riley Hospital for Children…the child was initially admitted to the facility in critical condition but was later upgraded to stable condition.
The child’s mother…told investigators that [her 32-year-old sister, Sharon Key] called her at about 10 a.m. that morning and asked if she could stay with her at the Days Inn. Key was dropped off at the hotel later that morning and drank alcohol for “most of the day.” At about 10:30 p.m. that evening, the sisters went to Burger King and arrived back at the hotel…
Themother said she laid her daughter down on her stomach atop the bed closest to the window and went into the bathroom to give her son a bath. A short while later, the mother said she heard “loud noises from the bedroom so she walked out and saw that [Key] was holding a knife in her hand and [her daughter] was bloody and screaming on the bed.” Key [said] “it was an accident” as the mother grabbed a towel and wrapped it around the wound on the back left side of her daughter’s head and applied pressure before calling 911. …after she called 911,[the mother] turned around and saw [her sister] “walking down the hallway towards the exit.” ….Officers found Sharon Key hiding in some bushes near the hotel and placed her under arrest…[She] allegedly said that her pit bull had taken the chicken sandwich she got at Burger King and eaten it. Key then became “mad” and…went after the dog with her knife. The dog… jumped on the bed where the [baby] was [lying]…In an attempt to stab the dog, Key allegedly said that she missed, accidentally hitting her niece instead of the animal.
1. I’ll introduce this by noting that an American Research Group poll found that public approval of President Biden’s handling of his job has fallen to just 39%.
Of the 39% of Americans saying they approve of the way Biden is handling his job, 65% say they expect the national economy will be better a year from now. (They are whistling past the graveyard.) Of the 56% saying they disapprove of the way Biden his handling his job as president, 71% believe the national economy will be worse a year from now. Why wouldn’t it be?
Of Republicans polled, just 3% approve of the way Biden is handling his job. 34% of Independents approve, but 80% of Democrats actually told another human being that they approve like the way Biden is running his Presidency because every thing is going so well. That’s incompetent citizenship. One can still be a Democrats and be able to honestly assess a disaster when a Democrat is at the helm of the Ship of State, can’t you? Talk about cult-like behavior.
2. Here’s a more encouraging poll, sort of: the latest Rasmussen Reports survey found that nearly three-quarters ,72%, of voters believe that “America is becoming a police state” under Biden. Rasmussen defined “police state” as “a tyrannical government that engages in mass surveillance, censorship, ideological indoctrination, and targeting of political opponents.” Targeting of political opponents? Why would anyone think that?
(Yes, I’m going to work that reference to Biden’s ‘anyone who opposes my party and government is a fascist and danger to democracy’ speech every chance I get. Lest we forget.…)
Republicans led the way with 76% expressing fears of totalitarian trends under Biden, but Democrats were not far behind at 67%. Combining the two polls, one can only conclude that a large number of Democrats like the fact that Biden is overseeing a developing police state. And I think that’s a correct impression.
The New York Times actually has a comedy critic, Jason Zinoman, which is fine. Still, someone needs to tell him to avoid writing about ethics, which he apparently does not comprehend. I, in contrast, have extensive experience in both comedy and ethics, and can say with confidence that his column “Lying in Comedy Isn’t Always Wrong, but Hasan Minhaj Crossed a Line” is the worst published ethics analysis I have read this year, and perhaps ever. Zimmerman’s column is ethics nonsense from the headline to the end.
Let’s start with the headline. There is no lying in comedy, any more than there’s lying in any performing art. Since the sole purpose of comedy is to make a targeted audience laugh, anything goes, or should. (This is one of the rare instances of my being in agreement with Bill Maher). For now, I don’t want to be distracted into justifying anything other than making stuff up, which stand-up comics do regularly and should, but if they are pretending something is true when it isn’t, that’s not unethical. It isn’t unethical because they are comedians, and their audience knows—or should— what their purpose is not to inform, but to amuse.
