The Trump real estate verdict and New York’s economy

The New Neo Posted on by

William Jacobson says get out of New York while you can:

Rough politics has given way to the political weaponization of prosecutors’ offices. It’s dangerous and sets a tone for the entire state that political opponents of those in power are living – and operating their businesses – on borrowed time.

I don’t care what you think of Donald Trump, it’s disgusting, unseemly, and in my view completely unethical for a prosecutor to run for office pledging not only to get a political opponent, but also his family. That’s what Letitia James did when she ran for New York Attorney General. She then fulfilled that campaign promise, weaponizing her massive and powerful office to scour through Trump’s businesses to find a crime, but she found none that could be prosecuted so she brought a civil lawsuit to ruin Trump and his family.

Nothing about this process was within norms of how prosecutors should conduct themselves and their offices. It may not be unprecedented, but it’s still clearly wrong.

I don’t think the civil lawsuit had merit and predict it will be reversed on appeal, at least as to the outlandish fines imposed, but that’s besides the point. The lawsuit never would have been brought if James had not targeted Trump with the full weight of the NY Attorney General’s office specifically because she didn’t like his politics.

Professor Jacobson goes on to criticize the Bragg case against Trump, also in New York, and just as absurd in its charges.

I don’t know enough about the NY appeals court to say whether I think either case will be reversed at the state level (if indeed the Bragg case results in a conviction, which has an excellent chance of occurring). But I do think that if either or both cases go all the way to SCOTUS they probably will be reversed. There’s no question in my mind that guilty verdicts in either should be reversed, and I would say that even if the targets were blue – which of course they wouldn’t be in New York.

I blame not just James, but the judges who don’t throw such cases out of court because they are based on tortuous and novel legal “theories” that are obvious ploys to get one person. Juries likewise, but they are somewhat less culpable because it’s the judges who control the courtroom and what is allowed as evidence (the real estate trial was not a jury trial).

Governor Hochul realizes the real estate verdict could have a chilling effect on doing business in the state, but she is reassuring on that:

Hochul joined John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM, where she was asked if other New York businesspeople should be worried that if “they can do that to the former president, they can do that to anybody.”

“I think that this is really an extraordinary, unusual circumstance that the law-abiding and rule-following New Yorkers who are business people have nothing to worry about, because they’re very different than Donald Trump and his behavior,” Hochul responded….

The governor provided reassurance to New York businesses after the ruling. “By and large, they are honest people and they’re not trying to hide their assets and they’re following the rules,” she said of the people who own and conduct business in the New York City area.

But of course business people, especially those who do business on a large scale as Trump did, know full well that what Trump did was standard practice, has never been prosecuted before without someone being harmed as a result, and are aware that the way in which they are “very different than Donald Trump and his behavior” has nothing to do with their business practices and everything to do with their politics.

How many big business people in New York are conservatives and/or Republicans, and politically active? I don’t know, but I think it’s probably a relatively small number. But maybe not. People are voting with their feet (as the old saying goes) and leaving the state, but this has the effect of making it more reliably blue than ever, and will lead to more prosecutors such as James, more judges such as Engoron, and more juries that will convict those with whom they disagree rather than those who are guilty. It becomes a more and more dangerous venue for conservatives the more blue it gets.

Not that I’m suggesting people should stay for that reason. But it is a result of their departure.

Does New York really care? If most people see this as a one-off that only affects Trump, the vast majority will continue to invest there. Also, remember this ten years ago from then-governor Cuomo?:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has caused a firestorm in the Empire State for declaring to a talk radio host that conservatives who are pro-life, pro-gun and anti-gay marriage “have no place in the State of New York.” Said Cuomo of conservatives: “Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are…. Moderate republicans have a place in this state.”

Clearly, Cuomo didn’t think these people were needed and felt the state would be better off without them. It would certainly be even more monolithically blue, which would give the Democrats more and more power to do whatever they wished.

NOTE: I’ve noticed that some people believe the real estate case was a criminal one, because it was brought by the state. But actually it was a civil case; see this.

Jonathan Turley provides his opinion:

In laying the foundation for his sweeping decision against former President Donald Trump, Judge Arthur Engoron observed that “this is a venial sin, not a mortal sin.” Yet, at $355 million, one would think that Engoron had found Trump to be the source of Original Sin.

