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How the "Rules" Determine if Criminals Become Politicians

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Thom Hartmann
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Reprinted from hartmannreport.com

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It's a low bar, but America must become at least as functional as the NFL!

How do criminals take over countries?

Donald Trump, for example, is a criminal, as the Supreme Court arguably determined yesterday when they denied his efforts to claim executive privilege to conceal his crimes. And as would be strongly suggested by his son Eric invoking the Fifth Amendment over 500 times in a single deposition about fraud.

His niece and multiple biographers have well-documented how he's been a criminal since his youngest years, working with his father to skim government rental money by faking maintenance work, refusing to rent to Black people, and openly stealing tens of millions from members of his own family.

And he is still at it: he's raised several hundred million dollars just in the last 12 months from gullible followers based on lies about not losing the last election.

Today his crimes of tax evasion, bank and insurance fraud are in the headlines, along with his attempt to draw Georgia's Secretary of State into a criminal conspiracy to steal the presidency of the United States for his own personal gain and to keep himself out of jail. As several biographers and his fixer, Michael Cohen, have told us straight up, Trump thinks of himself as a mafia-type crime boss and revels in behaving like one.

So, how do criminals like this become politicians? And how did it happen here?

Sometimes it's through brute force. I was in The Philippines in February, 1986 when a rising young anti-Marcos reformer politician, Evelio Javier, was chased through the streets and assassinated in a public toilet. I watched a massive procession that I recall was carrying his body snake down the street in front of my hotel in the Makati district, an event that led to President Marcos fleeing the country within the month (and him and his cronies bumping me off several Philippine Air flights trying to get myself to the US).

Other times its strategic blunders. Conservatives in 1933 Germany were so worried about keeping socialists and communists out of power that Hindenburg and Von Papen handed over the reins of power to the leader of a rising rightwing party, even though he and his Nazi party had never gotten more than about a third of the vote nationwide; they were convinced that they could easily control him. Hitler knew better.

But in most cases of the rise of what Alexander Litvinenko termed a "Mafia State," it comes about because the rules have changed.

Seriously, it's that banal in most instances. It's all about the rules. And that's what happened here.

After all, the rules define the game. If you play by the rules of football, then you're playing football. If you're playing by the rules of baseball, then it's a baseball game. Ditto hockey, basketball, and politics.

For example, the NFL heavily regulates football in the United States, at least the football played by its teams. Those regulations include how many players are on the field at any time, exactly what constitutes a down or a touchdown, and rules about how players may physically contact each other and under what circumstances.

The NFL's regulations also decide which team gets first pick of new players: they decided that the worst-performing teams should have first choice of newly available players, giving every team an opportunity to rise up through the ranks in the following season. It's sort of like progressive taxation, giving the little guy a chance while slightly restraining those already at the top.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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