So he used money from Libya to get elected and then later he bombed them?
replies(4):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heads_of_state_and_gov...
Additionally budget for political campaigns are strictly regulated in France. And getting bribes from foreign dictator is, of course, not allowed.
The reason he did not get condemned also for that is that the judge could not proove the usage of the money.
He delayed the case enough (almost 13 years) so that he's now more than 70 though and I doubt he stays to long in prison because of his age.
But it's nice to see that he couldn't run away from justice forever and is finally in jail.
The solitary confinement part is quite harsh, I've never understood how that is supposed to rehabilitate someone.
In France there's early release, parole, etc. so real time he spends behind bars might be as low as two years.
Edit: The WP article is actually a very interesting read, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_F...
His case is going to appeal but the court decided to still jail him now "provisionally" (exécution provisoire), which sounds like a political play. Coincidentally, the same is happening to Le Pen with respect to the decision to ban her from elections...
As for "delaying" the case, this is just the French court system for you. Everything takes years and years.
The "exécution provisoire" is a measure that was introduced when his own party was in power, to make sure that terrorists were jailed immediately. He happened to be condemned for breaching the same law (association de malfaiteurs) that is used against terrorists.
I once read a comment by a lawyer that he was amazed by the number of politicians who ended up being caught by laws they had voted for. This is what happened here.
In fact when he was president he implemented another law, on minimum mandatory sanctions for repeated offenders (peines plancher) which was repelled by the subsequent administration. He would have been caught by that too otherwise.
I cannot be sure of what is happening (hence "seems") but neither can you, especially regarding decisions that are discretionary.
At least here there is a guilty verdict even if not final. In France people can be jailed for years without a trial...
He should definitely be in jail, as some of the things he's been charged with, and also in other cases sentenced for, were conspiracies to rig his trials and attempts to lean on witnesses, in cases including, but not limited to, this very trial [1]. Him being behind bars is necessary to stop his attempts to rig his own trial.
No. That’s how it’s done, and he can thank himself because he introduced the process himself. It’s utterly disgusting to hear him bloviating about criminals in 2007 and now whining because he’s on the receiving end. Shameless.
The law is the law. He’s been convicted enough and he belongs in jail.
In this case it's for his own wellbeing, because it's probably difficult for a former president to go along well with the rest of the prison population. I also read a statement that it would help prevent other inmates taking and publicly sharing pictures of him (since some inmates do manage to have phones even if they are forbidden).
Prison in general is one of the worst ways to rehabilitate someone though, I do agree with you.
The court couldn't prove beyond reasonable doubt that the money was used for his campaign.
However they were able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he knew what his subordinates were planing and that he did nothing to stop it.
In France conspiring to commit a crime is punishable, regardless of whether the crime actually happened or not. That's a law that has been crafted by Sarkozy's own party.
> The solitary confinement part is quite harsh
The solitary part isn't a punishment, but to ensure his safety. They even went as far as to allocated another cell for the two full time police officers of his security detail...
Also the upside is that he has a cell for himself, something a lot of prisoners would love to have given the over prison occupancy in France is 137% (and up to 200% in some specific prisons).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_F...
There's been bags of cash that transited by private airplanes, terrorist acts in reprisal, and ultimately a probable demise of Gaddafi's regime in response.
Some real dirty actions with lots of lives lost.
- Prosecuting white-collar crime still takes ages and takes over a decade, long after the resulting sentences have a real impact
- People like Nicolas Sarkozy have powerful media relays (most of the TV/newspaper owners in France are friends of him or at least sympathetic) and they can smear the judgment, smear the judges in the media with impunity
- His allies are currently in power, he was invited for a short discussion by president Macron and got a visit in prison from the minister of justice Darmanin, which reeks of favoritism
So the road ahead is still long, and I'm not even talking about current political climate which is horrendous.
Even if indeed guilty, things like jailing him "provisionally" despite his appeal are discretionary decisions of the court so also open to all interpretations despite the very black and white comments here...
I would be wary of going through the appeal court. The judges motivation make it quite clear they were _extremely_ lenient and chose to ignore how contradictory a lot of statement were, and the other cases linked to this. If he is convicted for "subordination de temoin" in the related case, it is likely that his sentence would be set to a longer time.
The fact that Sarkozy started the Lybian war was also outside of the scope of the trial, sadly.
It's about making sure crimes have consequences, however highly placed you and your friends are.
Norman Saunders: Saunders was alleged by the US Drug Enforcement Administration to have accepted $30,000 from undercover agents to ensure safe passage of drugs by permitting safe stopover refuelling of drug flights from Colombia to the United States. Video evidence showed Saunders accepting $20,000 from an agent. Saunders was convicted in July 1985 of conspiracy, though he was acquitted of the charge of conspiring to import drugs into the United States. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined $50,000.
Then he went on to get re-elected. And then had an airport named in his honour. Nuts.
I personally agree with you that shouldn’t be the case, but given Sarkozy made his entire political career about being tough on crime and harsher mandatory sentencing, I’d be appalled if he received any sort of special treatment.
It really is not. Nobody is benefitting from this politically, and the facts are difficult to ignore.
> jailing him "provisionally" despite his appeal are discretionary decisions of the court so also open to all interpretations depiste the very black and white comments her
It’s just how it’s done in cases like this, and he can thank himself for having normalised it.
First, this is mostly about things that happened before his election.
The tribunal ruled he did not personally benefit, and he did not directly solicit money to finance his campaign either.
However, some of his closest allies (who would become his ministers later) did the latter. The tribunal could not find any direct proof he was involved but ruled there were enough "converging indications" that he knew and did nothing to stop it.
But it is also clear that judges (who are notable left-leaning, if not far-left) are much more efficient at prosecuting right-wing figures (Fillon, for 0 reason this time).
Formal proofs of this illegal financing have been linked to two of his closest collaborators but not him directly. He is so convicted for "association de malfaiteurs" wich mean "partnership with criminals / wrongdoers".
The illegal financing also explains what the US call the "Sarkozy war", which what a very odd move from France.
Note that, despite the formal proofs of the wrong doing, Sarkozy has the support of most major medias AND from the current president Macron which is not exactly the same party as Sarkozy (but close enough). That suggests politically motivated prosecution is very unlikely.
A very interesting documentary [2] explains all this. There's also Netflix series that I didn't watch though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Tapie
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_football_bribery_scanda...
[2] https://lcp.fr/programmes/les-mille-et-une-vies-de-bernard-t...
Looking at economic trends, it does seem like optimizing for quality of life of the boomer generation at the cost of the future generations, which is not so nice.
Without major cuts to its welfare state (which is Europe's most massive one as a percentage of GDP), France's finances are unsustainable. The necessary tax revenue just isn't there and you cannot borrow indefinitely to spend on entitlements.
As of current trends, if something explodes the Eurozone, it will be endless accumulation of French sovereign debt. It is the same as once Greece was, but ten times as big.
There is no formal proofs, but as you say, (the judges deliberated that) there is enough "converging indications" to support the idea that the short explanation is true.
This person humiliated our country, and we're glad our justice put him behind bars
Couldn't he setup some crypto fund instead? Or investment in ballroom? Or simply just receive present, let say plane, instead of money? Would that help him in this case?
Speaking as someone who isn't french,
If Sarkozy received the same funding from Obama it would have beem extremely shady.
From Gaddafi it sounds outright treacherous.
We just still have a working judiciary system. But for how long? It barely correctly financed and his independence his attacked every days in the oligarchy controlled medias.
I hope you fix your judiciary system one day.
The documentary The Bibi Files was a particularly interesting examination of the allegations against him and his almost shrugging response to them [0]. And going back to America, a week ago Trump asked the Israeli president to preemptively pardon Netanyahu during his speech at their parliament [1], which I find to be concerning on all possible levels.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33338697/
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-urges-israel...
Sarkozy and all of his billionaire media allies are already trying their hardest to undermine the credibility of the justice system at every turn with extremely dangerous rhetoric; I dread to imagine what this would have been like had they gone with ever-so-slightly-less-safe charges
I read it the other way around. You're arguing for preferencial treatment on the ground that any inconvenience could be misconstrued as politically motivated.
In the meantime you're seeing a case involving organized crime, lieutenants caught red-handed, and charges extended to the leader of the criminal enterprise. You're not seeing any doubt being raised on the charges, only on whether the politician could have political opponents.
"Why?"
"It saves time."
He probably thought he could get away with it. But make no mistake this is a political play and everyone involved is as dirty as the Paris Seine.
This blend of comments strike me as odd. Are you actually complaining that a judicial system is too efficient at catching corruption at high levels? Is this bad? What point are you trying to make, exactly?
Karine Le Marchand expressing her support is one thing, identifiyng herself as being part of the same caste as Sarkozy, but seeing the same support from regular folks, who have most certainly been screwed over by the ex-President...
As the most serious cases at the national level are often tried in Paris, the high-security wing is filled with drug traffickers, murderers and terrorists, at least for the duration of the proceedings, which can take years in France.
Sarkozy is in the VIP wing with two bodyguards nearby. These are hardly the conditions one would imagine for isolation.
