France: Wild In The Streets / The Kremlin Buries A New Plague / “Completely Unprecedented” Trump Corruption / Ken Paxton’s October Surprise / Crypto King CZ Flaunts It In Dubai
Special Report From France:
What’s Happening to La République?
Michael Finnegan filed this report from Paris to THKR:
Police in riot gear charging at protesters in clouds of tear gas are a familiar sight in France, but the state violence unleashed on high-school students in recent days has shocked much of the country.
A 15-year-old student had his hand torn off by a police grenade Monday at a high-school protest in Lens, near the Belgian border.
Last week it was a 14-year-old boy who was slammed in the face at close range by a police tear-gas grenade launcher, losing many of his teeth and suffering a double broken jaw at a school protest in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, a Paris suburb.
In Tours a couple days later, a 16-year-old student lost the use of his right eye permanently, and the local prosecutor said the injury was consistent with a rubber bullet strike.
All three tragedies prompted prosecutors to open police oversight investigations.
The protests have spread from one high school in Créteil, just southeast of Paris, to campuses all across France over the last two weeks. Rundown school buildings, overcrowded classes, and widely hated online systems for school-day schedules and university applications are among the many grievances.
A fire outside a secondary school in Seine-St.-Denis on Thursday.Credit...Lou Benoist/Agence France-Presse
It couldn’t come at a worse time for the outgoing President Emmanuel Macron, who is wrapping up his two terms with an epic budget shortfall that promises little or no relief.
With the presidential election now six months away, the aggressive police tactics have enraged the left in France, where a national demonstration of solidarity with the high school students will take place Tuesday.
In Libération, Sophie Binet, the secretary general of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), one of France’s biggest trade unions, expressed dismay that the government of Macron’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, was treating a youth movement like “a threat to be eradicated.” Sébastien Lecornu, was treating a youth movement like “a threat to be eradicated” — even as she condemned protester “violence committed against school staff or school buildings.”
“One high-school student has already lost an eye, another his teeth, and several serious — even fatal — accidents have been avoided by very little. This escalation must be stopped. Now. The government must stop fanning the flames. It must abandon this repressive headlong rush, genuinely guarantee public freedoms, and finally listen to what the high-school students are telling it.”
“For the high-school girls and boys are not asking to be brought to heel. They are asking that we stop stealing their future; they are asking for teachers, a school that works, accessible studies, decent learning conditions. They — girls and boys alike — are asking not to begin their adult lives with the certainty that they will live more precariously than their parents.
“These demands deserve a political response: not truncheons, custody, or a show of force!”
For more from labor leader Sophie Binet in Libération, go here.
The Kremlin Orders Russians To Ignore Reports About the Plague; In the Meantime, Reports of a First Death Are Confirmed
Meduza
An employee of a Russian plague research institute has died of a suspected pneumonic plague Credit: The Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and Far East/AP
Scott: A slipped vial in a lab in remote Siberia, and the plague is released. One death is already confirmed. The reaction of Putin’s Kremlin, predictably, is not to publicly announce a series of routine public health and safety measures, including quarantines and travel restrictions—instead it is to tell Russians to disregard all reporting about the plague outbreak, while the Kremlin waded in deleting warnings, notices and reports from social media. And all of this makes it extremely difficult to assess the threat posed by the plague outbreak in Irktusk. It also means that the Kremlin’s reassurances should not be credited. Remember Gorbachev’s glasnost’ policy? It was all a reaction to the sort of shenanigans we see the Kremlin playing now, coupled with advocacy of transparency about things when they go wrong.
Several hospitals in Irkutsk had imposed three-week quarantines, the news outlet People of Baikal reported on October 4. City Clinical Hospitals No. 1, No. 3, and No. 10 and the Ivano-Matreninskaya Children’s Hospital are closed, the outlet reported. Relatives of a woman giving birth at one of Irkutsk’s maternity hospitals told the outlet that it had also imposed a quarantine.
A health care source told the outlet that doctors in Irkutsk “are already openly talking about plague,” though documents sent to the hospitals do not mention that diagnosis. “With pneumonic plague, quarantine restrictions are not limited to selected facilities — they are imposed on all medical facilities at once,” the source told People of Baikal.
