Crime There, Business As Usual Here.
France’s Former President Sarkozy Taken Into Custody:
02 July 14
Just two years after losing the presidency in an election, former French leader Nicolas Sarkozy turned himself in to police for an inquiry into a cover-up of suspected illegal campaign fundraising. Sarkozy, 59, is France’s first former president to be taken into custody.
After 16 hours of continuous interrogation by the police, Sarkozy was put in formal “examination” by instruction judges at 2 am (on three counts). That means, translated in American semantics, that he is indicted.
Sarkozy is being questioned over his possible interference during a probe of possible illegal financing for his 2007 campaign from France’s richest woman, L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. The case centers around whether Sarkozy and his lawyer were kept informed illegally on the investigation by a friendly magistrate – who was in return promised a prominent position in Monaco.
The sums involved, at most a few million Euros, are tiny by the standards of the USA. Some were used to organize large, USA style political rallies, with lots of flags waved.
In the USA, there is basically no such a thing as illegal financing: once respected some purely formal barriers, the world’s richest people can finance their chosen candidates with unlimited funds. Astutely, they finance both sides, “democratic” and “republican”, of the same thing that is everything.
Under Obama, that system became industrial, for all to see. Obama, or his wife, fly to the San Francisco Bay Area, all the time. For a bit more than 30,000 thousand dollars, one can have breakfast with them. As that’s more than half the family income in the USA, the price of the visit keeps the commons away.
Lunch, dinner and personal interviews are reserved to multi-billionaires.
Why it has to happen so often means probably that the president is getting instructed about what to do next by the world’s richest people. (What else? More elaborated plots? Sex a la Clinton?)
In the French republic, spending for presidential elections is state financed, and limited to a few dozen million Euros. TV is requested by law to show candidates on an equalitarian basis. The last presidential election in the USA cost more than 6 billion dollars (there is also a lot of hidden spending).
The indictment of Sarkozy for corruption occurs on the very week when it was revealed that Bill Clinton, all by himself, had gathered a full billion dollars. from his beloved, the plutocrats.
That very week when the giant bank BNP was condemned grievously for financing companies in Cuba (an island that is Wall Street’s, the Mafia’s, and thus the government of the USA’s nemesis).
Financing companies in Cuba is legal in Europe. After all, Cuba is not viewed as a rogue nation by the United Nations.
Blatant, massive, astronomically large financing by plutocrats for all to see is basically unlawful worldwide, except in the USA.. The world most hidden, and largest, tax-haven (but only a haven for the hyper rich, because not everybody can afford an anonymous company set-up!)
Sarkozy is charged with corruption. This is a very serious charge in France. The last time this happened to a French politician (MP-Mayor of Grenoble, Carignon), he went to jail for four long years (among other punishments).
Sarkozy declared that he had been “humiliated“. And so it is for nearly anyone who has to do with “justice”. And yes, it’s not always “just”. Far from it. And yes, there should be more safeguards against the power of the state, as “liberals” have said for 26 centuries.
But, when he had the power, Sarkozy used, and abused, it. Enjoy.
Patrice Ayme