The Elite all don't get along with each other, but in a "civilized" world where there is enough loot to share with everyone, they don't need to directly attack each other. Unless something really threatens and freaks them out.
But once in a while they authorize their foot soldiers in the military, judiciary, legislatures, media to attack each other. Which is all just a side show - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_of_elites
Maybe the Seine was heavily covered as dirty by the media but remember that you shouldn't swim in the San Francisco bay either. Wait for the next JO to hear about water quality problem with the LA beach area under rain.
The tribunal didn't rule he didn't personally benefit. It ruled that he conspired to corrupt the leaders of Lybia to steal money from the Lybian people and fund his electoral campaign. In my book becoming president of France is certainly a "personal benefit". There are numerous factual evidence, documents from Lybia, fund transfers, secret meetings of his closest friends with Abdullah Senussi, who has been convicted to life in prison in France for orchestrating the bombing of UTA flight 772 which resulted in 170 deaths and is also currently investigated for another plane bombing.
The money he got allowed him to spend about twice the allowed amount on his campaign, giving him an unfair advantage in the election. In other words he dealt with terrorists to potentially steal the presidential election. What Sarkozy did is extremely severe, I'd call that high treason. He got far less that he deserved.
Also it's worth mentioning that it is his third conviction. He already got a 2 years and 1 year sentence which were confirmed in appeal in other cases.
This is by design and not an unintended consequence.
Justice in this country is only served thanks to the incredible determination of the members of the judiciary.
No offense but the french people should thank god their criminal in control didn't go all the way through turning the country into a shit show in the process.
As I said before I believe we live in a global time in which countries must embrace the rule of law systematically in order to survive as democracies. Otherwise you just get a kleptocracy with extra steps, just like in the US, some of Europe and Russia.
But got covered by Wikipédia "https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_de_la_Sant%C3%A9", so I did called it a nickname too.
I'm pretty sure it can be called a "Métonymie de lieu" but I just didn't want to insist about that, it feels a little pedantic.
Owner of Milan FC and involved in constructing large parts of Milan city. Multiple people in his parties were condemned for corruption, the co-founder of his main party “Forza Italia” called Marcello Dell’Utri went in jail for concussion with Mafia. Berlusconi had a mafia boss - Vittorio Mangano - living permanently in his mansion near Milan. Owner of large construction companies, movie companies, a large bank, publishing companies, multiple newspapers, a lot of investments and three of the main TVs in Italy, and never went in jail a single day. He was able to create laws ad personam, like that the tree most important political positions in the country got immunity from law persecution, and he also was able to shorten the limitation period for crimes, in order to avoid charges.
He got sentenced or prosecuted for: fiscal fraud for his Mediaset TVs, underage prostitution, prostitution racket (some of the girls were appearing in TVs and got elected as politicians to get $$$ government pensions), mafia murders ‘92/93 (where Falcone e Borsellino died, the two judges that brought to international attention the danger of Italian Mafia), multiple accounting frauds, criminal appropriations, and corruption. He had few personal lawyers which the main one of them, Niccolò Ghedini, got elected in parliament.
When I read about Sarkozy or Trump, I think they’re just bad clones of Berlusconi. They read his manual. Congratulations to France to take politics and corruption more seriously then Italians.
P.S. Berlusconi was best friend with Putin and Gheddafi.
It is unfortunately way less efficient at jailing or expelling multi-reoffenders, who have entered the country illegally, then broken the law multiple times, been in front of judges 30, 40, sometimes 100 times, been officially notified that they have to leave France ("OQTF"), yet, are still free to roam around until they're 101st crime ends up in the news and everyone asks "how come the non-politicized judges let them out 100 times before?"
85% of prison sentences of more than two years also carry “exécution provisoire”: https://www.justice.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/migrations/p... (page 2). Sentences of more than 2 years are not the norm though.
> He will most likely ask the courts to review the execution of the sentence until the appeal in the next few days.
He already did.
The tribunal acknowledged no direct evidence linked Sarkozy to receiving or handling the funds and that the disputed flows weren't established as having served his campaign. Yet the conviction rested on a "bundle of concordant indices" rather than established facts.
The irony: Sarkozy spent his political career advocating for tougher criminal laws and harsher punishments. The "association de malfaiteurs" law was reintroduced in 1986, and he championed its application throughout his tenure. Now he's imprisoned under the very provision he helped expand—convicted on evidence of intent to prepare a crime rather than proof of an actual crime, exactly the kind of broad prosecutorial power he once argued was necessary.
He got bitten by his own sword.
It seems that when you cross a certain invisible threshold "justice" applies just a bit differently. Same in Argentina with corrupt and ex-robber Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
The general difference is that "convicted" is neutral in tone. "Condemned" includes a particular tone, and religious and moral connotations, which might be unfitting in some cases.
Edit: Take the above with some grain of salt, might be at least incomplete, maybe somewhat wrong. After consulting the internet, I've found out that there are even more meanings and nuances, which I didn't know about. Sorry for being an arrogant non-native-speaker trying to score internet points ;)
How about it if by a fuller acceptance that power corrupts, we have the head of government only serve for one term and automatically be taken to (actual) prison once their time is done. They would then have an expedited trial by a socioeconomically diverse jury representing the population, judge their overreach in different areas, and how long of a sentence they should be given; at best, they would be released after a month or two for time served. Afterwards, unless this has been explicitly revoked from them due to gross misconduct, the former head of government would be given a sufficiently generous stipend to live and travel without ever needing to work again, and encouraged to spend the rest of their lives on charitable pursuits.
The big risk I see here is that by stripping some of the long-term power from the head of government, it would lead to a re-concentration of powers in a head of party role, or other behind-the-scenes power brokers, but the intent here is that the head of government once elected is explicitly given the ability to overreach, and particularly knowing that they'll be set for life, they'll have the freedom to act independently, in what hopefully would be their take on the country's best interests, and a desire to leave a positive legacy. And furthermore, I think that restricting the ascension to power to those who are willing to take on that prison time would attract people who are a bit less vain than the typical crop of candidates, and at the same time reduce the stigma of prison in general, and hopefully lead to political interest in improving prison conditions.
Sure, but also, he did the crime. There can not really be any doubt for the people who followed the trial, and the judges have shown extreme caution, rejecting charges when there was the slightest doubt.
The political opinion or lack thereof of judges is irrelevant.
Two wings, two different moods, one prison.
On the other hand, condemned is specifically about being sentenced to death -or sometimes life in prison or some similarly hard punishment-. Which is also why a building is said to be condemned when it is set to be demolished.
In Argentina the lives of people of an entire country have been ruined because of the last 20 years of robbery from the state arcs.
Yet every disgusting politician is out there or has served a laughable sentence. And what do you get in turn after ripping off a country? A home prision benefit.
Here's a weird observation. I know the names of several US supreme court judges, and their right/left lean, despite never having lived there. I've lived in four other countries, and I might know one judge due to him having a funny name.
What also doesn't tend to happen in Europe is questioning the legitimacy of the system. People can get sentenced and they just... accept it.
That's unfortunately not universally true. This is most obvious when considering the death penalty.
Norway exemplifies a rehabilitative justice model and it is effective, evidenced by low recidivism rates.
Unfortunately, the trend for more rule based order has reversed. European governments are all struggling when the "who cares about rules" governments are full steam ahead. Even if they have net negative approval, they have plenty of fanatical supporters, they hold full narrative control through the media which is owned by their super rich allies. Oh and by the way this is happening because the "rule based world" folks screwed up and weren't fair either.
It's going to be worse before it gets better. The west is going through a phase and all I hope is that would be too destructive. Thankfully, the world isn't made just from "the west", so I guess its not the end for the humanity - yet.
But now he is also the subject of his own policies and it does not like that. Looks like justice is ok just when it is not affecting him personally.
His attitude is totally disgusting and indecent.
Since a few days, there is an abundance of cover and articles in most major newspaper here with propaganda and repeated lies supporting him. It's hard to imagine but non stop. You have everyday interviews of his family saying that it is an injustice, that he did nothing, that the judgement was rigged, that he was a great men that served France and so should not be treated like everyone else. Article about how sad the poor family is. Number of articles repeating friends of him verbatim s that the judgement was fake.
Almost none speaking about the facts, the grounds for his sentence, the big number of other trials against him that are running. And also the other definitive convictions he got. Like for attempting to bribe a head prosecutor to get insider info about his case. Using a prepaid line opened with a fake name...
But what you see in the end is that 90% of medias in France belongs to a few wealthy families that are friends with him.
I'm just pointing out that the golden rule requires us to offer human rights even to people who we might think are scum. Because that's the only way to secure those rights for ourselves.
The current sentence is for the illegal financing of his presidential campaign to the tune of 50 million euro, which is well above the legal cost cap. Although the amounts are benign compared to the amount of bribery seen in the US presidential runs, it is still unfair democratically and should be punished harshly accordingly. Interestingly, this case isn't motivated by financial greed, as in bribery for his own financial interests, but by power, i.e., help win the presidential election.