The judgment against Trump (and his family and associates) was met with a level of unrestrained celebration by many in New York that bordered on the indecent. Attorney General Letitia James declared not only that Trump would be barred from doing business in New York for three years, but that the damages would come to roughly $460 million once interest was included.

That makes the damages against Trump greater than the gross national product of some countries, including Micronesia. Yet the court admitted that not a single dollar was lost by the banks from these dealings. Indeed, witnesses testified that they wanted to do more business with Trump, who was described as a “whale” client with high yield business opportunities.

Undervaluing and overvaluing property is a longstanding practice in New York real estate. The forms submitted by the Trump organization cautioned the banks to do their own estimates and the loans were paid in full and on time. Yet, the New York law used by James is a curiosity because it does not actually require a victim. Indeed, everyone can make ample profits and still allow for an investigation into “repeated fraudulent or illegal acts.”

I see plenty of jubilation online, too. It doesn’t matter to the celebrants that the law has never been used this way before and that it is clearly a biased political prosecution. They want Trump to suffer and they don’t care how it happens, but giving it the color of law is the icing on the cake.

Having campaigned on bagging Trump on any basis, James turned the law into a virtual license to hunt him down along with his family and his associates.

Engoron proved the perfect judge for the case. The opinion itself seems almost cathartic for the jurist who struggled with Trump inside and outside of court. In the judgment, Engoron fulfilled Oscar Wilde’s rule that the only way to be rid of temptation is to yield to it. He ordered everything short of throwing Trump into a wood chipper.

Turley isn’t usually quite that colorful in his writing. But he is very incensed about this case and this verdict:

The size of the damages is grotesque and should shock the conscience of any judge on appeal.

That would require a conscience, however.

Turley believes this will hurt business in NY:

As James gleefully uses this law to break up a major New York corporation, it is hard to imagine many businesses rushing to the Big Apple. …

The one hope for New York businesses may be the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the deference afforded to the states and their courts, the court has occasionally intervened to block excessive damage awards.

So according to Turley, it’s not even clear that SCOTUS would take the appeal. I think it would, but I certainly don’t know. And would it happen prior to the election? Ordinarily the case has to go through the state system first.

I think this part of Turley’s essay actually makes one of the most important points of all:

In electing openly partisan prosecutors such as James and District Attorney Alvin Bragg, voters have shown a preference for political prosecutions and investigations.

As John Adams wrote:

We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Enjoyment of movement in ballet

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Tom Grey” writes:

This enjoyment of dancing seems to be usually missing in a lot of ballet, where the dancers are working on making their difficult, unnatural, but lovely movements look easy, and their acting is so often to express emotions other than enjoyment of the dance.

That’s always been true of ballet, which as an art has a great many themes that are tragic, as in opera and theater. And yet even within those ballets, if you watch the full-length versions, there are quite a few passages that express a lighter quality and feature the joy of dance. For example, Act One of Giselle is an excellent example of that, in which the peasant girl Giselle – whose love of dance is a big part of her character – dances joyfully with the man she considers her boyfriend and also dances solo to express her happiness. Here’s an example of a solo:

And of course there are tons of “happy peasant” dances within such ballets. It’s true, however, that modern-day ballet dancers are not as good at conveying joy as previous ones once were. But some of them can still do it if it’s in the choreography. A great example is “Stars and Stripes” by Balanchine, choreographed in 1958. Here’s a performance from 1993 (not so recent, but still not SO long ago) that’s just plain fun, and the dancing is superb – particularly by Woetzel, but really by both soloists:

I wish I had a good video of Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering. It is a ballet that truly expresses the joy of dance, although more recent renditions can’t stand up to the original, in my opinion. It was choreographed in 1969, and I saw the original many times, live. It draw vaguely on folk dance motifs, and the music is Chopin. The 1969 cast danced it with a sense of abandon and risk that was thrilling. But here’s a little bit of a more recent production that (at least to me) fails to convey that excitement; the lifts (and what I call the “swoops” and “drags” and “swings” and “tosses”) are relatively restrained and tame. But it’s still beautiful:

And this pas de deux from the ballet remains glorious:

It is very very difficult to find any video of the original production. I know that the Lincoln Center Dance Library has it, but unless something has changed, you have to go there to watch it. Here is a video, however, that shows a few old and brief snippets of three parts of it, and only the first and third are of the original production; the second is from the 1980s, I believe. The video gives you a little bit of the flavor anyway, especially the third bit that features one of my favorite dancers of all time, Violette Verdy, doing a small part of her solo. Take it from me; she was transcendent in Dances At a Gathering. The role was choreographed on her, and no one else can come close:

It’s time to consider its versus it’s (again)

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Based on some comments in today’s open thread, I think it’s time to recycle this old post.]

