March 03, 2013
President Barack Obama
DETROIT, MI“Deliberations continue in the corruption trial of former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who faces 30 counts including racketeering conspiracy and mail fraud. Kilpatrick’s long pedigree of alleged misconduct includes possibly being involved in the murder and cover-up of a stripper who”d visited the mayoral mansion, illegally firing whistleblowers, swapping 14,000 or so lascivious text messages with a female city worker, preferentially hiring his friends and family, assaulting a police officer, and tax evasion. He also once allegedly reprimanded a black female police investigator by asking, “How can a black woman be riding in a car with a man named White?”
ITALY“Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his improbable hairline are being investigated yet again on suspicion of corruption. Berlusconi is accused of trying to entice a Parliament member to switch sides by plying him with a three-million-euro bribe. Berlusconi dismisses the charges as politically motivated. Without a single definitive conviction, he has faced over thirty prosecutions in his professional career for charges ranging from tax fraud to paying an underage girl for sex.
HAITI“Former dictator John-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, having returned to the country after more than twenty years in exile, is finally facing corruption charges for his bloody reign during the 1970s and 80s. Duvalier is suspected of profiting from the illicit drug trade and also selling the body parts of dead Haitians. He is also suspected of being complicit in countless extra-judicial killings and the routine torture of political prisoners.
SPAIN“The proles are outraged that high-ranking officials are allegedly receiving envelopes full of cash bribes while they impose austerity measures upon the masses. Swiss officials found bank accounts containing 22 million euro belonging to the former leader of Spain’s ruling Popular Party. The country is awash in corruption scandals, including Andalusia’s Socialist Party being accused of siphoning public funds toward phony retirement packages and the King’s son-in-law allegedly skimming public funds “from sporting and tourism contracts.”
BELL, CA“A juror has been dismissed in the corruption trial of six City Council members in this tiny low-income LA County municipality. The defendants had allegedly voted themselves pay raises that in some cases increased their salaries tenfold. Former city administrator Robert Rizzo”even his name sounds corrupt”had set himself up for a pension plan that would have rewarded him over a million dollars a year after retirement. There are also allegations of business shakedowns, misappropriated funds for breast-cancer awareness, and shady real-estate deals. The former mayor’s defense attorney said that much of the alleged misdeeds might simply be innocent mistakes due to the fact that his client was not known for being especially intelligent or “scholarly.”