It should be noted that most of the bigger parties are known to have "alternative" accounting tricks so you can be certain that they also don't fully respect the funding cap, but they probably get away with differences (that we know of/suspect) of a few (tens of?) percent.
Sarkozy was not only well, well above that, with order O(200%), it was also done with money coming from a known dictator: Gaddafi. This brings a lot of interesting additional ethical questions to the table. Such as: what was the quid pro quo expected from such a payment? Or: what role did it play in Sarkozy ordering the bombing of Libya?
It could also be considered politically motivated in the sense that the judges themselves are not a-political (and it's fully in their rights to have a political opinion) and that some of the high-profile cases in the past have been handled by judges of a different political leaning. And without putting the impartiality of the justice system into doubt, some questions have been raised when some of the judges were a bit too vocal in the criticism of their political opponents.
And in parallel, although the judiciary system in France theoretically acts independently from the executive branch, the zones of influence are a bit murky and there are some indirect ways through which some pressure can be exerted onto the judges to facilitate, or in other cases slow down some cases.
So you could be certain that such a high-profile case was not done without the go-ahead of the executive. In that sense, it can be considered politically motivated.
Which doesn't mean Sarkozy shouldn't go to prison. He absolutely should. But please also clean-up all the other crooks, and go strongly after those that enriched themselves at the cost of the country. There are plenty of them, with lots of low-hanging fruit.
"Humanity" as in "the species homo sapiens sapiens", yes, that will survive.
But "humanity" as in "societies ruled by foundational human rights and democracy"? Not if Trump's USA, China, Russia and Modi's India have their will.
Personally I don't have problem with that, my stuck is with the decay of the west. I like the European way of life, makes me sad to think that it might be coming to an end and that the rest of my life I will have to care deeply about the implications of geopolitics and power instead of more important things higher in the Maslow pyramid.
Fortunately he failed to do it when he was in power, and this is in my opinion a big factor in his current demise.
And sure, belonging to a communist-leaning syndicate which publicly takes political stances (one being to say "dont vote for Sarkozy") has strictly no influence on how you deliver sentencing, nor does the famous incident "mur des cons" in 2013.
Sarkozy played no small part in making this happen.
We should absolutely wish for all prisoners to be treated decently, and it is a terrible thing that the matter is only brought up when someone like Sarkozy has to ensure a portion of what regular prisoners endure.
And worst of all, his political followers are all lamenting about the conditions he is in while remaining hardliners for the rest of the prisoners. You are right that OP should not wish ill on Sarkozy, whose distress is real and painful to see. But OP's frustration is understandable to anyone who cares even a little for the welfare of regular prisoners in France.
https://www.tf1info.fr/justice-faits-divers/nicolas-sarkozy-...
So there's something there for everyone I guess.
If we follow the French justice, in my country (Greece) about 10% of people including almost all the politicians of the last decades should be in jail.
An other French politician, Francois Fillon, tried that with bribes as gift including some luxury Suits. In addition of some public money redirection to his own family.
And it did not play well for him either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fillon_affair
Ironically, he was Sarkozy's Prime Minster.
The party that they both come from (The republicans, previously UMP, previously RPR) has a long history of financial abuses and associated judgements.
The only "new" thing here is that it explicitly condemned a previous President.
Let's put things straight, both of them are criminals, giving them a treatment of favor would be insane.
And to show how morally corrupted they are, both of them have been really loud about a no tolerance justice system. I guess that speaks for itself.
I don't disagree with him going to jail: but it's one heck of a corrupt country where they all have their hands in the cookie jar.
Most french politicians who served at the EU, for example, have friends and family as "employees" on their payroll (well, on the EU citizens' payroll). Same at non-EU level: it's called "emplois fictifs" in french ("fictional jobs"). Soooo many stories about politicians at so many local, regional, national and supra-national levels engaging in "emplois fictifs".
So many mayors in France have dirty money on their hands. Where for example they block construction permits then, once joyfully greased with cash, allow the construction permits.
But Sarkozy was right-wing and the EU, and France in particular, is ultra left-wing. So it's good to put a right-wing president in jail.
Once again: I've got nothing against him going to jail. But we're talking about a country were judges are openly leftists. They're not impartial.
It's all rotten and disgusting.
And why do you think all the leftist french mainstream media root for right-wing Sarkozy? Because these media are at the hand of corrupt politicians who think a politician going to jail is a dangerous precedent. They're nearly all corrupt, so they're shitting their pants to see that even a president is sent to jail.
But yup: one politician in jail. Great. Only 9999 more to go. And corrupt judges.
And then there are the many other trials involving Sarkozy and those around him...
Not really. It is more complex than that.
There is two systems within the system for the "penal" (judiciary) in France:
- Le parquet, with a "procureur" who indirectly under the influence of the executive power.
- The "Juge d'Instruction". They are independent judges called only for complex affairs that are in charge of proof gathering and with more or less free hands.
Sarkozy affairs landed in the second system.
Politicans tend to hate the second systems for obvious reasons.
It is worth to notice that Sarkozy himself tried to reform the system and remove the "Juge d'instruction" entirely but ultimately failed.
I mean, jail should be a punishment, right?
Sorry, why is this such a big deal?
We don't ever use "sentence" in a legal context (it still exists but is old fashioned), things diverged quite a bit it seems between those languages.
How much of this is driven by contrarian and counter-cyclical reporting?
I’m not familiar with French media, but I see the same pattern in every country where I’ve kept up with the news: Media starts being favorable to a topic when it’s up and coming, switching to being highly critical when that topic becomes mainstream, then reverts again to exploring the positives when the topic falls out of favor.
You see it even with people like Elizabeth Holmes. News stories about her fraud were everywhere until she had to go to jail, but now the news has swung to humanizing her, claiming her sentencing was excessive, focusing on the angle of a mother separated from her children, and confusingly ignoring her fraud at all.
It’s all designed to be counter-narrative and rise waves of controversy. The more controversial, the more shares and views.
By 2024 they were 100% in lock-step with the party line that all cases were fake news lawfare (but wouldn't engage with detailed argument, of course) and in 2025 they are gaslighting me about ever having had those arguments at all. The only thing keeping me sane is the correspondence that I kept proving that our conversations weren't a product of my own fevered imagination.
Clearly, all the right-wing papers that have traditionnaly supported him (Le Figaro, Match) and all the hard-right-wing papers (owned by Bolloré, Arnault, etc..) that have _personnal_ ties to him are playing their "opinion" part.
I don't think public media is defending him at all. Left or Center-left papers are not (obviously.)
The tie breaker would be: "what is TF1 20h saying" (this is, no matter what new media says, still the one thing that most people watch and treat as "the news") - and I don't think they have been "blatantly" defending him.
Justice as prevention is secondary - and arguably ineffective - or we'd have no crime, no recidivism, no addicts, nobody acting with obviously negative personal outcomes.
Which are the "leftist french mainstream media" rooting for Sarkozy ?
The "leftist french mainstream media" I can think of would be Libération, Le Monde, Le Nouvel Obs, France Inter...
Do you have a link to articles where any of those are "defending" Sarkozy, cause quite frankly I missed it.
There is a reason why administrations don't go after obvious, in-your-face crimes committed by previous administrations/politicians. They all hate each other, but they are also terrified that if they prosecute previous administrations (for legitimate crimes), they'll be the target when someone else is in power (even if they themselves didn't commit any crimes).
I suppose it might be easier to prevent misbehavior by highest officials of the land by having stricter scrutiny, laws etc than prosecuting them after the fact, but who watches the watchdogs? Who watches the judiciary? As an ordinary citizen, it is exhausting to just even follow the news.
And if it is this bad in democracies, imagine how it is like in countries like Russia.
Lots of bureaucrats everywhere.
The fact that a new publicist was hired by her before all the sympathetic press started coming out is enough for me to believe that there's a link there and not a natural news swing cycle.
https://www.theverge.com/news/611549/elizabeth-holmes-people...
A nitpick of mine is how Trump having the documents wasn’t the case against him. The case against Trump was an obstruction case because he lied and concealed the documents from authorities, going so far as shuffling them between properties, having his lawyers give false statements, and defying subpoenas.
This differentiates Trumps document case from everyone else’s (ie Bidens); the right loves to use this as an example of DOJ weaponization when they couldn’t be more different.
https://schengenvisainfo.com/news/number-of-americans-moving... https://www.tresor.economie.gouv.fr/Articles/8c273940-72b7-4...
The past ~10 years have been a serious masks off moment. I long for who we were in the past, but I sometimes wonder if we ever were that, or if it was just a more well maintained facade. But this current nonsense? Yeah, I'm not particularly upset about giving another bloc having their time in the limelight, because at this point somebody calling what we've become to be grounded on 'foundational human rights and democracy' is plainly nauseating.
Out of that context, it's usually condenado the one used.
1. They are the voice of a group of millions of people, and therefore a perception will exist that an attack on the politician is an attack on those people as well 2. Sure seems like a lot of them are compromised in some way, so any time one is targeted it will always seem selective in the moment
I don't know how much that intersects with what you're observing, and I don't really have easy answers.
