17-Year-Old Girl Fined For Pepper Spraying “Rapefugee” In “World’s Best Country For Women”

On Wednesday, we brought you the tragic story of 22-year-old Alexandra Mezher, who was stabbed to death by a Somali migrant child in a Swedish asylum center for unaccompanied refugee children.

Mezher’s death served as a poignant reminder to the country’s politicians that the move to take in 163,000 asylum seekers fleeing the horrors of the Mid-East’s many proxy wars isn’t without risk.

The stabbing comes at a particularly delicate time for Swedish authorities. Earlier this month, Nyheter Idag released an investigative report alleging prominent Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter sought to conceal from the public a wave of sexual assaults at a youth festival and concert in central Stockholm’s Kungsträdgården last August.

Dagens Nyheter denied the allegations, saying it was in fact Swedish police that were responsible for the coverup.

Meanwhile, “gangs” of Moroccan migrant children have commandeered the main train station in Stockholm, where they plunder, grope, and otherwise wreak havoc upon helpless Swedes. Or something.

And it’s not just Sweden. There have been hundreds of reported sexual assaults across the bloc this month and so far, the “best” solution officials can come up with is a kind of blame the victim strategy articulated by Cologne mayor Henriette Reker who suggested that it is German women’s responsibility to keep themselves from getting raped by staying an “arm’s length” away from would-be attackers.

This week we got another example of officials effectively blaming the victim, this time in Denmark where a teenager who used pepper spray on an assailant will be fined for deploying an illegal substance.

The alleged attack occurred “near an asylum center” and according to the girl, was perpetrated by an “dark-skinned English speaking man who knocked her down and tried to undress her.”

“She was later warned by police that the pepper spray she used on him was illegal for private citizens to possess, and that she would face a £50 fine,” The Telegraph writes.

It is illegal to possess and use pepper spray, so she will likely to be charged for that,” a police spokesperson said.

“Numerous readers wrote in the comments section on TV Syd’s story about the incident that they would be willing to pay the girl’s fine,” The Local says. “The man who attacked the 17-year-old fled from the scene and has not been charged.” 

According to the Copenhagen Post, more Danes are traveling to Germany to buy pepper spray than ever before. 

“Sales have really exploded after the New Year and the attacks in Cologne,” an owner of a weapons store in the border town of Flensborg, said. “In January, we’ve had 50-60 percent more Danish customers than usual.”

You’ll recall that pepper spray sales are off the charts in Germany since the attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve as are Google searches for the weapon.

But don’t be fooled says Anders Rasmussen, a prevention specialist at the Danish Crime Prevention Council, pepper spray may be used as a defensive weapon in some cases, but if legalized in Denmark, people will “quickly” start a non-lethal arms race with one another. 

“Pepper sprays give a false sense of safety,” Rasmussen told The Post. “They can also be used as an offensive weapon, which may quickly develop into a sort of armed competition between civilians.”

Yes, “a sort of armed competition between civilians” who would presumably try to stockpile mace in a dangerous game of pepper spray one upsmanship. One commenter – a Frank Silbermann – is incredulous:

Good question, Frank.

We wonder if Rasmussen would point to 17-year-old girls’ usage of pepper spray on would-be assailants as an example of how dangerous society can get once you allow “civilians” to carry mace. 

We close with the following screengrab from US News & World Report:


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1KdnSdI Tyler Durden

Turnout Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing at the Iowa Caucuses

Bernie SandersWe are four days out from the Iowa caucuses. The Democratic candidates made their final pitches to voters at a town hall event on Tuesday, while the Republicans (minus The Donald) will take their parting shots at this evening’s Fox News–sponsored debate.

For almost a year I’ve been advising readers not to put much stock in the polls. Among other reasons, I’ve said that people are apt to change their mind about who they’re supporting many times over the course of the weeks and months leading up to an election, as they learn more about the various candidates, observe their performances in the debates, and view ads for and against. Poor showings in the early states can also push straggling candidates to throw in the towel, thus winnowing the field and changing voters’ calculus.

But none of that likely matters in Iowa at this late stage in the game. By now, most people there know who they like. They not only have studied up on the various candidates, they’ve probably met some of them. I’ll never forget watching a focus group in Des Moines in 2014: The moderator asked how many of the 30-some participants had personally shaken hands with Barack Obama while he was running for president. Virtually everyone indicated that they had. Iowa is, in many ways, a horse of another color.