It may be the most common error in English, and Spellcheck doesn’t catch it (although Spellcheck catches me when I attempt to spell Spellcheck “Spellcheck,” much preferring two words or a hyphenation to my single word).]

I try my best to pay attention to grammar and spelling, helped out by the always-handy Spellcheck (shh—don’t tell anyone, but I’m not the world’s best speller, unaided).

But Spellcheck has its limits. And one of them is the proper use of the word “its.” “Its,” that is, vs. “it’s.”

Have you ever noticed how often those two words are confused? Even though I try to pay close attention, I’m always catching myself messing up, and my bet is that, despite my best efforts, some of them have slipped by here. I see it all the time in the work of others, too (and no, I’m not going to do an exhaustive search and link to examples; you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or not.)

The error almost always goes in one direction only: the use of the apostrophe, as in “it’s,” for the possessive form of the word, when it should only be used for the contraction “it is.” Example (the one that sparked this rumination): originally, instead of “…see this from Reuters, not known for its right-wing bias” I had written “…see this from Reuters, not known for it’s right-wing bias.”

Why do we do this? Are we all just stupid! No, no, a thousand times no! We are actually very smart, because we are extrapolating a general rule to include this word, and that is the rule about forming possessives. Usually we do this by adding an apostrophe and an “s,” as you no doubt well know. But with the words “it’s” and “its,” we choose to reserve the apostrophe for the contraction, and that leaves the possessive hanging out there, alone and forlorn and apostropheless.

In this, however, we’re following another rule (are you still with me? or have I already bored you to tears?), that of the possessive personal pronoun: hers, his, theirs, ours, yours, for example. All lack apostrophes. But they’re not confusing, somehow—perhaps because, unlike “its,” they clearly refer to people, and are never given an apostrophe because they never become contractions.

Now, aren’t you glad I cleared that up? But I bet it won’t stop me from making the same mistake again—and again and again.

The social media war against Israel and the Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

For a long time I’ve been convinced that social media is a force that can be used to spread evil in a way that has never before been possible. Here’s some very strong evidence of that; please read the whole thing.

It describes the social media war against Israel and the Jews. Goebbels would weep with envy at what’s been made possible these days through the internet.

An excerpt:

… a huge campaign against us started on October 7th, while our people were still being slaughtered.”

According to Rolnik, the campaign involved exploiting the precise targeting tools of social media platforms to quickly incite large audiences in different places using customized propaganda. The propaganda was disseminated using a massive army of bots, avatars, and sock puppet accounts. …

When tens of thousands of sock puppets, avatars, and bots simultaneously initiate attacks on Israel, Zionism, and Jews, they can swiftly reach millions of people online. …

Often, the claims will be tailored to the group being targeted. For instance, Black Lives Matter activists were inundated with messages and videos depicting Israel as a “white” country oppressing those with darker skin. Climate activists, concerned about the future of the planet, were targeted with messages portraying Israel as a colonialist entity destroying the natural environment. Those focused on wealth inequality were bombarded by a campaign presenting Israelis as capitalist imperialists crushing the poor.

To Rolnick, the intelligence failures in the lead-up to October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists streamed into southern Israel practically unchallenged, killing 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage in an unprecedented paroxysm of violence, “pale in comparison” to Israel’s inability to grapple with the online campaign against it and against Jews around the world.

“It stands out as our most significant failure. Why? Because, in that arena, we are essentially irrelevant,” he said. “And you can see that even now, despite everything we know happened on October 7, Facebook, Google, and all these entities are still undermining us. It drives me crazy. What else needs to happen?”

