The Manafort Verdict

I’m glad as any libtard snowflake to hear about the Manafort verdict. And I do hope, as so many do, that it’ll lead him to flip. Being who and where he was, I think he’s in a position to fill in a *lot* of blanks and/or corroborate a lot of things that seem obvious but for which there aren’t yet smoking guns.

But you know what? I’m even gladder to see someone who lived his life as if the rules the rest of us have to play by didn’t apply to him get his just desserts. Pumping up his income to get loans, lying and shrinking it when it was time to file taxes, working to make some of the world’s worst people look good (and, most likely, helping them launder money), hell, working as their undeclared agent in the United States: all the actions of a man who, because of his privilege and connections, decided he could do whatever the fuck he wanted and get away with it. And for decades he did, because people like him run the world. A poor woman with a great business idea can’t get a loan, but this guy gets a million dollars because the CEO of the bank wants a job in the Trump administration. It’s not just wrong, it’s counterproductive.

I’ll tell you, what I’d like to see — even more than watching Trump go down, sweet as that would be — is for all these people trading favors and scratching backs and screwing everyone over all the time to be investigated, charged, and put on trial for the fraud and self-dealing that underlies so much of our economic and political decision-making. Sure, we pretend at meritocracy, but we all know it’s not what you know, it’s who. We all know the game is rigged, that, as George Carlin so eloquently and succinctly put it: “There’s a club, and you ain’t in it.”

So yes, let’s hope Manafort flips to save his own skin. Let’s hope (and work so) that Manafort and Cohen are just the beginning of a cascade of justice and realignment. Because it’s not just that it’s morally and ethically wrong for a such a small minority of the population to arrogate such a ridiculous wealth of resources to themselves while so many don’t have enough and never will. It’s a bad use of those resources, one that perpetuates a pyramid scheme version of civilization where the vast majority of human potential is not only wasted but actively discouraged from developing, to all of our detriment.