#it was bribery

[3liza]

my general position on public nuisance is "you should do your best not to irritate or inconvenience other people unless there's a good reason" and then litigate the "good reason" on a case by case basis. i think that's the best anyone can do. the definition of "good reason" varies wildly depending on context, your background, culture generally, what data you have as a participant or a bystander, and local laws, and all three of these things are relevant factors

for example it really does lower my level of reactive, irritable stress with my neighbors to know their names and general schedules. i don't know why but it really does bother you less if Kyle Upstairs is having a party a little too late and you can hear Bulletproof through the ceiling, as opposed to if you're on year three of living underneath some anonymous fuckhead you want to kill. it's like oh Kyle's cousin is visiting and they're just chilling out maybe they lost track of the time. this makes all the difference. as usual the best advice is to form community with the people around you no matter what, even if you are entirely self-interested it will benefit you in the end. well that's all I got

[frog-in-a-dew]

Boys nights out or sm idk never been to one (two of them are missing, one fighting in a tutu magical dress and the other I'm pretty sure is overdosing on sugary snacks)

[fuck-u-maga]

[basedjamil]

silly little retainerswap au . . . baur was a bodyguard for one of kalim's ancestors; kalim is at NRC specifically so that sebek can go without abandoning his post. the vipers are the traditional retainers for briar valley's royalty and they REALLY disapprove of lilia for book 7 spoilers reasons

[destiel-news-network]

(Source)

"No Person holding any Office [in the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present... of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State." — US Constitution, Article I, Section 9, Clause 8

[critterbitter]

Meet Ingo’s partner!

The one and only!

A Litwick!

Litwick’s a panic capture and she knows it.

As a firm believer of half the depot agents in BW2 being either ghosts or pokemon (or both), a litwick with vague telepathy isn’t too out of question, me thinks.

Bonus:

Feel free to add any headcannons! This is lawless lands now. (click here for submas masterpost!)

[poorrichardjr]

The Banana Republic

In 1977 the Republicans in Congress forced then president Jimmy Carter to sell his families peanut farm because they feared that some entity would use it to funnel money to the president. Well, not really, but it was a justifiable concern. Carter, did the right thing and sold it because he didn't want to give even the appearance of impropriety. The country had just come off of the Nixon scandals and Ford's unsolicited pardon to "heal" the country.

In 2016, a new president decided differently. Instead of divesting in his businesses or at least putting them in a blind trust where he wouldn't have undo influence on their profits, Trump decided to hand off his businesses to his sons, but did not take himself out of the loop. In fact, it is more than speculated that a few foreign nations and local oligarchs paid Trump, his businesses, or his hotels large amounts of money to "influence" him. There were halted investigations that proved that foreign nations paid Trump in various ways to get what they wanted.

This is the sort of thing that goes on in corrupt nations, and sadly, America is just as corrupt as any Eastern European nation during the reign of Communist Russia. Tomorrow, Trump is getting back into office, but this time he isn't just content to get millions of dollars from foreign nations through his hotels, or tax funded trips to Saudi Arabia or Davos. Nope, now he has a new con, and a much better way to hide the vast amounts of money nations like China or Russia will be willing to pay him just to get what they want.

Cryptocurrency is a godsend for someone like Trump. Anyone from anywhere can buy into it, but it doesn't really exist. It's like money for nothing. Except it isn't going to be nothing. We aren't going to be able to monitor who buys this illusionary currency put out by Donald Trump, and it is absolutely guaranteed that someone in Trump's orbit is going to suggest to all those entities who have business in America exactly what they have to do to get what they want. It's just modern day bribery in the Banana Republic of America.

President's often got out of office with major debts they had to repay. That didn't happen to Trump last time, and it's absolutely guaranteed that it isn't going to happen this time. The man doesn't know anything about running the country, but he sure knows how to pull off a con, often badly. A lot of very bad things are going to happen to this country. After all, a man who's only concern is how much money he can make, doesn't have the countries interests at heart.

[im-totally-not-an-alien-2]

As it turns out, Danny makes a pretty good leader. His little gang of homeless children has grown immensely, both from picking up strays and from assimilating other gangs into his group.

Danny might only be 10 and still figuring out his powers but dang, intangibility and flight are over powered even before you add invisibility and laser blasts. At first he regretted sneaking into the lab alone to check out the portal his parents made in this basement. Waking up in a cold alley in a city you've never heard of is a terrifying experience even without the corrupt cops trying to sell you into human trafficking, but finding out he had powers and could do whatever he wanted? That was great. It no longer mattered that adults didn't listen to him or chased him around. He could do anything now. Be anything. Take anything.

He and the people under his protection often robbed places, never banks or anything but high class restaurants and stores that usually wouldn't even let them in through the front doors. Yeah, Danny can admit most of thier robberies were because of grudges the other kids had because of how they were treated but Danny being ten thought this was fine.

The real issue was Gothams Paw Patrol (who absolutely hate being called that :3 ) they were always on thier case, Dannys especially. They kept insisting that the system could help them -Danny called bull. No one helped him or Jazz back in Amity and it was waaaay nicer that Gotham- and kept getting him and his fellow kids arrested. That didn't really matter. Anti-meta stuff never worked on him so getting himself the other kids out was no big deal.