I have also become convinced that, if Iran were to gain nuclear weapons and somehow use them to eliminate Israel – or if Israel were to be eliminated in some other way and its population murdered – a very significant number of people in the world would consider it okay, or would even rejoice.

And this is as good a place as any to embed the following informative video:

NOTE: Way back when Google was in its infancy, I noticed that any search I did that had any relation to Israel or Jews drew an enormous number of anti-Semitic sites at the top of the list. In fact, there were so many that one had to scroll past a page or two to get to any more objective sources. The anti-Semites had gamed the algorithm. In a while, the Google people tweaked the algorithm in some way in order to improve the situation. But it was clear to me even back then that the Jew-hating forces were intent on using the internet to spread their point of view, and they were quite sophisticated already.

Dershowitz on the Trump real estate case; plus Trump Jr.

The New Neo Posted on by

Dershowitz and Jarrett (Gregg, not Valerie) understand what’s going on here:

And this is a good way to put it, too:

Did you ever notice that the lawfare against Trump gives new meaning to the phrase “trumped-up charges”?

The New Neo Posted on by

For example, this legal travesty:

A New York judge ordered Donald Trump and his companies on Friday to pay $355 million in penalties, finding they engaged in a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth.

Trump won’t have to pay out the money immediately as an appeals process plays out, but the verdict still is a stunning setback for the former president.

If he’s ultimately forced to pay, the magnitude of the penalty, on top of earlier judgments, could dramatically diminish his financial resources.

No one was duped and no one complained. This is a transparent scheme to hurt Trump, and if it’s not reversed on appeal, it will be an even sadder day for America. All Americans – even Trump-haters – should agree, but of course they don’t.

Trump, one of 40 witnesses to testify at the trial, said his financial statements actually understated his net worth and that banks did their own research and were happy with his business.

“There was no victim. There was no anything,” Trump testified in November.

During the trial, Trump called the judge “extremely hostile” and the attorney general “a political hack.” In a six-minute diatribe during closing arguments in January, Trump proclaimed “I am an innocent man” and called the case a “fraud on me.”

Indeed.

Navalny dies in prison – perhaps

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the report:

Russian authorities said famous Putin critic Alexei Navalny died on Friday:

“Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most famous opposition leader, died on Friday after collapsing and losing consciousness at the penal colony north of the Arctic Circle where he was serving a long jail term, the Russian prison service said.

“Navalny, 47, rose to prominence more than a decade ago by lampooning President Vladimir Putin and the Russian elite whom he accused of vast corruption, avarice and opulence.

Authorities placed Navalny in the IK-3 penal colony known as “Polar Wolf,” located in Kharp, which is above the Arctic Circle:

Navalny, who was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism, felt unwell after a walk, according to the Federal Penitentiary Service, and lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to revive him, but he died. It said the cause of death was “being established.”

Most people think this is a case of Putin offing him. It is, however, within the realm of possibility that this was a natural death. I wouldn’t bet on it, though.

See also this.

Joe Manchin isn’t running for president

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not absolutely official yet, but there’s this:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced Friday that he will not run for president, ending long-running speculation that he would mount a third-party bid.

“I will not be seeking a third-party run. I will not be involved in a presidential run,” Manchin said in remarks at West Virginia University.

“I will be involved in making sure that we secure a president that has the knowledge and has the passion and has the ability to bring this country together,” he said.

The West Virginia senator, one of the most moderate Democrats in the Senate, already announced that he would not seek another term for his Senate seat, but he had previously not ruled out running for president.

Is this good news or bad? Most pundits seem to think that a Manchin run would have hurt Biden more than Trump, so perhaps this helps Biden. But I’m not at all sure they are correct. Manchin was a wild card, and it’s possible he would have drawn votes equally from each candidate. I don’t pretend to know, but I doubt anyone else does, either.

But he’s out. Was he ever in?

A defiant Fani Willis in court

The New Neo Posted on by

Willis must be very surprised that her little grifting scheme with her boyfriend has seen the light of day and is getting her into trouble. She’s used to being a powerful person in the courtroom and elsewhere, and I assume she thought she could get away with this and be the great Trump-slayer as well. It seems to me that she felt immune from discovery or being called to explain herself.

But her plan has hit a possible snag. No need for me to go into the details; I’ll just link to some bloggers covering the story quite heavily: there’s this and this from Ace; this and this at RedState; and this and this at Legal Insurrection.

