December 20, 2024

December 20, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

Domestic Update

Free of the strictures of the Times, Paul Krugman tells it like it is.

Paul Krugman - The Chaos Monkeys Have Already Taken Over the Zoo.

The peddlers of misinformation are high on their own supply.

Well, I was going to post about proposals for bank deregulation, but I think that can wait for a bit. The news of the moment is the looming prospect that the federal government will shut down over the weekend.

We’ll have to see how much damage this does, but it’s already clear that assuming the worst happens — and it’s hard to see how it won’t — this will be the dumbest shutdown ever. I’d say that the incoming Musk administration (so far Musk, not Trump, appears to be calling the shots) is trying to hold itself up for ransom, but it doesn’t even rise to that level. This isn’t like 1995, when Newt Gingrich shut down the government in an attempt to extract cuts in Medicare and Medicaid — a move that seemed (and was) a foolish act of petulance, but at least had a ghost of motivation.

No, Musk is demanding — apparently successfully — that Republicans in Congress renege on a deal they had already agreed to, a continuing resolution that would keep the federal government going for the next few months. Why? Because, Musk says, of the outrageous provisions in that CR.

Except none of the items Musk is complaining about are actually in the bill. No, Congress isn’t giving itself a 40 percent raise. No, the bill doesn’t fund a $3 billion stadium in Washington. No, it doesn’t block future investigations into the Jan. 6 committee. No, it doesn’t fund bioweapons labs.

I have an embarrassing admission to make. I thought that Muskaswamy’s obvious problems with getting DOGE going would have inspired, not humility — never that — but at least a bit of caution. That is, I imagined that Musk would by now have at least an inkling of two things.

First, finding big-ticket examples of government waste is hard, because the government mostly spends money on things people want. Here’s a nice chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, showing where the money goes:

Yes, the federal government is an insurance company with an army.

Second, you shouldn’t trust claims about the budget coming from Some Guy on the Internet. You might have imagined that the world’s richest man could have a couple of fact-checkers on retainer to help ensure that he isn’t making clearly stupid assertions. But nooo.

In a barrage of posts on X Musk pushed misinformation about a more or less routine, place-holding bill that was basically a way to keep the ship of state afloat until Trump takes charge. Maybe this was in part a power play, an attempt to make Republicans in Congress show fealty to a man who clearly imagines that he’s the real president — and Trump, by meekly endorsing Musk’s position, did in fact convey the impression that Musk is leading the guy who is supposed to be in charge by the nose. But this political theater will have real consequences, for America, for Trump, and for Musk himself.

Musk has asserted that shutting the government down for a month would do no harm. And it’s true that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid funding — which is where the bulk of the money goes — will continue. But many services people rely on will be disrupted, especially if the shutdown goes on for more than a month, which seems all too likely given Republicans’ razor-thin House majority and the dominance of misinformation in many members’ thinking.

Maybe Musk himself doesn’t expect to experience any hardship, but put it this way: I’m glad that I won’t need to renew my passport any time soon, that I don’t expect to be trying to get through airport security for a while, and especially glad that I don’t rely either on food stamps or on small business loans. For all of these things have been disrupted in past government shutdowns.

Do Musk and Trump know any of this? Almost surely not.

Beyond the specifics, my guess is that antics like the potential shutdown will do much more damage to the Musk/Trump administration than they realize. (There’s also this other guy — JV Dance or something? — but he clearly doesn’t matter.)

First, since the election financial markets have clearly been betting that Trump will do very little of what he promised during the campaign — that we won’t really have a trade war, just some minor trade skirmishes, that we’ll have symbolic deportations rather than a mass roundup of immigrants, and so on. Markets have, in effect, discounted the disastrous consequences that would follow if Trump honored his own promises.

But a government shutdown in response to completely false claims about what’s in an innocuous short-term funding measure suggests that the peddlers of misinformation are high on their own supply. Trump may really believe that foreigners will pay tariffs, that U.S. trade deficits subsidize the rest of the world, that there’s a reserve army of American workers available to fill the gaps deportation would create. I don’t want to put too much weight on the latest market fluctuations, but it is starting to look as if investors are questioning their own complacency.

Second, many, probably most people who voted for Trump believed that he really is the character he played on The Apprentice — a highly competent manager. The other day I said that Trump was elected by low-information voters; this wasn’t a slur on Americans’ intelligence, it was a reference to survey results showing that Trump’s edge depended entirely on support from voters who don’t pay much attention to politics:

How will these voters react if, as seems all too likely, the second Trump administration is instead marked by rolling chaos?