"First-world" is Cold War terminology meaning Western countries and their allies, as opposed to second-world Warsaw Pact states and their allies, versus third-world non-aligned states. This would include death penalty states like Pakistan and Iran, who at one point were British dominions.
If we instead mean "developed countries" (as defined by the IMF), then 4 out of 60 developed countries have not abolished the death penalty: they are the United States, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.
The other 49 states continuing to use the death penalty (including China) are not considered "developed countries" by the IMF.
Enslaving our media to what triggers the cravings of the masses was probably one of the dumbest thing we did. And we owe it, like many other terrible things, to ad industry.
It's a parasite of the economy and cancer of society. Serves no useful purpose beyond what an open access database of all products and services could cheaply fulfill.
I guess there are some edge cases. Drug smugglers for example are probably aware of the rough probability of detection and weigh it up against the length of jail time. But I reckon Sarkozy thought he'd just get away with it and didn't even consider what the potential punishment would be.
[1] (French Wikipedia article about the affair) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_du_%C2%AB_Mur_des_cons...
Was there ever a time or place where this was not true?
Does that still even exist? The problem I see in politics is that everyone has their hand in the cookie jar to some degree.
You don't get into politics unless you already have your hand in there, or are given the option to prove yourself where moving up the ranks involves helping someone getting their hand in there, with the unspoken assumption that they'll return the favor. And of course once you're in and have your hand in there, why rock the boat and waste all that effort?
> President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes.
It's worth considering then that the next person who has the option to do this might behave differently, given Sarkozy has not got away with it.
the money didn't go in his pocket, but he benefited from it by being elected president (partly thanks to this illegal funding), which to this day gives him a life of money and various privileges.
Sarkozy ran a right wing populist campaign promising "zero tolerance" and being "tough on crime". He helped, through the policies passed under his term, create a huge overcrowding issue within our jail system. It would be only fair for him to experience all of that for himself, after the many heinous crimes he's committed.
I have been opposed to these policies in forever, and advocate for the humane treatment of prisoners. Now that Sarkozy is finally facing some retribution for his crimes, we should all feel sorry for him and bend over backwards to make his life more comfortable. Fuck that. He should reap what he sowed. I don't believe in that "they go low, we go high" bullshit.
This part is especially fascinating because I have heard of, and even had, remarkably similar experiences. The only real thing is the perpetual now. It's not even that they aren't curious or aware of what they said previously, they even emphatically deny their own words.
I don't know if you remember when Ebola was a big news topic because there were two or three cases in the U.S., but I had a family member insisting it was "just the beginning" and was going to get worse. A year later he said there's "probably a lot of stuff happening that's not reported yet". Two years later he forgot he ever said it.
To use the example from a sibling comment, if a person kills a child and the father kills this guy out of vengeance .. it will do those children good, who can now live in safety afterwards from that person.
But if in reality the murderer also had family who did not believe he murdered anyone in the first place now set out to seek justice/vengeance, then yes, it becomes a war .. which is why we have courts and police nowdays, but what justice is, is still rather arbitarily defined. Concretely it means enforcing the law. And laws are written by people.
In Hungary and Poland, they are specific, time-bound events with important institutional implications and unique factual circumstances. "It's always been that way" is risky because it can be used to airbrush away specific moral urgency with vagueness and false equivalences, and even functions to apologize for active advancements of authoritarianism as they are happening in real time.
I don't know. I suppose there is behavior that is illegal and behavior that is unethical. I guess there aren't that many politicians that are ethical, but there may be some (hopefully?) who don't do downright illegal things? Maybe, I dunno.
The fact that collectively we all have such low expectations and such low opinions about our politicians/government says a lot about the sorry state of affairs :(
Putting an active president in jail was not something the country wanted to risk, I'm not convinced prior Supreme Courts would have agreed to that either in other situations. If Trump did not win the election he would have faced serious consequences, beyond the millions of dollars he already owes from other trials.
Sarkozy is easier to put in jail because he's not in power.
Tribal alignment. If the tribe had moved on from Trump and he had lost the election, your relatives would still be grounded in these conversations and reality.
Trump is still the leader of their party and cultural movement, They have zero incentive to acknowledge the truth if it conflicts with these loyalties. If anything, such an action would be dangerous and risk their standing within their tribe, So the loyalty test then becomes denying what's clear and obvious to prove you are still a loyal member.
It’s also a very dangerous precedent to bring criminal charges against the presumptive (and in hindsight, actual) winner of the at time forthcoming presidential election, even if some of the cases have merit. Regardless of the merit of the cases, it’s impossible for that scenario to not be at least partly politically motivated and to have the effect of trying to disenfranchise half the country.
For example: https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/110123/nic... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/15/france-investi...
Much like a brushless motor controller, if you pull towards the direction the rotors already faces, it's uninteresting. But if you lead the momentum in a different direction...
That these same candidates, when elected, haven’t even attempted such a thing, even when they have an aligned Congress, doesn’t seem to register at all. They hear their lying talking heads say it again the next time, and believe it whole-heartedly. It’s so weird. You’d think at some point they’d start to wonder why it never happened.
I'll take the time to recommend everybody go see the Northern Lights one time in their lives. Not only are they beautiful, the brain has a hard time contemplating something so huge and far away that the eyes discern no parallax. But unlike the moon and stars, they move!
No, if Joe Biden had the same facts against him the entire right wing -- including you -- would be eagerly prosecuting them and singing of the high-minded justice in doing so. Have you forgotten "lock her up!"?
"President is above the law" is a far more dangerous precedent to set, and "nominees are above the law" is out-of-this-word nuts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country#...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
You sound like you actually don’t know much about France. For instance your accusations about left wing media rooting for Sarkozy has no foundation. The judges being biased toward left is groundless as well. Many left wing politicians have been condemned by French justice.
The craziest example for me was NYC congestion pricing. When it was about to happen, all the reporting was about all of the downsides of the tolls starting. A week after the New York Governor "indefinitely paused" congestion pricing, the reporting was all about the downsides of the tolls not starting.
It's similar to the people who push against unionization for fear of being retaliated against, only to get capriciously laid off during the next cyclical downturn. Seek your justice now, as delay is a form of denial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_during...
Your claim that the judges are red is a popular right wing fantasy
Btw, I've seen chinese tankies and I've seen russian tankies. First time I see a gadaffian tankie.
I am not right wing, have never voted for Trump or chanted "lock her up", and no, I believe in principles and not party loyalty and would have felt the same had it been Biden.
I was also against Clinton's impeachment for the same reason. Stormy Daniels and Monica Lewinsky were both private sexual matters, and to try to use ancillary technical crimes (obstruction; campaign finance) to remove your political opponent is a bad precedent and it's bad when both parties do it.
Your reply itself also proves my point. You say that the right wing would have prosecuted Biden on the same facts, not that the same left wing New York DA would have. Justice shouldn't be left wing and right wing.
But keep thumping yourself on the chest. What do all the deaths and suffering matter ? The bad guy has been beheaded after all and the War stockholders got richer! Mission Accomplished!
The purposes are punishment are deterrence, retribution, and rehabilitation [1]. (Incapacitation is also typically considered in sentencing.)
The potential deterrence and retributive benefits of cruel have been known for ages. It’s why jailers did it. Those potential benefits are balanced against rehabilitation. But that doesn’t make it the supreme consideration, particularly for crimes of corruption.
The crimes of the Gaddafi regime are one thing, the ensuing chaos is another. We celebrate the end of a brutal regime and we despair at the death and destruction that followed.
It’s not fancy around these parts to give the example of El Salvador, because most of us live in a very comfortable bubble and can pretend we support all these fancy thing of “reintegration and not punishment” but go ask what the people in El Salvador think about how their country got rid of criminal violence.
For a modern look at this, look at the xeer system of Somalia, where victims will almost always prefer payment/compensation over punishment.
Imprisonment is largely an invention of the state, as they push victims and inter-personal conflict aside, and rather use their tools to subordinate the citizen to the order of the state and then charge the victim taxpayers the cost of imprisonment and funnel the money into their buddies running and working the prisons.
At least in France he’ll serve a sentence- in the US we might have elected him again and let him make the charges go away.
Most of French media, specially newspapers, are money sinks only surviving because they are useful to push the rent-seeking business or ideological agenda of their owners (Dassault, Bouygues, Lagardere, Arnault, Bettencourt, Saade, Pinault, Niel).
Also, just for context, Martin Bouygues, Bernard Arnault and Vincent Bollore, the respective owners of TF1 (main French TV channel), Le Parisien (major newspaper) and CNews/Europe1 (major TV channel & radio) are personal friends of Sarkozy (a la "witness at your wedding, god father of your son or let's celebrate your election on my yacht" kind of way).
The Figaro (main right-wing newspaper in France) and its owners, the Dassault family, are also not far away.
Seeing the Figaro website was actually quite funny. Because the evidences are so damming, their main page was textbook "how to propagate fake news with plausible deniability". It was mainly pro-Sarkozy Editorials/Tribunes from non-journalists people, articles titled with quotes from Sarkozy's supporters and the few articles actually on the case were about the side stories.