So the time remaining for voters there to change their allegiance is running low. The only real remaining question is how many people will actually turn out—but the answer can make a hell of a difference.

The race on the Democratic side is extraordinarily close. The RealClearPolitics average for the state has Hillary Clinton ahead of Bernie Sanders by just two percentage points. Anything, it seems, could happen.

Yet whether Sanders is able to squeak out a win depends entirely on whether his supporters are motivated to show up Monday night and stick it out. As I wrote here at Hit & Run a couple of weeks ago:

Bernie Sanders is doing well in the polls at the moment. But if a lot of the people who say they support you don’t show up to actually vote, those strong polling numbers mean very little.

Turnout matters, and it’s not yet clear whether the largely grassroots Sanders campaign can compete with the Clinton machine at getting warm bodies to their polling places

This is an especially important question in places like Iowa that don’t hold traditional secret-ballot primary elections. Caucusing is a far more arduous and time-consuming process, one that by its nature includes multiple rounds and can stretch late into the night. Importantly, it’s also a more public one. Supporters must literally stand under a sign or banner with their preferred candidate’s name on it, for all their neighbors to see.

GOP frontrunner Donald Trump is leading by a reasonably solid margin in Iowa right now. (He’s more than six points ahead of his closest competitor, Ted Cruz, according to the RealClearPolitics average, and nearly 20 points in front of Marco Rubio.) There are some very good reasons to be skeptical that he’ll be able to match his polling performance on caucus night, however—and the biggest one is that his get-out-the-vote operation is untested, to say the least. Per The New York Times:

Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals have spent months calling and knocking on doors to identify potential supporters to draw them out to caucuses, but Mr. Trump does not appear to have invested in this crucial “voter ID” strategy until recently.

Donald Trump

Something called social desirability bias comes into play in Iowa, as well. A December study from the Morning Consult found that better-educated voters were more likely to say they were supporting the real estate mogul in totally anonymous online surveys than they were in live-interview telephone surveys. In other words, some people like Trump but are too embarrassed to say so out loud. It seems rather unlikely that many of these individuals would be willing to venture out on a cold February night and plant themselves, in full view, next to a sign bearing a reality TV star’s name. 

As a new report from Monmouth University explains, for Trump to win Iowa, he will need the GOP caucuses to garner record-setting turnout numbers. If 170,000 Republicans show up—far surpassing the record-high 122,000 from 2012—Trump is expected to emerge victorious. But if the real number is more like 130,000—still a record, mind you—it “puts the race in a tie at 26% for Trump and 26% for Cruz, with Rubio at 15% and Carson at 12%.”

Why does lower turnout necessarily spell bad things for Trump? Because his support is disproportionately strong among groups that tend to vote in low numbers—”disaffected folks who are only marginally attached to the political process,” as The New Yorker put it, or “people on the periphery of the G.O.P. coalition,” as per The Upshot blog at The New York Times. He does well among blue-collar types, among people who call themselves Republicans but are actually registered as Democrats, and among those who have turned out only “irregularly” for past elections. To believe he’ll win is to assume these groups will buck history and show up en masse.

Despite all the reasons to be skeptical, though, I’m becoming increasingly nervous about what might lie ahead. 

I keep thinking back to the right-of-center conventional wisdom on the eve of the 2012 general. It held that, in order to win re-election, President Obama would have to repeat the miracle he achieved on Election Night 2008 by turning out unprecedented numbers of “unlikely” voters—young people, African Americans, and other demographic groups that have a track record of staying home.

Given all that had occurred in the four years intervening, that struck conservatives as thoroughly implausible. With the GOP’s strong showing in the 2010 midterms, the collective national momentum seemed to be running against the Democratic Party. Surely Obama’s base was disappointed in the candidate that ran on a platform of criminal justice reform and closing the prison at Guantanamo and then went through with none of it?

Of course, all those assumptions turned out to be wrong. Obama did repeat his GOTV miracle and won big as a result. In raw numbers, more blacks and Hispanics cast ballots in 2012 than they had four years before. Stated a report from Brookings, “Minority turnout determined the 2012 election.”