Anyway, it’s pretty remarkable. Inauguration Day is still a month away, yet the chaos monkeys have already taken over. (Substack)

One more thing.

On Wednesday, Trump, following Musk’s lead, ended the bi-partisan budget bill.

Yesterday, fearful of being blamed for the government shutting down, Trump backed a replacement bill. Notice, the man, who has no mandate from the voters and barely won by one of the smallest popular margins in American history, wrote this.

Last night, the Musk-Trump replacement bill was rejected by the GOP controlled House.

If the Government shuts down, Trump and Musk are responsible. They can’t wiggle out of it.

How popular will they be, as people lose their jobs and care and services right before Christmas.

---

International News

I have deliberately ignored the horrifying case in France. There is enough terrible news to report without asking you to read the grotesque story of a man who encouraged dozens of men to rape the wife he doped and raped too.

But somehow, with the verdicts against him and the other rapists reached yesterday, I decided to post a summary of the case, to honor Gisèle Pelicot, now a recognized feminist hero.

51 men participated and raped her. Take that in. 51 rapists. 51 guilty. 51 convicted.

Patriarchy will one day end and she will be one who helped end it, recognizing the shame of these rapes was the men’s, not hers.

I post this in tribute to Gisèle! If you choose to read it, you do so in her honor too.

Viva Gisèle Pelicot!

With Guilty Verdicts, Rape Victim’s Ordeal in France Becomes a Message of Hope.

Dozens of men who abused [sic-raped] Gisèle Pelicot were convicted, including the man who invited them to do so: her husband of 50 years. She wanted the public trial to show rape victims they were not alone.

Gisèle Pelicot leaving the courthouse in Avignon, France, after judges sentenced her former husband on Thursday to 20 years for serially raping her.

In a packed courtroom on Thursday in Avignon, France, the head judge asked each of the dozens of men accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot — while she was near-comatose and at the invitation of her husband of 50 years — to stand briefly. Then he pronounced their convictions swiftly, one after the other: all guilty.

By the time it was over, every one of the 51 accused men had been convicted, most of them for raping Ms. Pelicot in her own bedroom. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, 72, who had admitted to drugging her over nearly a decade to abuse her, was the only one to get the maximum sentence: 20 years.

The rest were given sentences mostly ranging from six to nine years.

And with that, the trial that had both horrified and captivated France for almost four months ended with a victory for the woman at its center, Ms. Pelicot. She became a feminist icon for her bravery in allowing the case to be tried publicly, to more fully expose the horrors of rape in a country where #MeToo hardly gained traction.

After it was over, she stepped into a swarm of French and international reporters and hundreds of supporters eagerly awaiting her, who held up signs of appreciation and cheered when she emerged. There were so many of them that they stopped traffic on the road outside the courthouse.

“Justice for Gisèle, justice for all,” one sign read. Another proclaimed: “All the women on Earth support you. Thank you Gisèle.”

As she has throughout the trial, Ms. Pelicot retained her trademark poise, giving a simple statement about her decision to allow the world to witness the painful details of her rapes rather than keep them private as is allowed by French law. Her goal was to force discussions of rape, including those facilitated through the use of drugs.

“I wanted, by opening the doors of this trial on Sept. 2, that society would take up the debates that have been launched,” she said on Thursday. “I never regretted my decision.”

A crowd outside the courthouse in Avignon on Thursday held up signs of support for Ms. Pelicot and cheered when she emerged.

She said she had drawn strength from the backing she had received from people around the world, adding that the support had allowed her to return to the courthouse “over long days of this trial” — even when videos of some of the rapes were shown in court at her insistence.

Though all the men were convicted, many feminist activists who have lined up daily to watch the proceedings in an overflow room were upset by the sentences. That was because in all cases, except for Mr. Pelicot’s, the sentences were lower than the prosecutor had recommended. Six of the convicted men were freed, having already served most or all of their time in jail.

“It means you can rape a woman who was drugged in her own home and walk out free,” said Pascale Plattard, a member of the feminist collective the Amazons of Avignon, who was perched on a fence in front of the courthouse. “I am very angry.”

Lorraine Questiaux, a lawyer whose Paris practice focuses on violence against women, called the sentences “relatively lenient, given the gravity of the acts.”

Many of the lawyers of the accused said they were satisfied with the sentences, though it was unclear if some would appeal.