French press ownership map:
https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/PPA#&gid=1&pid=1
There are only two truly independent major media left in France: Mediaparte (the ones we have to thanks for Sarkozy's well deserved condemnations) and Le Canard Enchaine (a bunch of scandals, but lately, the "Affaire Fillion").
The rest is either owned by billionaires, state run, or is far smaller and doesn't have the aura, size & credibility to reveal such scandals.
The incredible successes of Trumps second term so far will encourage and empower populists everywhere.
Faith based society is not just the domain of the religious. 1984 been the norm since well before Orwell wrote the book.
The only way the current wave of right-wing media ends if by finding a new way to fund media & making it impossible to concentrate in the ends of a few rich folks.
And good luck with that, folks don't want to pay for media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eighth_Amendment_...
Big head political pundits literally go on Fox News and blame a Democrat President for Epstein's death, and you have to tell them "Uh, no, Trump was president then, and it was his administration in control" and they have this insane double take look like they can't possibly remember that.
Blaming Obama for the Hurricane Katrina response wasn't a fluke.
My father is a general contractor and viscerally experienced Trump's first term stupidity tripling his material costs. He still voted for him again, as "good for the economy", or "the democrats have gone too far". He blames democrats for the regional grocery chain hiring gay people as managers, which is funny, because they hire those people because they are the right kind of MBA types. He literally can't recognize the problem when it's in his very face.
My father has never been outwardly sexist and always demonstrated respect for strong women and their ability to participate in normal society. He still was convinced by right wing media that he should be afraid of women in the cockpit.
The soybean farmers were fucked by Trump's first term, and he gave them over $10 billion dollars. They all voted for him again, and it happened the exact same way.
Like, at this point, how do you convince people who change their memory of reality to fit their ideology?
I miss my suburban home after a week there, every time.
Also I Wanted to say that French jail is NO JOKE. You already hurt from inhumane solitary, or else you have a cell with a TV (there is indeed a TV) but to socialize with psychopatic and/or "exotic" people. They're not "kind", and they're not nice.
Even other exotic people had a rough time. It is filled with aggressivity, honor struggles, ect.. JAIL IS NO JOKE. On top of that, it spans a looooong time... You cannot realize how loooong it is to be in jail, it feels forever. People who never went to jail cannot realize that.
I am basically thinking nowadays that jail is torture and it should not be a thing. It is very torture... Let us militate for the end of that.
Or maybe it's a simple change of strategy; the goal is now "rehabilitate image" rather than "prevent conviction" - and with the new strategy, a new team.
The best way to notice this in yourself (I think) is if there are arguments for the other side of an issue that you simply avoid discussion of altogether. When they are brought up, you attack the source, personally attack the person repeating them, or refuse the discussion on some other terms. This is reflexively doing propaganda, on a small scale, but as a reaction to being cornered.
If you find yourself in this situation, resorting to repeating slogans you've heard rather than treating the argument exactly as you would treat an argument in an uncontroversial context, it's better to shut up, listen, and reflect.
The only moral position is to be a collection of any valid argument you can find, always trying to clarify their degree of soundness. Whenever you deviate from that, you're defying reason, and weakening civil society (which relies on secular protocols.)
If you consume propaganda with that mindset, you notice because it has very little useful content at all. It's astounding how long media can go on about a subject without saying anything, or making any coherent claim, and scary when you see people who seem to get something out of that avalanche and they can't quite explain how they got there. It's how Saddam did 9/11.
...with one national flaw. All that lovely food is available strictly between the hours of 12 and 2 (for lunch) and 7 and 9 (for dinner). If you don't eat on the precise timetable as everyone else (say, jetlag) then you don't eat.
I do not want to be all about doom and gloom but I do not think that there is any media on this planet that delivers factual information without lying (either directly or by omission) to shape the opinion. And no, having a narrative is not lying as long as all the facts are presented, which allows the reader to make their own judgement whether they are buying into the narrative or not. Unfortunately, today journalists/editors believe that they have to report in a specific way as otherwise the “fight” would be lost.
You're implying that imprisonment makes people offend more - perhaps the simpler explanation is that most criminals will commit crimes when they get the chance, especially prolific criminals. Prison takes them off the streets and stops them victimising more people - this is helpful.
Nah that's horse shit. Trump has been trying to ride outright populism since Ross Perot showed you could be a moron with no experience and people would still insist you were somehow a genius because you had a million dollars.
Trump's first campaign was nothing more than the republican party being utterly ravenous to demonstrate the hatred that AM radio and Fox News had been cooking up for a generation.
The tea party movement was not organic, it was invented and astroturfed into existence. The outcome was not planned, but it was entirely intentional.
Trump was the biggest source for the birtherism bullshit remember?
The people who believe haitian immigrants eat dogs, that portland is currently on fire, or that Mr "grab them by the pussy, they let you do it" and "I used to watch all the ms teen USA girls change" is somehow not the primary pedophile problem were never serious about justice, never cared about it being applied equally, and will never be satisfied with an actual fair justice system. They believe that crime is at an all time high despite no evidence. They believe the man that has quite literally scammed them time and time again is a "great businessman" or knows what he is doing at all.
The people who say "Obamacare is the worst thing" and yet "Don't you dare take away my ACA coverage" at the same time do not care about justice.
These people keep electing Republicans despite mountains of objective evidence that Republicans nearly alone are responsible for America's current budget and debt problems.
A lot of these people are utterly furious that the Federal Government forced them to treat black people like people in the 60s and have been holding a grudge ever since. You don't scrub rainbows off of cross walks because you are upset about justice.
The people cheering on the black bagging of American citizens and hate fueled oppression and the literal suppression of free expression or thought do not care about justice
The people who were upset by the injustice of 2008 were the Occupy movement. Where are their political candidates?
To be fair, le Figaro was The French conservative newspaper long before the Dassault's ownership (like +100 years prior), so it's more a case of "Le Figaro has a more comfortable budget to push its views".
The closest I can think of in the US context is Bezos owning the Washington Post to both push his personal views and Amazon's interests.
Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy for his son).
In Ireland, we prefer to just tie them up in tribunals for the rest of their lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Haughey (PM til '92, under investigation from '97 to '06, at which point he died)
No, there's not. The incentives are hopelessly misaligned.
If the biggest, most profitable story is the destruction of civilization itself, then the news media -- which like so many other institutions in our society is owned by people too old or too wealthy to suffer the eventual consequences -- will cheer it on.
For example reddit is consistently an echo chamber in the reverse direction. Another example is any clips selected by cable news are doubted by republicans for intentional malicious framing. Which is fair enough since I’ve seen plenty of intentionally obtuse takes of things said which are already unacceptable.
Why would I not believe candidates who have spent their political life advocating the banning of the most popular rifle in America? When someone shows you what they are, believe them.
If Democrats want people to stop reacting that way, they need to commit to leaving law-abiding gun owners alone, not say "well it'll be fine, believe us" yet continue to campaign for bans and pass idiotic restrictions that do little to control crime.
The BBC article is using the two terms interchangably. Very few readers are concerned about the distinction you are making.
A politician who is no longer able to exert influence going to prison isn't a big loss to them, in fact it's arguably a good outcome. They get to have had favors while Sarkozy was in office and an angry France now that's he's out.
I agree that the point is punishment and deterrence to other public officials, proving no one is truly out of reach of the law.
What I meant is that general media (either social or legacy) has often strong biases and narratives and at certain times it gets too much to the point of propaganda.
But, if you're not very intimate in some topic, or have not been part of the events it's not that obvious.
Few examples.
1. Almost a million people protested the war in Gaza few weeks ago here in Italy, in many cities, but if you turned on the tv (any channel really) or read the news this was skipped and instead the entirety of the focus was on few limited clashes with the entire narrative being built about how if you protest for Gaza you're automatically violent and antisemitic. Nonsense.
1.5 At an anti-Covid protest in Piazza San Giovanni, a place that comfortably holds half a million people, the place was ultra full, as packed as during concerts...But ask the police and the official numbers were below 10k. Ridiculous, it was at least 15 times as much. I wasn't part of the protests but lived nearby so I had a full account.
2. Around 15 years ago our main airline (Alitalia) was in terrible shape and Air France-KLM wanted to buy it out, pay the debts and retain most of the workforce. Non stop bombarding on every outlet about how we could not sell our main company, and that taxpayers would foot the bill. The bombarding went on with plenty of interviews of how Alitalia staff was in favor of this operation, but I had several friends working for the company and actually the opposite was true: most of them supported the merger rather than the bailout, but the propaganda did its best to silence these voices.
Again, how would you know about those things if you were not intimately knowledgeable about the topics?
I really don't have time to get knowledgeable and fact check or be part of every world, national and local event. Thus I'm not equipped with distinguishing a genuine fact based narrative from a biased one.
for those who don't watch videos:
you go to jail if a cop doesn't like you. you can only go to prison if you're poor.
Lots of things to criticize Sarkozy for but his support for the intervention is not one of them.
I certainly understand why, I'm not mad about it, just a disappointed. I really liked the food.
Your choices betray your priorities and they are not what you claim.