The Trump campaign is betting it can accomplish something similar. Are they right? I have honestly no idea. As savvy politicos like to say, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior—right up until it isn’t.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1nBbo5U
via IFTTT

Manufacturing Matters

Submitted by Sean Corrigan via HindeSightLetters.com,

Much predictably fatuous comment has been devoted to the fact that, to the extent that the US is facing any difficulties at all outside the oil patch, at present these ‘only’ affect manufacturing – a sector which , as any fool knows, accounts for a mere 12% of GDP. Ergo, we are told, while employment in general holds up and consumer spending is maintained, a recession is not to be countenanced – a bill of clean health which conveniently supports the sell-side’s fingers-crossed contention that stocks are cheap and that credit is beginning to offer up real bargains for the man brave enough to dip his toe back into the waters. 

We Austrians, however, tend to hold a different view of the pivotal role of what we call ‘higher order’ sectors in the economic machine, while recognizing that the modern-day institutions of Big Government and mass, end-consumer finance can partly mask their workings in a manner which would have been alien to the theory’s early architects.

To acquire a feel for this argument, we must look beyond the final-use fixation of the GDP arithmetic and cast our gaze instead at wider measures of activity. The charts presented here are an attempt at achieving such an overview.

The first shows the distribution of business revenues compiled from almost 6 million corporate tax returns in 2012 (the latest period for which we have available data). Out of a total of $26 trillion in sales (a number, please note, while far from including all economic activity in the country is already some 60% greater than that same year’s GDP estimate), the manufacturing sector’s $8 trillion contribution accounted for the single biggest fraction, namely 31%. In terms of those forms of business spending which are registered under the rubric, ‘cost of goods’, manufacturing was further responsible for 36% of the overall sum. Likewise, it made up 28% of all pre-tax profits. In all bar the last category, where it was beaten by c.10% that year by Finance & Real Estate, these were the largest shares of all the major sectors.

Even in the Uber economy, still the Big Daddy of them all...

Even in the Uber economy, still the Big Daddy of them all…

Turning to the second graph (and this time using the BEA’s somewhat different methodology which seriously reduces the weighting of retail and wholesale), manufacturing itself consumed almost $2 trillion of the ‘gross output’ of other businesses, further extending its footprint. Can you imagine how they must be feeling, right now as the country’s makers of things catch something of a chill?

16-01-27 MFG Own Buy

…and a Buyer, not just a Seller

It should be borne in mind that, the BEA’s numbers show that B2B spending (which is often highly discretionary in nature) makes up 2/3 or so of manufacturing’s customer base – with around a half of originating from other manufacturers in their turn. In addition, capital intensity here is generally higher and timelines for ROI therefore longer; the nature of the goods being produced is typically highly specialized – and hence highly user-specific – meaning their place in the ‘national assembly line’ is much more circumscribed than is the case in many other areas of commercial life.

All in all then, this sector is not just the largest, but also the most variable and hence the most susceptible to booms and busts.

‘Only’ manufacturing, indeed!


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1SlT4IQ Tyler Durden

This Could Be A Problem: China’s Debt-To-GDP Rises To A Gargantuan 346%

In early 2015, after years of China’s massive debt pile being roundly ignored by most so-called experts (despite being profiled here many years prior), McKinsey released a report showing that not only has the world not delevered since the financial crisis, adding well over $60 trillion in debt (through 2016), but also revealing in a format so simple even an economist could grasp it, just how massive China’s all-in leverage has become.

Many were shocked when they read that China’s total debt/GDP had risen by 125% in under 7 years, hitting 282% as of Q2 2014.

Those same people may be just as shocked to learn that according to the head of financial markets research Asia Pacific at Rabobank, Michael Every, not only has China not begun to delever at all, but since McKinsey’s update, its debt has risen by another 70% of GDP!

According to Every, China’s 2015 debt-to-GDP might be as high as 346%, and while that is in line with wealthier developed economies but is “vastly higher” than any EM peer.

Cited by Bloomberg, Every adds that the time-frame for debt accumulation pre-crisis varies, but what always follows is a major currency drop afterwards, as has happened even with reserve currencies such as dollar, yen, euro and pound.

He also adds that nominal GDP needs to rise faster than debt for a sustained period if deleveraging is to truly be under way, aka Dalio’s beautiful deleveraging thesis. The problem, however, is that with even Goldman admitting that China’s real GDP growth rate is about 4.5%, China’s debt load is rising orders of magnitude faster than its underlying economy and is on the daily verge of entering the final phase of the Minsky Moment breakdown.