The trial has rattled the country because of its many sordid elements.

A grandmother and retired manager at a big public company, Ms. Pelicot had built what she and her children thought was a happy life with her husband.

But that gauzy vision was torn apart one day in late 2020, when the police arrested him and told her of the abuse she had been suffering. Only then did she understand why she was losing hair and weight, and suffering repeated memory losses so severe that she thought she had Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor.

Mr. Pelicot quickly admitted to crushing sleeping pills into her food and drink for years to rape her when she was near-comatose. Then, he invited dozens of men he met online to join him, charging them nothing but regularly filming the encounters. (Ms. Pelicot has since divorced him.)

The case drew so much attention in part because of the sheer numbers of men who had participated and because of their varied and ordinary profiles. The French news media called them “Monsieur Tout-le-monde” — “Mr. Every Man” — and experts said they destroyed the myth of the “monster rapist,” replacing it with the image of the man next door.

Aged 26 to 74, they appeared to be a cross-section of middle- and working-class men — tradesmen, firefighters, truck drivers, a journalist, a nurse.

Ms. Pelicot left the courthouse surrounded by police officers and journalists.

About 15 of the defendants pleaded guilty. The rest admitted that they had had sex with Ms. Pelicot but argued that they had never intended to rape her. Instead, most said that they had been lured by Mr. Pelicot to join the couple for a consensual threesome and had been told that Ms. Pelicot was pretending to sleep or had taken sleeping pills herself. Most painted Mr. Pelicot as a master manipulator; some argued that he had drugged them, as well, a charge he denied.

Many offered stunning explanations to the court, qualifying their acts as “involuntary rape,” “nonconsenting rape,” “accidental rape” or “rape by body but not mind.”

But the videos — which Ms. Pelicot insisted be played in court as evidence and as a wake-up call to the country — showed the men penetrating her nonresponsive body.

Earlier this week, the accused were given a last chance to offer final words in their defense. Few took it.

Many of those who had been free on bail for the trial arrived at the courtroom on Thursday morning carrying small bags with their belongings in preparation for what the day might hold. Shortly after the verdict, they were whisked away by police and taken directly to prison. Their wives, mothers and daughters who had watched the verdict in an overflow room wept.

As in other important moments during the trial, on Thursday Ms. Pelicot was flanked by her and Mr. Pelicot’s three children. The trial, and the horrific crimes it documented, had shattered not just her life and identity, but theirs, as well.

The children had considered their father a loving pillar of the family who had hosted fabulous birthday parties and was there for them, whether it was attending sports events together or making sure his daughter got home from parties safely. The revelation of his crimes and double life destroyed their perceptions of their childhoods.

The couple’s eldest son, David, told the court recently that he feared his own son, who remains in psychological treatment, had also been abused by Mr. Pelicot — a charge Mr. Pelicot denied. The couple’s second son, Florian, said he had lost his marriage because of the tragedy.

And the couple’s daughter, who goes by the pen name Caroline Darian, is convinced she was also drugged and sexually abused by her father since the police recovered deleted photos of her from his electronics that showed her in underwear she did not recognize, asleep with the lights on.

She was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric ward soon after the police took her father into custody and checked herself back into a clinic during the trial, she said on Instagram, “to recover all my energy, to be able to sleep again.”

Her memoir about the horrific discovery has been translated into English and will be released soon: “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.”

Mr. Pelicot was convicted on Thursday of taking and publishing sexual photos of her, as well as of his two daughters-in-law. He had repeatedly denied abusing his daughter or grandchildren.

As she left the courtroom, Ms. Pelicot thanked her children, their partners and her grandchildren, including one grandson standing nearby, “because they are the future, and it’s also for them that I waged this battle.”

Then, she shared some thoughts for the crowds.

“I think of the victims, unrecognized, whose stories often remain hidden,” she said. “I want you to know that we share the same struggle.”

She added, “I have confidence in our ability to collectively seize a future in which everyone, women and men, can live in harmony, with respect and mutual understanding.”

With that, she was escorted by a knot of police officers through the throngs of reporters and into the giant cheering mass of her supporters. (New York Times)

---

Georgia court disqualifies Fani Willis from election subversion case.

A Georgia appeals court disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting the 2020 election subversion case against President-elect Donald Trump. But the court rejected a request to dismiss the indictment fully.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office filed a notice Thursday indicating that it will appeal the decision to the Georgia Supreme Court. (Daily Docket).

---