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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21794 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Eric Adams indicted

NYC mayor Eric Adams has been indicted in federal court. The indictment details a scheme where he took illegal benefits from Turkey in a quid-pro-quo scheme, and there's an additional scheme where he applied for matching campaign funds using illegal campaign contributions. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/26/us/whats-in-nyc-mayor-eric-adams-indictment/index.html

The indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams unsealed Thursday morning alleges he secretly solicited and accepted freebies and illegal campaign donations from wealthy foreigners, including Turkish officials, as far back as 2014.

In exchange, he pressured the Fire Department of New York to approve the opening of a new Turkish consular building in the city without a fire inspection, the indictment states. In addition, his campaign used those illegal campaign donations to “steal public funds” through New York City’s matching funds, according to the indictment.

Those allegations represent the core of the federal indictment charging Adams with five counts: bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and two counts of soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals.

Adams, a Democrat elected in 2021, has denied wrongdoing and said he does not plan to resign.

“I look forward to defending myself and defending the people of this city as I’ve done throughout my entire professional career,” Adams said.

And that's pretty much the meat of it. There's the full indictment in the link if you want to read 56 pages of legalese.

Naturally, the right wing punditsphere is speculating that this dropped because Adams is critical of the open border, but I think it more likely that he just got caught, and maybe there's some sort of low-profile diplomatic dustup with Turkey that got the FBI investigating Turkish influence in the US. Bigger question- what are the odds he tries to play up that story in the hopes of a Trump pardon? I suspect that if he was going to pull an Eric Johnson over his disagreements with the DNC(and he is not a standard democrat) he would have already done it, but there doesn't seem to be much way he can really dispute these charges and federal courts almost always convict, and Trump just might pardon him like he did Blagojevich.

I'm going to posit, without any real evidence, that this is just the tip of the iceberg for Eric Adams, and that he was pimping out his offices and the levers of power in the city government for a lot more people than just the Turks. All the corruption here is penny ante shit, if he was willing to do this, he was willing to do a lot more.

This might be what they caught him on, but there's a ton more under the surface that will come out over time, even if it never makes it to an indictment. If he was willing to take obviously corrupt offers like this in exchange for a free flight, he was taking much bigger offers for much bigger jobs.

Discussing the case at this time is probably premature until we at least start to get the rumors of the bigger stories.

I'm not disagreeing outright, but it's also not uncommon for politicians to draw a line somewhere while engaging in petty corruption. I think he'd plead guilty if it turned out he was taking all the bribes- any further corruption is going to be of the sinecures for brothers in law types. Or at least that's my two cents.

Adams was always laughably corrupt and everyone knew it, but the business establishment (as opposed to the Democratic Party) supported him over the alternative(s) because a corrupt ex-cop who is willing to support law and order cracking down on the scum was a billion times better than another defund ACAB candidate prepared to let the city rot out of ideological insanity.

And sure enough, the person lined up to replace Adams if he’s removed is an insane ACAB ideologue.

Indeed, and that’s why Hochul is wavering for now.

I"m amused that you said he was laughably corrupt while @gattsuru said mayors were hilariously corrupt.

https://x.com/TheDailyShow/status/1839636694376583296

A rare funny daily show segment

New Yorkers are pragmatic, but the line is fine between that and stupid (Philadelphians) and delusional (Chicagoans). I will refrain from judging other cities for now.

I'm going to find you and throw a battery at you. Go birds.

Nyc is pretty unique in scale relative to other US cities so the corruption will be different than a city like Philly or Chicago.

It's also just kinda goofy because New York mayors have been so hilariously corrupt for so long it's hard to even distinguish what counts as penne-ante anymore. Taking 10 million in matching public funds would normally be a huge deal on its own (compare the Catherine Pugh scandal, which earned her three years over smaller numbers). But deBlasio's wife lost track of 850 million, and no one cares.

and maybe there's some sort of low-profile diplomatic dustup with Turkey that got the FBI investigating Turkish influence in the US.

In 2017 (was it that long ago!) there was an incident where Turkish secret police attacked anti-Erdogan protestors in Washington DC. It might have got Turkey on the radar.

The other thing that comes to mind is Turkey holding up Finland’s NATO admission, which would line up with the timeline quite well.

To completely sidetrack the conversation, is there a way to kick members out of NATO? Because Turkey needs to go. They just kinda... suck on every dimension.

There's no official mechanism that allows removal of a member that doesn't consent. If the alliance is dependent on however the USA feels about a member at any given time this diminishes the value of joining the alliance. The value of the alliance is also diminished by an adversarial member that does adversarial things too. Maybe to a lesser extent.

There's nothing that practically stops all the other members agreeing to boot Turkey out, considering that decision "unanimous", then writing a new rule about removal after the fact. Officially the alliance member needs to consent to removal to leave.

That's all a lot of mess when NATO and the US can just wait out Erdogan and hope the next guy is more compliant. Despite the theatrics and politics they did host support for US through the GWOT. Turkey also hasn't kicked all NATO personnel out of the country recently. Which they did in the 70's as I recall. So maybe they've always been a bit of an adversarial partner in the alliance. The grandstanding, bloviating, and opportunistic haggling is the price to pay for a relatively, if not quite as important as 50 years ago, important strategic ally.

Being able to almost singlehandedly block in Russian access in and out of the Black Sea (the only alternative is the Volga-Don canal) is incredibly valuable, and probably the main reason we put up with their shenanigans.

(the only alternative is the Volga-Don canal)

Wrong canal. You're thinking of the Volga-Baltic Waterway and White Sea-Baltic Canal, which together allow Russia to move stuff from the Black Sea to the Baltic or White Seas (the latter of which gives uninterdictable ocean access). The Volga-Don Canal connects the Black and Caspian Seas, but that's of much more limited value since the Caspian Sea is a lake.

No, you still need to traverse the Volga-Don canal to get to the Volga and those other canals (and eventually the Baltic or Arctic) because the Don empties into the Sea of Azov/Black Sea, while the Volga empties into the Caspian.

Seems not that valuable to me given that we have complete air superiority in the Mediterranean. Time to make Turkey pay their freight. Threaten to kick them out and they might actually act like valuable alliance members and not an embarrassment.

Per the Montreux convention, Turkey gets to block warships of warring parties without itself being a party to the war. If the US had to apply its Mediterranean air superiority to prevent Russia from reinforcing the BSF, they would have to (threaten to) directly fire on the Russians, which would let the Russians feel like they have license to shoot down US drones over the Black Sea, which would still be very detrimental to UA. Any attempt to claim that a naval blockade in international waters is not in fact an act of war would bite the US in the ass over Taiwan, as China could start that one sooner than the US argument could be memoryholed.

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