oh I wish the American people were this brave
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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...
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.
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.
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.
Fortunately he failed to do it when he was in power, and this is in my opinion a big factor in his current demise.
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.
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?
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)
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
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