While no surprise to people with common sense, Every concludes that debt must be repaid with interest, which acts as a drag on economic activity, and is the reason why such monstrous debt loads always lead to an economic collapse; making matters worse is that in China cheap credit is channeled to state-owned firms with low or no profitability.

So what happens next? Every believes that China has no choice but to proceed with a massive devaluation, far bigger than the prevailing consensus, and expects the Yuan to plunge to 7.60 against the dollar over the next year.

Some more thoughts from the Rabobank analyst:

“Despite vociferous PBoC rebuttals that such currency forecasts are “ridiculous” and “impossible” there are a wide variety of arguments to explain that view, including: Slower growth, interest rate differentials with the US as monetary policy diverges, declining export competitiveness and net capital outflows and declining FX reserves.”

And of course, massive debt, record NPLs and a wave of commodity-related bankruptcies. Every said that the single strongest reason to be bearish on CNY is the debt build-up. When debt-to-GDP rises as rapidly as it has, and to as high (and rising!) a level as it has in China, a weaker currency invariably follows.

In short, a CNY decline of 6% to date is nowhere near an adequate response to the fundamental problems China has.

As such, 2016 is likely to see CNY remain under downward pressure.

“So will the economy, which is desperately in need of real reforms. Of course, China has shown that it can take radical action when needed. However, the most recent example was to drain the CNH market of liquidity rather than allowing it to continue to depreciate and so reflect the lack of radical action elsewhere. CNH is now compliant, but the internationalization of the currency has been significantly set back. Let’s hope that same energy can be channeled into a broader reform process ahead.”

We are far less optimistic: yes, there will be reforms, but only after the government has no other choice, which means that they will take place only after the crash.


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1P0hT90 Tyler Durden

Record Foreign Central Bank Demand For Treasuries In Today’s 7 Year Auction

When commenting on yesterday’s dreary 5 Year auction and previewing today’s last for the week issuance of $29 billion in 7 Year paper we said that “perhaps the reserve liquidators who showed such interest in the short-end of the curve, are a little too pregnant with paper in the belly: we will find out for sure tomorrow when the 7 Year auction prices. If, likewise, it is a poor showing, then one can slowly build a representation of where “Indirects” are over exposed in terms of inventory.”

Moments ago we got the answer and not only was today’s “belly of the curve” auction not a “poor showing” at all, it may have been the strongest auction on record: pricing at 1.759% this was stopped 2.2bps through the 1.781% When Issued, perhaps a record in terms of concession, or lack thereof.

The internals were likewise dramatic: not only was the Bid to Cover of 2.630 was far above the 2.49 average, but was the highest going back to November 2014. 

But the strongest indicator was the Indirects which took down a whopping 69.4%, up from the paltry 47.1% a month ago, and also the highest on record. And since Directs were largely unchanged at 14.8% from a month ago, this meant that Dealers who ended up with 15.8% of the final allotment, had the lowest take down on record.

So with today’s last for the week auction in the history books, we now that while the 5Year may not be the sweet spot for foreign investors, when it comes to offshore central banks and other official investors, they just can’t get enough of 7 year paper, leading to even more confusion about just what and who it is that foreign reserve managers are buying and selling.


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1SMqkKX Tyler Durden

You Won’t “Buy The Dip” After Seeing These 2 Charts

The mother's milk of stock market returns is turning increasingly sour…

Earnings season took a dark turn on Wednesday, according to MarketWatch's Ciara Linnane and Tomi Kilgore, when the majority of companies reporting numbers for the December quarter missed on sales and lowered their outlook for the rest of the year.

This weakness in overall corporate earnings growth could bode badly for the broader stock market, as it represents the actual impact of geopolitical concerns, the slowdown in China, the weakness in oil prices and productivity, said Karyn Cavanaugh, senior market strategiest at Voya Investment Management.

So, do these two charts scream at you to "Buy the F##king Dip"?

As we detailed previously, the S&P 500 is on track for its fourth straight season of negative sales, according to FactSet data, the longest such negative streak since the four-quarter stretch from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the third quarter of 2009.

 

Per-share earnings are looking at a deeper decline of 6.3%, wider than the 6.2% reading on Tuesday, according to FactSet. That would be a third straight quarter that earnings decline.

 

“When the Fed was back-stopping everything, people were willing to pay a little more for earnings,” Cavanaugh said. Now, she said the question has become: “Why would you pay more for the same exact thing you got last year?”

