Currently there is a tiff between The World's Richest Man, Amazon.com Supremo Jeffrey Bezos, and The World's Sleaziest Man, David Pecker, Boss of Bosses at a tawdry racket named American Media Inc. (Sooo, patriotic, that name!) AMI publishes smarmy, sensationalist rags sold at supermarket checkout stands, the most notorious of which is named the "National Enquirer." It specializes in ginned up sex scandals and celebrity gossip. Its target audience is bored housewives and others with low intellectual standards attracted by the tawdry. [1]
An AMI executive and an AMI lawyer sent letters to the lawyer of the investigator Bezos had assigned to find out how AMI got photos and private emails of him and his mistress. These two threatening to publish nude photos of Bezos (which they described in detail) UNLESS Bezos agreed to issue a public statement retracting his claim that AMI had a political motive in going after him, which they called "libel," and stuck to that position in future. More tellingly, AMI demanded that Bezos stop investigating how they obtained his emails and the photos. In other words, a classic case of both blackmail and extortion.
Rather than knuckling under to this criminal extortion/blackmail attempt, Bezos went public with it, exposing AMI's action.
The result in the establishment jabbersphere has been an avalanche of quizzical questions, Is It Or Isn't It Extortion? AMI, after a period of silence where they imitated a deer frozen in oncoming headlights, recovered their composure and said they were merely "negotiating" "in good faith," just a perfectly normal business practice! Much of the jabbersphere made it a He Said He Said story.
But that won't wash with this fact set.
Kidnappers negotiate ransom payments. Hostage-takers negotiate their demands. Criminals can negotiate in the commission of their crimes. Happens all the time. A bank robber can demand X amount of money, and be told it's not available, and settle for a lesser amount.
Blackmailers and extortions ALWAYS negotiate with their victims! They present their demands, and the victims respond. There is a back-and-forth about terms and conditions. Likewise with kidnappers.
An AMI executive and an AMI lawyer sent letters to the lawyer of the investigator Bezos had assigned to find out how AMI got photos and private emails of him and his mistress. These two threatening to publish nude photos of Bezos (which they described in detail) UNLESS Bezos agreed to issue a public statement retracting his claim that AMI had a political motive in going after him, which they called "libel," and stuck to that position in future. More tellingly, AMI demanded that Bezos stop investigating how they obtained his emails and the photos. In other words, a classic case of both blackmail and extortion.
Rather than knuckling under to this criminal extortion/blackmail attempt, Bezos went public with it, exposing AMI's action.
The result in the establishment jabbersphere has been an avalanche of quizzical questions, Is It Or Isn't It Extortion? AMI, after a period of silence where they imitated a deer frozen in oncoming headlights, recovered their composure and said they were merely "negotiating" "in good faith," just a perfectly normal business practice! Much of the jabbersphere made it a He Said He Said story.
But that won't wash with this fact set.
Kidnappers negotiate ransom payments. Hostage-takers negotiate their demands. Criminals can negotiate in the commission of their crimes. Happens all the time. A bank robber can demand X amount of money, and be told it's not available, and settle for a lesser amount.
Blackmailers and extortions ALWAYS negotiate with their victims! They present their demands, and the victims respond. There is a back-and-forth about terms and conditions. Likewise with kidnappers.
The backstory here is that Bezos owns The Washington Post newspaper, which has been relentless in documenting Trump's endless firehose of lies, and is also upset that Trump is allowing the Saudi Arabian regime to get away with murdering one of their contributors, the Saudi Jamal Khashoggi. Pecker is a close friend and ally of Trump, who during the campaign used the rags he controls to relentlessly promote Trump every single week, and denigrate Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, AMI made illegal undeclared campaign contributions in the form of paying off at least one woman Trump has sexual relations with, by buying exclusive rights to her story and then not publishing it, effectively silencing her. AMI subsequently entered a plea agreement with Federal prosecutors. In return for no criminal charges being brought, AMI agreed to cooperate with their investigation, and to commit NO MORE CRIMES for a period of three years.
The fact that AMI tried to blackmail Bezos into ceasing to investigate how they obtained their material on him, led Bezos to believe that Trump had obtained or given it to them to use to embarrass him and pressure him to jerk the Washington Post's leash and ease up on criticizing Trump. Another suspicion was that Saudi Arabia was involved. Pecker put out, at company expense, a preposterous 100-page glossy magazine positively glorifying the murderous "crown prince" of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who has been bombing Yemen and starving its population with essential U.S. help, and who ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi last year.
What a WONDERFUL tyrant!
The commentator Glenn Greenwald, who usually is trenchant and on-the-mark in his analyses, made a logically flawed argument about the case to say that it wasn't clear if it was extortion, it was in a grey area, because it happens all the time that people accuse each other of libel and then arrange to stop libeling each other. Except Bezos was NOT being libeled by AMI (AMI CLAIMED Bezos was libeling AMI by asserting they had a political motive in attacking him- which they obviously do), and Bezos never claimed they were libeling him. They published the true fact that he was having an affair, with whom, and of course embarrassing photos that are really of him are not libelous.
The "business model" of AMI is extortion and blackmail, coercing celebrities wishing to avoid career-damaging embarrassment to provide juicier "dirt" on others or to cooperate in other ways. Unsurprising that the sleazy Pecker is pals with the mega-grifter Trump. Trump attracts to himself like a dustmop collecting dirt dodgy and disreputable hustlers like Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen the Fixer, political mountebank and saboteur Roger Stone, and novice grifter Michael Flynn, who was in the pay of Turkey. Trump has frequently broken the law over the years, and he and his family have committed tax fraud for years and defrauded their tenants, as documented by the New York Times. [2]
A number of Trump's appointed government officials have committed multiple acts of graft and corruption and malfeasance, such as his first EPA head Scott Pruitt, his first Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Ben "$30,000 Office Chair We Paid For" Carson, and others.
Previous regimes did a better job of hiding their moral corruption than this gang.
An example of the fine "journalism" produced by "American" Media, Inc.
The barracuda bares its teeth: David Pecker, Sleaze Personified.
"You dirty little PECKER!"
1] There are other "titles" in AMI's staple of garbage publications. All peddle celebrity gossip and fluff, sexual titillation, and sensationalistic nonsense. These include a cheesier version of the Time Inc. magazine People, named Us (sic!). They used to publish an absurd supermarket tabloid, Weekly World News, which relentlessly promoted- in all seriousness, NOT tongue-in-cheek- fake stories of extraterrestrial aliens on earth, complete with cooked-up photos. The people who churned out this brain-poison for the lower uneducated classes were Harvard graduates. Cynical, soulless, amoral graduates, I presume. Calling such garbage, peddled year after year, and not as satire or irony, is properly viewed as psychological warfare against credulous members of the hoi polloi. Keep them dumb and distracted and confused.
2] See from the New York Times, "Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father," October 2, 2018; "11 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Trump’s Wealth," October 2, 2018, and "4 Ways Fred Trump Made Donald Trump and His Siblings Rich." October 2, 2018, among other articles.