Not only is it a category error, it is undesireable. Let them fight it out in the special realm of politics and leave our legal systems alone so we can enjoy their benefits.
Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is determined by trial in an open court where defendent has the right to cross examine witnesses and present evidence. Do not assume guilt or innocence based on heavily politisized reporting.
For anyone who is not following the trial, Netanyahu was charged with bribery and a few lesser charges which do not have a direct US equivalents. As soon as the prosecution's case-in-chief was over, the judges publicly notified the prosecution that they should drop the bribery charges as they are unlikely to be able to prove them.
The prosecution case for briberty was built on a hypothesized meeting in which Netanyahu supposedely instructed the director general of the ministry of communications to serve the interests of Elovitch.
During cross examination, the defense managed to prove conclusively that such a meeting, as described, could not have occurred. They also showed that the prosecution had in its possession all the necssary evidence to show such a meeting could not have occurred.
https://www.kan.org.il/content/kan-news/local/409910/ (use Google Translate)
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for providing a link to a website and infographic shining light on the lack of independence in US media. That's HN for you.
The vast majority of people don't look at news media (much less pay for it) unless there's a massive controversy.
The "Juge d'instruction" is not an independent judge that will, out of his own will, start an investigation.
He can start an investigation when asked by the "procureur", directly or indirectly under influence of the executive power, or by private citizens, as a "partie civile". The Sarkozy case was started by the former.
On top of that, the "juge d'instruction" is nominated by the Minister of Justice for a period of 3 years, which means it is, once again, linked to the executive power.
Nope. This picture was found in the office of an Union related to "magistrats".
Magistrats is a broad term that also include Procureurs, Judges but also some Lawyers.
The union is not specifically associated to the position of "Juge d'instruction" by any means.
But yes, generally speaking Politicians do not like Magistrats and Magistrats do not like politicians in France. And honestly, it is more healthy like that.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/07/olympics-fren...
You have editorial like "Sarkozy stays honorable and magnificent despite an illegal non proof based sentence" "His wife so sad that this hero of the nation that did so much, proud father, beloved by his friends, will have to live this hard experience" All days long.
A few examples just to give one newspaper: https://x.com/Le_Figaro/status/1980589938941874341
Or "Sarkozy in jail, the fault of the justice!" https://x.com/Le_Figaro/status/1980567283157139926
And we now all know well what book "he will bring" to show how honorable is this man: "The count of Monte Cristo", "life of Jesus Christ", ...
* An honest acknowledgement of ones behaviour and its impact on others.
* Accepting the consequences of your behaviour, whether legal (such as going to jail), financial, or personal.
* Taking the initiative to make amends where possible.
* Taking steps to improve oneself and/or prevent the same behaviour in future.
I also think there's a kind of fascinating meta question about how the nature of conspiracy theorizing itself response to challenges. I think fact checking is a perfectly legitimate institutional response to it and in a healthy culture it would be appreciated and valued and utilized and would play a role. But the conspiracy ecosystem writ large has had to think of a systematic response to the phenomenon of fact checking and like evolve its way out of vulnerability to it.
One is to dismiss correction for any number of reasons, another is to kind of cultivate a mindset and attitude of frenzied emotional subject shifting that kind of exists and sustains itself in a way that's detached from the habit of factual investigation. But I also think there are such things as like experimenting with principled philosophical stances like relativism or disputing baseline concepts like burden of proof or especially fascinating in the flat Earth corner of the internet are philosophical positions about the relativity of knowledge and extreme subjective and skeptical orientations towards the world and the possibility of data and knowledge.
So even though I actually personally believe in the importance and significance of isolating out and emphasizing specific clear and short criticisms such as conspiracy theorists can't remember the past. I do think they have processes to metabolize and respond to those criticisms and I'm fascinated to learn to what extent they might try to articulate a principle in defense of not remembering the past. Because surely some will give it the college try.
If it were just a toy for his son these things wouldn't have happened - Stephen Colbert canned - Bari Weiss hired to head the news division - $32 million settlement for an easily winnable lawsuit
I've probably missed some. Ellison is a huge Trump supporter and is clearly reshaping CBS to at least go easy on Trump, if not to make it yet another right wing propaganda outlet.
En: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/about-us/article/2023/09/24/two-ma...
Fr: https://www.lemonde.fr/actualite-medias/article/2023/09/24/d...
This was the result of journalist demands, covered here: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/le_monde_daniel_kretinsk...
This structure is also used by Mediapart, owned by Fonds pour une presse libre, and Libération, owned by Fonds de dotation pour une presse indépendante, with Mediapart being inspired to emulate The Manchester Guardian (which has been operated by a trust since 1936): https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/medias/le-monde-appartie...
Successes? He's succeeded at consolidating power because his own party and his partisans on the Supreme Court allow it. Also, destroying stuff is easy. What are these successes of which you speak?
I mean he's going to jail. If anything that's better than most countries. In India, a chief minister who instigated racial riots never even had to go to court for it and he even became the current de facto autocrate
Yes, because removing Gaddafi from power after he yielded to international pressure to give up his nuclear-weapons ambitions makes it less likely that leaders will agree to give up nuclear ambitions in the future.
All leaders of countries know that no one would do to the leader of North Korea what France, Britain and the US did to Gaddafi -- because North Korea has nukes.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde_diplomatique offers a few first insights. Note how the page quickly emphasizes the redaction's independence.
Yet, it might be reasonably true: as stated in the Wikipedia page, Le Monde Diplomatique is read mostly by educated people, who probably are 1/ less susceptible to/more aware of coarse manipulation 2/ much less numerous.
That's to say, influencing (too much) the redaction might have too low of a costs/benefits ratio.
Personal anecdote: I've read it a few times about a decade ago. At that time, I perceived some of the articles to be more emotionally grounded than rationally, and the prose to be at time needlessly heavy, "sophisticated".
Those are the main reasons why I didn't kept reading it more often.
This is untrue anywhere that has the rule of law. (One can run a system where the law is secondary to politics. But it doesn't have the benefits of rule of law.)
> To preserve the law for the common stock, we can't use law against political figures without debasing the currency of law
The entire history of the rule of law runs in the opposite direction. Prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens the rule of law. What it weakens, temporarily, is stability. You need strong institutions to take on and survive prosecuting a former politican, particularly a former head of state.
> If the will of the people can be overruled by the shrewd use of legal challenges then you have a juristocracy, not a democracy
You have a republic. Pure democracy doesn't work.
> legal system can and will be abused when it is used politically
Which is exactly what shielding politicians from prosecution causes.
The Roman Republic had this flaw. One of the perks of magistracy was immunity from prosecution. This not only encouraged corruption, it incentivised lawbreaking during office for politcal advantage and ultimately led to the downfall of the Republic when expiring politicians chose violence over losing immunity.
I imagine in the latter form, it's easier to get big boys in jail, because simply being defeated once doesn't weaken all future attempts. I could be completely misremembering though.
Unlike someone else who is engaging in extreme corruption and is trampling the constitution of his country completely in the open and will likely never face any repercussions.
Maybe... if someone did prosecute him this whole thing could have been avoided?
Well yes. That's certainly the case when the system is deeply corrupt and only superficially democratic. They shouldn't be above the law nor their opponents should have the power to abuse it.
I do not think you should let the Democrats off
Defending a status quo that is so obviously broken, where injustice is getting baked in to cultural expectations...
I am sad that it has come to this, and I fear for the health, very existence, of the republic
Given that the precedent is that the president can arbitrarily decide that the country is in a permanent state of national emergency and suspend the constitution indefinitely (which is literally what happened with the tariffs) that seems quite reasonable.
For a nuanced discussion, the Illustrated Guide to the Law is an excellent introduction. Here's the section on Punishment: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=41
It ends with the summary "The State punishes those who commit crimes partly in the hope of preventing future offenses (via rehabilitation, deterrence, and removal)... partly to restore a sense of balance and fairness (via retribution)... and partly because fuck you, that’s why (retaliation)"
it should be repeated ad-nauseam that he is a crook, a shame for the country and its values and that the whole discourse about the injustice of the sentencing has heavy anti-liberal vibes
You kill a single mom and her children for fun , those people shouldn’t suffer consequences for that ?
But Le Monde Diplomatique's redaction has been able to remain independent thanks to it's 49% shares and veto right.
It's also fairly small (~10 permanent journalists + independent contributors, ~150k monthly readers).
It's not really the kind of journal able to sustain a long investigation, it's more "social commentaries with a left-leaning/alter-mundialist point of view".
That's why he's so pissed he was send to prison during his appeal. He expected to slow that down too, and get to stay at home on account of his age should he lose his appeal.
They want to hurt people. They elect Republicans to hurt people and openly cry that the republicans do not hurt the "right" people, and then vote for them again. They cheer on siccing the damn National Guard on random blue cities, which they have never even seen and have no knowledge of because they hate liberals. They cheer for sending brown skinned people to torture prisons and putting razor wire in the rivers they use to cross because the cruelty is intentional. They've wanted to turn the southern border into the berlin wall at least since Bush Jr, and emphatically want the guards to be just as hostile as the soviet ones.