Shortly after People of Baikal’s report appeared, Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, issued a statement. The agency said “the public health situation in the Irkutsk region and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is stable” and that it had implemented “a series of special measures.”
The measures were prompted by a case of “pneumonia of unknown cause” in an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute. Rospotrebnadzor emphasized that no “microorganisms associated with her professional work” had been found in the deceased woman’s body…
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged Russians to rely solely on official information about a possible plague outbreak in the Irkutsk region.
“The lead agency with expertise in this area is Rospotrebnadzor [Russia’s national public health and consumer protection agency]. People should rely on its official statements and disregard rumors, speculation, and so on. Rospotrebnadzor has highly qualified professionals in this field,” Peskov said.
Trump Corruption Watch
Krugman On The Cesspit of Trump Corruption
Charles: One of the biggest problems in journalism today is the near-impossibility of giving every Trump scandal the attention it deserves, because there are so many of them. This was top of mind for us when we founded The Horton-Kaiser Report.
No one contributes more to this battle than Paul Krugman. His decision to leave the New York Times and strike out on his own is one of the best things that has happened to journalism during Trump II. It made it possible for him to point his spotlight at all of this theft and desecration as often as he needs to.
Here are the highlights of his latest precis of the endless stream of high crimes and misdemeanors Trump and his minions are continuously flinging at us.
The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented – self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before. America currently has a Republican president who, along with his family, has raked in billions, possibly close to $10 billion in personal gain from office in less than two years. He has effectively sold criminal pardons to scammers, invalidating the legal claims of their victims for restitution. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has become a billionaire running an investment fund for Gulf petro-state autocrats despite having no discernible investment skills. The Times just reported that Kristi Noem paid hundreds of millions over the reasonable price for 5 aircraft – one of which contains a marble bathroom and luxury bedroom – that were ostensibly for deportations but are instead sitting on the runway. And then there’s Trump’s Secretary of the Commerce, Howard Lutnick, whose family has doubled its net worth to over $7 billion, largely through its investments in Tether, the crypto-currency of choice by Iran, terrorists and rogue states.
And I shouldn’t omit the tragic fate of Simon Andriesz, the British banker and whistleblower, who recently died by suicide. Andriesz revealed to the Senate that Lutnick had lied about the extent of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Right before his death, Andriesz spoke openly about how threats to himself and his family as a result of his testimony had ruined his life.
If the now widely-anticipated blue wave actually returns control of the House and Senate to the Democrats, focusing on this corruption needs to be a priority for every new committee chairman.
Through Congressional hearings and investigations, Democrats can vastly elevate the visibility of the extent of the outright looting and vandalism of this country by Trump and his gang.
Given the extent of the corruption, the rise of oligarchy in America, and the ever-rising flood of money in politics, many people may reasonably ask “Why will this matter?” Having elected Trump twice, can we trust Americans to vote for what is right rather than for lies? And can we trust Democrats, once in power, to be immune to the seduction of Big Money, as the Big Money will certainly try?
So, in a very real sense, once in power Democrats will have multiple battle fronts on their hands. In addition to battling Trump in his two remaining years of power, they will also have to prove to the American people that they will be immune to the inevitable attempts by Big Money to buy them off through campaign contributions and back-room deals. A couple of examples of what is already going wrong are the recent employment of Chuck Shumer’s daughter by OpenAI and the crypto billions raised by Kirsten Gillibrand’s 22-year old son for a new venture.
Granted, these two examples are exceedingly small potatoes in comparison to Trumpian corruption. But a significant number of voters won’t see it that way and will instead settle into a disaffected stance that both parties are equally bad. Furthermore, it’s a sure bet that once Democrats are in power, the Wall Street Journal and its ilk will revert to form, lambasting Democrats and elevating the Republicans.
So Democrats need to use this coming blue wave not only to clean out Trump’s corruption but to also put their own house in order. Because the forces that gave rise to Trump will not go meekly into the night.