After overhearing a conversation between Nightwing and one of the other bats a kid came into thier current secret base announcing that Nightwing was poor and the other bats weren't. This caught everyone attention. Appearently Nightwing was trying to establish himself outside of the colony cause he didn't get along great with whoever the bats super daddy was, which was fair. A lot of them were runaways for one reason or another and knew a bunch of reasons why you wouldn't want to except "free" money.

This led to them fetching Nightwings "wingdings" and batarangs instead of keeping them/selling them like they do with the others, sharing some of thier spoils with him like the groceries, jewelry, fancy clothes, ect that they stole.

Dick even catches one of the kids in his apartment in Bludhaven filling up his fridge which has him panicking about his secret id being compromised. Luckly the kids had only followed him there and didn't think to check who was on the lease or anything cause they assumed it would be a fake name or something.

Just Dick getting forcibly adopted by a child gang.

[destielmemenews]

"Adams has consistently said he is cooperating with the investigations and has denied wrongdoing through the steady drumbeat of searches, seizures and departures of top members of his administration.

But as news of the indictment spread Wednesday night, he began to mount a defiant defense that he was being targeted by the federal government for his political views, adopting language similar to former President Donald Trump and other politicians accused of crimes."

"The indictment alleges illegal actions stretching back to 2014, from when he was Brooklyn Borough president.

“For nearly a decade, Adams sought and accepted improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel, including from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him,” the indictment reads."

source 1

source 2

source 3

[relaxedstyles]

[aunti-christ-ine]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules

Today (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

It's a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277266828.html

The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.

The bill topped $36 million – and it was illegally charged to its customers, the Californians whose immediate health and long-term survival these efforts opposed. SoCal Gas refuses to disclose the full extent of the spending, as do its lawyer-procurers, who cite legal confidentiality and a First Amendment right to secretly seek to influence policy in their refusal to disclose their profits from this illegal conduct.

The law firms involved are a who's-who of California's most prominent corporate fixers, including Reichman Jorgensen and Holland & Knight. The partners involved have a long rap sheet for anti-climate dirty tricking, most notably Jennifer Hernandez, notorious in climate justice history for an incident where activists claim she posed as one of them, infiltrating a campaign to force corporate despoilers to clean up their pollution in order to sabotage it, while secretly on a wealthy, prominent landowner's payroll.

Hernandez claims to care about the environment and says that her longstanding, corporate-funded, extensive campaigns and lawsuits against state environmental regulations are motivated by concern over their impact on working people. Her firm, Holland & Knight, denies serving SoCal Gas in opposing gas regulations, but it received $594k in ratepayer dollars, and submitted comments opposing the rules on its own behalf. Those comments were nearly identical to the comments submitted by SoCal Gas.

Hernandez also represents an obscure organization called The Two Hundred for Home Ownership in "a flurry of lawsuits" over California Air Resources Board rules on pollution, seeking to overturn the state's landmark climate change regulations.

Two Hundred for Home Ownership was founded by Robert Apodaca, who told the Bee that Hernandez's work for him is pro bono and not funded by SoCal Gas, but his entry into the fray occurred just as SoCalGas was founding an astroturf group called Californians for Fair and Balanced Energy (C4BES), which pretended to be an independent organization, disguising its relationship with SoCal Gas.

Apodaca is also founder of United Latinos Vote, an organization that had been largely dormant for seven years, not receiving any donations, until 2018, when the California Building Industry Association gave it $99k. The CBIA is a large-dollar recipient of donations from SoCal Gas, and its CEO insists that it was not acting on SoCal Gas's behalf when it made its unpredented donation to Apodaca.

The CBIA donation to United Latinos Vote was forerunner to a flood of corporate donations from the likes of Chevron, Marathon and Phillips 66. Shortly after receiving this cash, United Latinos Vote ran a full page ad in the LA Times, accusing the Sierra Club of pushing for anti-gas appliance rules that would harm working class Latino families.

This ad, in turn, featured prominently in advocacy by the SoCal Gas front group C4BES, funded with $29.1m in ratepayer money, which it then spent seeking to link clean appliance rules with anti-Latino racism. A quarter of California's carbon emissions come from home gas use.

SoCal Gas is regulated by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), which tolerated this mounting illegal conduct for many years, even as the company circulated internal memos as early as 2015 discussing its plans to oppose electrification in the state on the basis that it constituted "a significant risk to our business."

But last year, CPUC fined SoCal Gas $10m. Now, CPUC's Public Advocate office has filed a damning, extensive report on SoCal Gas's unlawful conduct, seeking $80m in rate cuts to compensate Californians for the funds misappropriated to protect the company's shareholder interests:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M517/K407/517407314.PDF

Additionally, the Public Advocate is demanding $233m in fines for the company's refusal to allow investigators to audit its books and discover the full extent of the fraud.

SoCal Gas is the nation's largest utility, but (incredibly), it's not the dirtiest. That prize goes to Ohio's FirstEnergy, which handed $60m in ratepayer dollars to state politicians in illegal bribes in exchange for coal and nuclear subsidies and cancellation of state climate rules. That scandal led to GOP speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder being sentenced to 20 years in prison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

There is something extraordinarily sleazy about using ratepayers' own money to lobby against their interests. SoCal Gas and its Big Law enablers have funneled millions in Californian's money into campaigns to poison us and boil us alive, and they did it while using workers and racialized people as human shields.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen

Image: Maryland GovPics (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6635539089/

Jackie (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/79874304@N00/197532792

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[crastlefolke]

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[sawbuckplus]