Crime

Thom Hartmann - A lot of words get thrown around to describe what we can expect with a MAGA Republican administration at full strength. From “authoritarian” to “fascist” to “Christian Nationalist” and worse, however, most of these words and phrases have — for most Americans — no specific meaning and so are often just considered either a cheap slur or hyperbole. But the reality is that the MAGA wing of the GOP (now fully in control of the Party) and the rightwing billionaires who fund the think tanks and networks that keep it alive do have a very specific idea about how America should be governed.

And there’s nothing new or modern about it. It’s the second-most ancient form of governance humanity knows (behind democracy), described in detail in works both modern and ancient, dating all the way back to ancient Sumeria, China, Mesoamerica, and Europe; some countries incorporate it into their official names to this day.

 It’s called “kingdom.” Most people, when they think of a kingdom, think of a king: a ruler with absolute power over his subjects. Absolute immunity for all official acts. A monarch accountable to nobody except his own whims. A man who must be obeyed under all circumstances, lest dreadful consequences befall those who defy him.

And, of course, six Republicans on the Supreme Court just this month granted that very sort of power to the American presidency, an abomination completely at odds with the form of government our Founders and Framers created and generations of Americans fought and died to preserve for us, our children, and our grandchildren. But kingdoms are also economic systems. In many regards, in fact, the economics of a kingdom are more essential to understanding how power is acquired, wielded, and held over time by the sovereign and their class — in defiance of the majority of the people — than any other single factor.  More

Time - Since the pandemic, mail theft has boomed. There was an 87% increase in reports of high-volume theft from mailboxes between 2019 and 2022, according to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. A report from the Government Accountability Office shows that the number of investigations into serious crimes investigated by the service nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023, from 609 cases to 1,198, an increase driven by a jump in robberies of mail carriers. ... The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued an alert to financial institutions in Feb. 2023 asking banks to be vigilant about check-fraud schemes targeting the U.S. mail. In many cases, scammers take checks, use chemicals to wipe the writing off of them, and then rewrite them for tens of thousands of dollars. If consumers don’t let their banks know of the fraud in time, they can’t recoup their money. There were nearly 250,000 reports of suspicious activity around checks in 2021, the most recent year for which there was data available, a 158% from 2014, according to the Department of Treasury.