The day after the Penn State massacre by the National Guard, more than half of the polled people blamed the students for getting shot. They were upset that students were protesting the Vietnam war.
They just want "uppity" people put down, because non-conformance is somehow the biggest problem I guess? The want this imagined social and societal conformance that only existed in their head. Though a large fraction of them explicitly want a theocracy and to take away your rights to not be christian or to be taught things that are against a fundamentalist christian perspective, which is funny, because the "christian" religions pushing for this are insanely unchristian.
The entire reason the US has laws on the book for "Religious exemptions for required vaccines" that are currently being weaponized to for some reason bring back nearly eradicated diseases is entirely because of the Church of Jesus Christ; Scientist, which claims to be christian even though it's a cult that spawned from like 20 literal Simps competing for the attention of an insane lady who plagiarized her fake religion from a crackpot "doctor" right here in Portland Maine, and outright lied about a miraculous disease recovery that never happened. This same group also successfully prevented states from punishing parents who let their children die from completely preventable illness for "religious reasons".
This is not "Freedom of religion". Those dead kids are not free from religion. In fact, the US and state governments went out of its way to carve out rules to allow parents to impart THEIR religion on their kids.
A lower bound of 10% of Americans openly state that they believe Continental Drift has not happened and that god created humans and the earth as it is now within the past 10k years. 30 million americans openly state that they believe easily verifiable science is not just wrong, but outright a conspiracy against them done by science in league with satan. That is not an exaggeration. There's an entire parallel set of media industries around teaching your kids that science is fake and that scientists think you are stupid, have no evidence, and are literally helping satan trick you into hating god. They consistently make movies, shows, books, etc where they are the poor little victims of an authoritarian state who literally busts down their doors for believing in god. They insist that Starbucks not saying "merry christmas" is an attack on their religious freedom. They WRONGLY assert that the US was founded as a "christian" nation, including multiple currently sitting members of state and federal legislatures. This can only be a lie, as the founders were not shy about being not conventionally christian.
Since the Civil Rights Act, Americans have reliably elected more and more Republicans. It took BS marketing slogans ("It's the economy stupid") to elect Clinton and the worst economic event in many decades to get them to vote for Obama, and a pandemic to vote in Biden. Otherwise they reliably elect Republicans and let them cause problems.
I cannot fathom how people still "blame democrats". They cannot do anything when people do not vote for them, that's how democracy works and this goes triple for the US democracy that does not give minority parties any power. There is nothing a democrat president can do with a hostile congress and court, and that's as designed
You can say "Well the democrats need to be more electable" or something, but you cannot court the racists and religious fundamentalists without objectively abandoning important things like "Freedom" and "Justice" and "children should be educated in a way that may not be compatible with religious fundamentalism and unquestioning parental authority if the parent is wrong about something".
When democrats in the 90s backed liberalism, it's because that's what americans voted for as seen by Reagan's landslide. When they backed the stupid Crime bill, they did it because that's what americans were screaming for. Now, even though those were objectively what Americans wanted, Democrats are held at fault for both. Even though when they tried to not embrace liberalism, they lost nearly all power, and it nearly destroyed the democrat party.
When Democrats suggest incentives to build new power infrastructure, that's socialism and anti-american and they are killing the economy and destroying our country. When Donald Trump cuts us off from global markets and talks about invading our allies and massively increases the cost of building things in the US and literally takes a national stock in a private company, that's somehow fine and nobody ever says the S word.
There is an insane double standard, where Democrats are absolutely panned for not having Authoritarian power to fix everything and be perfect even after they do not get voted in, but republicans get to seriously undermine our country and people and still somehow get elected. It's infuriating. It is deeply dishonest.
There are plenty of polls that demonstrate that there is a huge effect from having "(D)" next to your name. Voters will say "I agree with this" in a poll, and then also say "I refuse to support a (D) doing this" in a similar poll. They then vote for a republican who objectively will not do that thing, because their public platform loudly declares they support the opposite. Most republicans want a legalization of weed, but keep voting for republicans who openly declare their intent to continue to criminalize weed. There are several states that have public referendums that pass popular measures which are then outright contravened or illegally suppressed by Republican governments, and those same voters reelect those same politicians
Republicans openly state that they will prevent democrats from doing things, and it is still blamed on democrats
I hope LePen goes to jail as well although it would be harder for the prosecutors to follow the money and convict her.
Hilary Clinton funded the creation of the Steele dossier-- which was later shown to be generally false and unsupported-- but paid for it through one of her law firms and misclassified it as legal expenses in an effort to conceal its origins.
Trump was criminally charged with falsification of business records because he paid Stormy Daniels hush money (to get her to deny her earlier claim that they had an affair) via his lawyer, and classified it as legal expenses. A visible hush money payment would have made it ineffective, just at the Steele dossier being known to be a campaigned paid hit piece would have made it ineffective.
There are plenty of things to ding Trump on, but I think if you're trying to persuade someone that the legal system wasn't weaponized unfairly against him this is a particularly poor example.
Even an argument that the facts make him worse here (e.g. maybe you say concealing an accusation of an affair says more about his integrity than paying for a false report says about hers)-- wouldn't change that this is just not a good example.
Particularly because there was nothing unlawful about the hush money payment itself-- the crime was an obscure accounting violation resulting from it... and in any other circumstance nothing would happen at all or at most, as seen with Clinton, a nominal fine would result. Sure, it's true that random details (like what state the acts in) will often decide if an act is technically illegal or not, but that's hardly an argument for the fairness of the justice system or that it was fairly applied to him.
I don't even hope to convince you of this-- but only to convince you that your example is unlikely to convince others, and is easily exploited to wrongfully convince people opposite your intentions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Techno...
It is 100% false that prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens law when we're talking above a certain low threshold of corruption. In those cases, it's up to the ruling class to police its own by using the legal code against low-level political figures and officials. The Chinese Communist Party operates this way more overtly but same principle. The incentive to do so is to strengthen the legitimacy of that ruling class, not because the law says you must.
According to the Law, you and I are committing "Three Felonies a Day". If the law were en vigueur then you and I and everyone else would be prosecutable 1984-style. It's at the whim of The Prosecutor to decide whether or not to pursue. Sound good to you? Me neither. The only thing stopping that is politics. When the political will is on the side of prosecution, then there will be prosecutions. We saw this with some heavy-handedness during the early days of the GWOT, 2020, Covid, hate speech legislation, many such cases.
The point being, interpretation of laws is a point of political conflict, often very sharp-elbowed. Even in the cases where laws are unambiguously stated (rare), there's still interpretation of the evidence, which doesn't happen in a political vacuum. Who would disagree?
You don't have to look far in history to see the abuse of the legal system in politics. Watergate is a prime example. Uninformed people think Nixon committed crimes and had to go. Anyone who spends just a little time looking at the details of that episode understands it as a political coup executed using lawfare. Whatever you think of Nixon's politics, the facts support that he was taken down by the anti-communist hawks in the defense establishment, largely in consequence of his opening up China. (The reasons were anti-USSR but given that China subsequently went from an agrarian backwater to a global competitor, one could debate whether they were right for the wrong reasons.)
Impeachment as a check/balance was just recently burned in Congress as a political tool to remove a sitting president. Extremely shortsighted. Or perhaps it just exposed it as a paper tiger. I thought it was burned when it was used against Clinton but it was only singed. Now it's completely discredited and no one will take it seriously ever again. That's the effect of abusing the law for political purposes.
What happened to the Roman Republic was overdetermined, but the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon". If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.
If you're talking about Orange Man Bad then he was, in fact, prosecuted, and it was a political own-goal by the Dems. Complete and total waste of time and resources for short-term political gains that never actually materialized. And it discredited the institution of impeachment forever. Well done.
Sarkozy is at the root of much prison violence, but we should feel sorry for him now that he's facing prison himself? I won't. I am merely wishing for him to get a taste of his own medicine, not to be subjected to senseless, uncalled for physical violence.
I'll link you aaplok's comment, somewhere else on this thread, that summarizes my viewpoint with much more verve than I: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667285
The reason the answer is not clear is attitudes to Retributive Justice vary widely across cultures and political systems. In OECD countries, the dominant (but not universal view) is there is no role for Retributive Justice in a modern society.
That is my position. The reason I don't think vengeance should be part of Justice is it's counter productive. The role of society as I see it, is to create an environment that produces nice things for myself and my family, so we prosper. I think it's self evident having as many people as possible working hard maximises this.
Justice is a unfortunate blight on that. Producing nice things requires people to work cooperatively, people working cooperatively requires rules. You can't have someone kill another for food when they could be working on a farm instead, so we have a rule for that. The role of Justice is to encourage people to follow those rules, so Justice is necessary too. But Justice is costly. It requires police, lawyers, judges, and jails. It removes people who could be producing nice things from society and makes them a burden to carry instead. "An eye for an eye" sounds equitable, but it means there are now two people without an eye instead of one. There have been calculations on what the Justice systems costs a typical OECD country. The answer seems to be around 2% of GDP. For the USA, that's about $600 billion per year.