Why indeed!!??


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1QvsLhF Tyler Durden

Our Police at Work: It’s Not Public Property. It’s State Property! And We’ll Make Up a Reason We Bothered You to “Cover Our Ass”

A Great American Police Work story, reported at Raw Story, thanks again to the magic of cheap and widespread recording technology, involving:

Michael Picard’s encounter with the troopers last September, when he and a friend were detained while standing on a highway to warn motorists about a DUI checkpoint in Hartford, Connecticut….

One trooper, identified as Jeff Jalbert, is seen approaching Picard’s friend and saying that they were called to the scene because “somebody just said that one of you guys had a gun on them.” Picard states that he is carrying a gun, but that he has a permit allow him to do so.

Trooper First Class John Barone is later seen in the video reaching for Picard’s phone and telling him it was illegal for him to be filmed on a city street.

“Did you get any documentation that I am allowing you to take my picture?” Barone asks.

“No, but you’re on public property,” Picard replies.

“No I’m not,” the trooper responds. “I’m on state property. I’m on state property.”

Barone then seizes Picard’s camera, but does not realize it captures his discussion with Jalbert, Sergeant John Jacobi, and an unidentified trooper after noting that Picard’s gun is legal. Barone can be heard asking his colleagues, “Want me to punch a number on this? Gotta cover our ass.”

Later, Jacobi recommends to the group, “I think we do simple trespass, we do reckless use of the highway and creating a public disturbance. All three are tickets.”

“Then we claim that, um, in backup, we had multiple people, um, they didn’t want to stay and give us a statement, so we took our own course of action,” an unidentified trooper adds….

Picard says “As of now, the prosecutor has not dropped the case despite having video evidence of police misconduct.”

Raw Story picked up the story from the Free Thought Project.

The video:

For extra police recorded dark tragi-comedy this morning, Oakland cops on tape telling Hernan Jamarillo in 2013 “sir, we are not killing you” minutes before the 51-year-old man they were all on top of died. His crime? Being in his room and acting erratically after his sister (foolishly) called the cops about a ruckus in his room she thought was an intruder.

Hat tip: Gabriel Starr

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/208wIAT
via IFTTT

Silver Market In Disarray After Benchmark Price Fix Manipulation

As Bulliondesk.com's Ian Walker reports, the silver market was thrown into disarray on Thursday after the LBMA Silver Price was set 84 cents below the spot and futures price this morning.

The LBMA Silver Price – the crucial daily benchmark used by producers and traders around the world to settle silver products and derivatives contracts – was set at $13.58 per ounce.

 

At the time of the auction, which begins at 12 noon London time, the spot price was at $14.42 per ounce while the futures price on the CME was at $14.415, leaving a number of market participants extremely confused as to what has happened.

 

“Unfortunately, it is not [a mistake],” Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy for Saxo Bank, told FastMarkets. “This could be the end of the fix. It took 14 minutes to find a fix – they obviously found a fix way off of the market.”

 

The difference between the two was nearly six percent but the benchmark cannot be changed, a person familiar with proceedings told FastMarkets.

 

Another source also suggested that the continued existence of the fix has been put in jeopardy by the huge discrepancy in today’s price, adding that many producers – who still use the price as their daily reference – may have lost significant amounts of money if any contracts have been settled according to the fix.

 

“A huge number of contracts are still settled on that price,” another said. “This will no doubt cause significant problems.”

 

The matter is being investigated internally, FastMarkets understands, so CME has no official comment at this time.

This is how the market reacted to this clear manipulation…

 

As we have detailed previously, the ‘fix’ or ‘benchmark’, as it is now known, is still the global benchmark reference price used by central banks, miners, refiners, jewellers and the surrounding financial industry to settle silver-based contracts.

While some traders continue to use the 24-hourly traded spot price, larger players prefer the snapshot-style daily benchmark to settle bulkier contracts on a traditionally over-the-counter (OTC) market.

The price is set every day by six participants – HSBC, JPMorgan Chase Bank, Mitsui & Co Precious Metals, The Bank of Nova Scotia, Toronto Dominion Bank and UBS – using a system run by CME and Thomson Reuters.

CME and Thomson Reuters won the battle to provide the methodology and price platform for the daily process back in July 2014, replacing the 117-year old fix in August that year under sweeping reforms of the entire precious metals complex.