Willis and Wade are a disgrace. But it’s not at all clear whether they’ll have the Trump case taken away from them or not, and what sort of censure – if any – they face from the legal community.

Trump has sometimes been lucky in his enemies. But I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Tucker Carlson: useful idiot abroad

The New Neo Posted on by

The title of this post is a play on the Mark Twain book called The Innocents Abroad:

The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress is a travel book by American author Mark Twain. Published in 1869, it humorously chronicles what Twain called his “Great Pleasure Excursion” on board the chartered steamship Quaker City (formerly USS Quaker City) through Europe and the Holy Land with a group of American travelers in 1867. The five-month voyage included numerous side trips on land.

The book, which sometimes appears with the subtitle “The New Pilgrim’s Progress”, became the best-selling of Twain’s works during his lifetime, as well as one of the best-selling travel books of all time.

Well, Carlson is Carlson, and Twain is Twain, and never the twain shall meet (couldn’t resist). I also just discovered via a search for “Idiots Abroad” that there’s a British guy named Karl Pilkington who currently has a humorous TV show and book entitled An Idiot Abroad, with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

But I digress.

I’ve written about Tucker Carlson many times. I never watched him much, because (a) I watch little TV news, finding most of it at best shallow and simplistic and at worst simply wrong and/or duplicitous; and (b) Carlson in particular has long annoyed me because I disagree with him on quite a few things but predominantly on foreign policy.

I wrote about his Putin interview in this recent post. Now I see that, as part of Tucker’s visit to Russia, he was ooing and ahing over the prices in a Russian supermarket, taking his place in a long line of useful idiots abroad. Most of them have traditionally been on the left, but these days the attitude is expressed by Carlson, who is on the isolationist wing of the right:

At the World Government Summit, Tucker Carlson told a gathering of world leaders that Moscow was “so much nicer than any city” in the United States. “It’s radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow,” Carlson went on. “I didn’t know that. I’ve learned it this week, to Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, because these cities, no matter how we’re told they’re run and on what principles they’re run, are wonderful places to live that don’t have rampant inflation.”

If you’re wealthy, I imagine, Moscow is pretty great. This is true of most European cities. When you’re an American tourist, you tend to stay in clean and beautiful city centers, eat at the best spots and wander around the most attractive areas of town. In Europe, you get to see onion domes that were built by serfs dotting the skyline. I’m sure it’s neat.

It is also true that if you’re an average person, Moscow is awful. The average Muscovite is most likely to live in some grim outlying apartment complex, many of which were built during the Soviet era. That’s if they’re lucky. Many Russians live in Novosibirsk, Ekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk and Ufa. Russia’s per capita yearly GDP is around $13,000. In the United States, it is around $83,000. It’s around $46,000 in Mississippi, our poorest state. Most Russians are living in what most Americans would consider poverty.

There probably isn’t a single quantifiable economic measure in which Russia bests the United States. None of this is even to mention that Russia is an extraordinarily corrupt place, the price of which is embedded into virtually every business transaction. I’m not sure Americans appreciate how little graft they deal with in their everyday lives. Then again, Russia ranks in the vicinity of Uganda and Togo on the corruption indexes.

The only thing more pervasive than bribery is alcoholism and suicide.

Much much more at the link.

Here’s another article about Tucker’s visit:

After checking out, Carlson is floored by grocery prices in Russia. He said in the video that a cart of groceries that he thought would cost $400 actually cost $104.

Americans will frequently be impressed by how far their money goes in foreign countries. It’s expensive to travel abroad, but once you actually get there, a lot of stuff seems really cheap. That’s because American tourists benefit from a strong dollar, and they have high incomes by global standards. It doesn’t really tell you much about the quality of life for people who live in the foreign country.

That’s especially true the past few years. In 2022, the dollar was trading at 20-year highs relative to other currencies. It’s down slightly from that today, but it is still very strong.

Tucker Carlson isn’t dumb. At least, I’ve never thought he was. Perhaps he’s blinded by his own need to get viewers and stir up controversy, and his anger at what he sees as too much aid to Ukraine and too much support of the Ukrainians in their battle against Russia. At any rate, this is not his finest hour.