Since so much of what a comic says is not true—a duck, a Canadian and an acrobat did not walk into a bar—-there is no breach of trust when that comic states anything else as a fact when it isn’t. Dave Chappelle often starts a story by saying, “This is true,” which means that he has decided that the story is going to be funnier if the audience thinks of it as really happening. I don’t assume the story is true because Chappelle says so, but he’s asking for the suspension of disbelief from his audience, just as “The Exorcist” was when it showed Regan’s head turn backwards. We suspend our disbelief in the possessed little girl to be horrified; we suspend disbelief in what comedians say to be amused.
The target of Zinoman’s accusation of unethical comedy is, as the headline states, Hasan Minhaj, who has a Netflix concert streaming. He can’t have “crossed a line” because there are no lines. There are no ethicd rules for comics, nor can or should there be.
Here is an example of what Zinoman calls “crossing a line”:
On September 15, 2022, Calvin Ushery was clearly shown on a surveillance video as he stomped 68-year-old Chang Suh, a Korean-American jewelry shop owner and hit him over the head at least a dozen times, twice with a hammer. Ushery then stole about $100,000 in merchandise. The evidence, including the video, was indisputable and beyond rebuttal, so his lawyer argued for jury nullification, slyly, because in Delaware, like all but one state (New Hampshire), arguing that a jury should ignore the law is an ethics violation. He said the video would doubtlessly raise “a lot of emotion,” but argued that the jurors’ revulsion shouldn’t be focused on the defendant.
Oh. What?Who then? Surely not his victim, who after a year is still not recovered from the beating (that’s him in a shot from the video). Oh come on—you know the answer by now, don’t you? The emotion should be aimed at the systemic racism that made Ushery into the dangerous enemy of civilization that he is. He needs diversity, equity and inclusion, not punishment. What are we, barbarians?
And that defense message worked! The jury was hung, and a mistrial declared. In the eyes of the law, despite video evidence that he committed a brutal crime, Calvin Ushery is technically innocent.
Elie Mystal is surely thrilled. The racist, anti-police, anti-Constitution Marxist editor for “The Nation,” also a frequent visitor to MSNBC (naturally), argued in 2016 that black jurors should always vote to acquit black defendants, no matter how guilty they may be and no matter how horrible the crime.
“Maybe it’s time for black people to use the same tool white people have been using to defy a system they do not consent to: jury nullification,” Mystal wrote in an op-ed. “White juries regularly refuse to convict or indict cops for murder. White juries refuse to convict vigilantes who murder black children. White juries refuse to convict other white people for property crimes. Maybe it’s time minorities got in the game?” he continued. “Black people lucky enough to get on a jury could use that power to acquit any person charged with a crime against white men and white male institutions.”
Well, that’s our Elie! His degrees from Harvard and Harvard Law School didn’t imbue him with enough critical reasoning skill to overcome his hatred of anyone who isn’t black, and to see his his “burn, baby, burn” nostrums for societal improvement as the garbage that they are. True, Mystal was only hoping that blacks could abuse, rob, rape and kill white people, but nothing in his op-ed ruled out using jury nullification to let minorities—like Mr. Suh—be victimized without justice too. Black criminals’ lives matter more than the lives of law-abiding citizens, which is one prime reason why so many cities are descending into permanent chaos. Over-incarceration, don’t you know.
The Ushery verdict has so far escaped coverage in the mainstream media.
Yes, this is a Popeye, and I apologize for not doing it sooner. When this blog began in 2009, I often relied on the Poynter Institute’s erudition on journalism ethics matters for blog ideas, because back then, it actually was a relatively non-ideological, non-partisan source of media ethics commentary. In the intervening years, Poynter, like so many other institutions and ethics authorities, slowly morphed into another organ of leftist, progressive, Democratic Party and, eventually, Trump Deranged propaganda. It is now a purveyor of ethics rot in journalism rather than a nostrum for it, which is supposedly its mission. Today, like Popeye, I decided that it was “all I can stands” when Poynter joined other biased media “factcheck” attacks on Trump’s “Meet the Press” interview with a particularly blatant example of exactly the kind of bias Trump complained about in the interview. So I deleted Poynter from the Ethics Alarms blogroll, which I bet you didn’t even know existed. (It’s about half-way down the home page here, along with other links).
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