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1nqGble Tyler Durden

First Farm Run Entirely by Robots to Open in Japan

Japanese agricultural company SPREAD is constructing the world’s first farm manned entirely by robots. The indoor, vertical, and LED-lit endeavor in Kyoto—which SPREAD is calling the Vegetable Factory—will exclusively grow lettuce, with robots able to harvest up to 30,000 heads of lettuce every day.  

If you’re picturing something straight out of sci-fi, though, not quite: There will be no humanoid robots roaming these faux fields. According to Tech Insider, the robots “look more like conveyor belts with arms.” But they will be able to plant seeds, water and trim crops, and harvest the heads of lettuce when they’re ready without the aid of any human beings. 

SPREAD’s current indoor farm produces 21,000 heads of lettuce per day, but it’s still staffed by some of us. For its “next-generation Vegetable Factory,” SPREAD is focusing on sustainability and keeping costs low with “full automation from seeding to harvest and the optimization of the energy used for the lighting and air conditioning.”

The company projects a labor-cost reduction of 50 percent and 30 percent less energy usage, and will recycle 98 percent of the water needed to grow the crops. 

SPREAD sells its lettuce—which is higher in beta-carotene than conventional lettuce—under the brand name Vegetus. The company will open the fully-automated plant in 2017 and aims to scale up to 500,000 heads of lettuce per day within five years, franchising out its robotic plant-factory system in Japan and internationally. 

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1Utl3FN
via IFTTT

The Death of Buddy Cianci: Two-Time Mayor of Providence, Two-Time Convicted Felon

The AP would eventually report that the schoolchildren didn't actually see much money from the sauce sales. Naturally.Vincent “Buddy” Cianci Jr. has died at age 74. A fixture in Rhode Island politics since he was first elected mayor of Providence in 1975, Cianci is famous—or infamous—in the rest of the country for two incidents, which between then sum up the toupee-wearing thug’s style of personal and public corruption and brutality.

The first came in 1983, when Cianci invited a contractor named Raymond DeLeo to his home. After a cop frisked DeLeo, the mayor held the man captive for hours, hitting him, spitting on him, trying to stick a cigarette in his eye, assaulting him with an ashtray and a fireplace log, and telling him that if he hit back everyone present would swear that DeLeo struck first. Throughout the night, the mayor accused the contractor of having an affair with Cianci’s estranged wife, demanding that his prisoner “sign a confession that he had been sleeping with Sheila and an agreement that DeLeo would pay Cianci $500,000,” the Providence Journal later reported. Because of that evening, the mayor was charged with assault, kidnapping, and attempted extortion; when he went on trial in early 1984, he pled no contest and resigned from office.

In 1990, Cianci was elected mayor again. That paved the way for the second infamous incident: In 2001, he was indicted on a host of corruption charges.

Here’s how the Boston Globe‘s obit describes his second term as mayor:

The second coming of Cianci coincided with “Providence renaissance.”

Rivers that had run through underground culverts were reclaimed. Ornate walkways and bridges graced the rivers. Providence landed the largest mall in the region. People flocked to a downtown that just decades ago had been a dangerous, seamy zone. The hugely popular WaterFire display lighted up the rivers with floating braziers of crackling, burning cedar.

Cianci soaked up the notoriety. He marketed his own line of pasta sauce and became a fixture on the national “Imus in the Morning” radio show.

But beneath the glitter, the city was rotting. Buddy’s Providence was a town for sale, federal prosecutors said, where even routine dealings with City Hall—such as applying for jobs or bidding on contracts—meant greasing a few palms.

This time Cianci insisted he was innocent. He was eventually convicted on one count of racketeering conspiracy, resigned again, and served half a decade behind bars. He made another run at the mayor’s office after he got out of jail, but this time the voters said no.

The Globe goes on to quote a line from Cianci’s 2011 memoir, Politics and Pasta: How I Prosecuted Mobsters, Rebuilt a Dying City, Dined with Sinatra, Spent Five Years in a Federally Funded Gated Community, and Lived to Tell the Tale. “I used my public power for personal reasons,” he wrote. “I admit it. It probably wasn’t the right thing to do, but it certainly felt good.” He was talking about the petty favors he used his office to extract from people, but the line applies to a lot more of his career than just that. They should put it on his tombstone.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1Utkr2X
via IFTTT