Because of that large cost to me it is self evident you want as little Justice as possible. Just enough so just about everyone follows the rules, and no more. If you are forced to productive people from society and feed, house, and protect them in a jail, then you should strive to redirect, educate, and train them so when released they will become productive, and produce nice things. For me. This is called rehabilitation. Every modern society preaches rehabilitation over vengeance, but not all do it.
So what rule does vengeance play in this? Vengeance is by definition punishing people more than rehabilitation requires. Thus it costs money to extract vengeance. Sometimes a lot of money. In my country jailing someone for life means it costs my government $300/day, potentially for decades. That means I have less nice things. It even means the victim has less nice things, in the end. After all, that money could be paying for teachers and schools, to educate the victims kids. The conclusion most most people in OECD societies have drawn from that is vengeance has no role in Justice.
In this view, the becoming the victim of a crime is no different to any another unfortunate event, like losing your house to a storm, or becoming the victim of a plane crash, or dying from cancer. You don't get to seek vengeance for those events, so why should being the victim of a crime be any different? Adding to that, you are not entirely powerless against random destructive events. You can insure against them. Crime is no different. We can and do insure against the ill effects of crime.
Say someone is legally elected president of France. They serve their 5 years term, doing their job. They get out of Elysée Palace, draw a gun and shoot a passer by. Do they get a free pass? Wouldn't that victim deserve justice?
That person, not a divine being, a mere mortal like the rest of us, has been convicted of serious offences. He is now serving his sentence as any other person would (well, not exactly, for instance he gets a clean solo room and 24/7 security detail).
If your point is "an elected head of state should not be prosecuted by a standard court of justice" (a point I still disagree with btw), the french judicial system got that covered with "cour de justice de la république".
For offenses committed while doing their jobs. Use your elected position as president to steal money? Cour de justice de la république it is. Not a walk in the park, judges & a "jury" of members of the Parliament. Aggravating circumstances (committing an offense while in an official capacity) means theoritically harsher sentences.
What he's been convicted for was as a private citizen. Standard judicial system. As should be, nothing naïve about this.
(Huge simplification of the french judicial system, the actual nature of his current legal status, etc as this case is utterly complex. Judge's ruling is over 400 pages long, and he's appealing, and he'll mostly spend a month in the lam and the rest under house arrest)
Assuming he's losing the appeal on this particular case, he will have been sentenced for scheming with a convicted murderer (Lockerbie amongst other things).
If convicted, that person will be guilty of criminal actions together with a foreign dictator and his terrorist in chief.
Not exactly stealing gums.
The case is of particular seriousness and he's a convicted person, repeat offender.
Would something as serious be put under the rug in other democracies? I'm not so sure. If Justin Trudeau is found accepting money from a bunch of Taliban involved in weapons trafficking, would the RCMP turn a blind eye?
(Why do I say "if convicted"? He appealed, so he is innocent until proven guilty. Why is he in jail? In large parts because his political party lobbied for this type of sentences. Leopards did eat his face)
Everything we’re discussing is made up. That’s what social constructs like law, politics and language are.
> up to the ruling class to police its own by using the legal code against low-level political figures and officials. The Chinese Communist Party operates this way
You’re inspired by Legalism. It rejects the rule of law. It stands in conflict to the institutions of a republic, specifically, of voting.
(Also, the Chinese would execute someone for doing what Sarkozy or Trump did. Eliciting foreign interference in a domestic political contest and challenging the outcome of one with open violence. Former Presidents have been treated roughly for worse.)
> the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon"
The Senate didn’t threaten Caesar with prosecution until after he crossed. Cato, personally, was threatening him.
> a political coup executed using lawfare
Impeachment and conviction is lawfare according to you?
> Now it's completely discredited and no one will take it seriously ever again. That's the effect of abusing the law for political purposes
It’s been “discredited” before. The teeth are in removal from office, not impeachment per se. (That’s just American civic ineptitude.)
To the extent that we’re abusing the law, you’re correct. I’ve seen serious brainstorming on how a D President can use Trump’s precedents to act swiftly ahead of Congress and the courts, for example, to accomplish policy goals that are popular but have been difficult to do precisely legally. If the President is above the law, he doesn’t need to worry about that constraint anymore.
> If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.
It did. Caesar didn’t end the Republic. That was his son, Octavius.
The point is when the Republic’s laws stopped applying to Caesar, it was effectively dead. There is no point calling for votes in that context.
We have a large number of authoritarian fascists in America. (There are also authoritarian leftists. They have not been politically empowered like the right has been.) The historic solutions to those were through law and then violence. If the law doesn’t apply, that leaves only violence. That’s civil war.
We’re not there yet. But we do need to make a concerted effort to ensure these folks are politically incapacitated while a basic civic education campaign can be completed, since basic concepts like “rule of law” isn’t taught outside the elites.
You’re citing history, ancient and modern, inaccurately to push an edgy narrative. I don’t know if you’re trolling or have been unwittingly trolled.
The short answer is you can't. But There is enough hints that he maybe implicated at least as much as his collaborators.
One for example, is a testimony of a "smuggler" that he deposited the dirty money 2 times to his collaborator and once directly to Sarkozy. Not enough, he could lie.
A write-up of a meeting preparing the coming of Sarkozy (in arabic) that suggests there is another important subject to the visit of Sarkozy in Lybia. In a way that coincides, we know that the discuss alone (Gaddafy, Sarkozy and Guéant without any diplomatic representative only translators). Not enough, maybe it was another secret subject.
That may explains the famous trip of Gaddafy in Paris. (10 of December 2007, which was an unexpected move regarding his implication in multiple "plane terrorist attacks" (DC10 UTA ( UTA 772),Pan Am Flight 103 (Lockerbie)) and the "greatness" of the trip which was in "great fanfare" very uncommon one. https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=3984020 Maybe Sarkozy really trade welcoming trip for good contracts but nobody trusts that.
It can also explains the implication of Sarkozy in nato air strike on Lybia to help the rebels (that leads to Gaddafy death). Gaddafy may have ask for help to interfere the revolt, and Sarkozy couln't politicaly explains it so did the opposite. At that moment, Lybia official reported that he must get the money back and that he was financed by their money (one of the two who reported it is dead, the other one is in exile and it's more complicated because he first support Sarkozy to get extracted from Lybia as he was caught by the rebels). At that time, nobody trusted the Lybia representative as the regime was a terrorist state.
Sooo, you can't tell that he knows, but it does explains a lot.
RCMP turned a blind eye to multiple corruption scandals involving bribery, fraud, embezzlement of public funds, etc. under Trudeau and his government, and helped cover them up. That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corruption within the RCMP - there is a long list of nefarious and straight up illegal shit they have done over the years.
I don't want to digress into Ancient Roman history but it's specious to argue that Caeser was only threatened after he broke the law. That's just not a plausible reading of history. It's well-established that crossing the Rubicon was the culmination of political conflict with the Senate, not the inception. Octavian would not have been in a position to end the republic if not for his uncle.
Impeachment is lawfare, of course. It is almost by definition a political act of parties in Congress. What could be more lawfare than that? Use the courts to attack your political enemies. Removal from office in a western democracy is "mostly peaceful" but I agree that removal from office is the solution with teeth. The parent post is about prosecuting former heads of state. That's 3rd world shit. At least in the 3rd world you would do that to remove a rival. Here it just seems to be vindictive. At best a shot across the bow of Sarkozy's patrons. If that's the motivation it's at least understandable. My objection is when people are propagandized to the point of being traumatized by political fights that have zero impact on their lives.
I don't believe terms like "fascists" have any meaning in the current political discourse and immediately suspect people who use that term casually. If half the country is fascist then we've really lost the plot. Nor do I think narratives about civil war are creditable at this time. The sectarian ingredients are not present in this country. Bringing it up is an appeal to extremes to discredit the vast middle ground.
What is the curriculum of that "basic civic education" campaign you propose should be completed? Sounds ominous.
Judges are socialists
https://www.grasset.fr/livre/le-coup-detat-des-juges-9782246...
This lack of overwhelming political firepower and clear focus on guns and guns alone is why they haven't acted, not any kind of goodwill or sudden appreciation for the Constitution. They haven't banned common firearms yet because they can't, not because they don't want to.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
In France, however, there is a special law, although rarely used, that allows a sentence to be enforced even if the judgment is not yet final.
But what Israel is doing isn't war and the innocents they're killing aren't unfortunate 'collateral damage.' They're primarily and purposefully killing civilians that had absolutely nothing to do with what aggrieves Israel, exactly the same as Nazi Germany was killing Jews who had absolutely nothing to do with their grievances. And they're doing this only thanks to American weapons and technology.
After all is said and done, Israel will claim victory, yet Hamas will likely be dramatically larger than ever, at least if there are any Gazans left, simply because each person whose brother, father, or child was killed by Israel is now going to hold a life-long death grudge against Israel, in the same way that Jews still seek out what few remaining Nazis there are, when they aren't being standing ovations in the Canadian parliament at least (more of those 'foundational human rights' being displayed). And this is because genocide has nothing to do with war - it's something uniquely abhorrent.
