Mrs. Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders wife is now in legal trouble. It's significantly different than most political spouse corruption cases in that she and Bernie do not appear to have benefited personally by it.

Several years ago she was the president of a small college. Some land came up for sale in the vicinity of the college. The area in question is highly populated and this was the last buildable land available. If the college did not snap it up for future expansion they would never be able to get something similar. So she (and likely others at the top of the college) desperately wanted this land. They needed a loan to get the land.

That is where things get into the questionably legal area. In order to get the loan they gave the bank widely optimistic numbers regarding future enrollment projections and pledged donations. The legality will depend on where exactly the line is between widely optimistic and criminal fraud.

Things went badly wrong. Not only did the optimistic numbers never materialize, but the college wound up closing. The huge debt was a contributing factor to the closure but not the sole reason for it.

My personal opinion is that she did cross the line, although she probably did not believe it at the time. I think she most likely thought that that she was bending the rules for the greater good. But she didn't just bend them, she broke them and the rules are there for a reason. Other people suffered harm because of her choice to break them - the college closed and the faculty + staff lost their jobs, students had to transfer in the middle of their education, the lender lost money etc. I'm not sure how it will turn out legally. It may come down to whether the jury believes that lying to get a loan for what the individual believes is the greater good is a crime or not. What is in her favor is that she never tried to benefit personally from this whole fiasco.

(Side note - there are also wild accusations of illegal influence peddling by Bernie Sanders in regards to this. I haven't seen any credible evidence to date and until I do, I'm assuming that part is political sour grapes.)

The criminal probe was announced January of 2016, the college closed in May of 2016, the investigation has been ongoing for the last year and has now reached the grand jury stage.

In other words, she's a typical leftist.

"It was all for the greater good."

No matter what the actual results, no matter how many people lose their jobs, their homes, their life savings, no matter how many people spent their lives building that college into something they could be proud of and are left with nothing, "it was all for the greater good" so she shouldn't have to face the consequences of her actions.

Boy, Bernie found himself the perfect wife. They're a matched pair.

Leftists, communists, socialists — the harm, the downright evil they do while assuming that the world will conform to their delusions if they just wish hard enough — and then they stand over the wreckage and smugly proclaim that 'it was all for the greater good'.

Bah! Tell it to the Venezualans. To the people of East Germany, and East Berlin.
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The primary result of government-run health care is that doctors shuffle papers and paper-pushers play doctor.

Imaginos1892 wrote:
No matter what the actual results, no matter how many people lose their jobs, their homes, their life savings, no matter how many people spent their lives building ..."

You are of course referring to the ENTIRE LIFETIME of activities of the guy currently occupying the White House.... right?

At least he didn't claim 'it was for the greater good'. He didn't say that the problems are our fault because the world didn't conform to his expectations. He wasn't trying to have the government force his view of reality on us.
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The government can only print money. It can't make it worth anything.

Imaginos1892 wrote:At least he didn't claim 'it was for the greater good'. He didn't say that the problems are our fault because the world didn't conform to his expectations. He wasn't trying to have the government force his view of reality on us.
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The government can only print money. It can't make it worth anything.

So just so we're absolutely clear here.....

You prefer the guy who spent his entire life deliberately stealing from people he did business with and ruining peoples lives and businesses intentionally.... to someone who made one error while trying to help people?


The former is fine, the latter gets you furious?

gcomeau wrote:

Imaginos1892 wrote:At least he didn't claim 'it was for the greater good'. He didn't say that the problems are our fault because the world didn't conform to his expectations. He wasn't trying to have the government force his view of reality on us.
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The government can only print money. It can't make it worth anything.

So just so we're absolutely clear here.....

You prefer the guy who spent his entire life deliberately stealing from people he did business with and ruining peoples lives and businesses intentionally.... to someone who made one error while trying to help people?


The former is fine, the latter gets you furious?

It's hard to figure out if he is a net job creator or not due to the extreme complexity of his business dealings. CNN has him as a net creator and they hate him so it's probably an underestimate.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/03/news/ec ... index.html

This reminds me of Godwin's law re Hitler. Trump has nothing to do with Bernie's wife and to my knowledge hasn't even commented on her situation. Perhaps we should start a Trump free thread for non-Trump topics. After all there are 7.5 billion other people on this planet. Surely some of them are doing newsworthy things.

She crossed the line.
Problem is did she cross it far enough to be definate fraud, or was it just enough to go oops?

Bit like the old Danny Crane defense of yeah it's technically illegal but (the lawyer) covered himself.

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biochem wrote:

gcomeau wrote:So just so we're absolutely clear here.....

You prefer the guy who spent his entire life deliberately stealing from people he did business with and ruining peoples lives and businesses intentionally.... to someone who made one error while trying to help people?


The former is fine, the latter gets you furious?

It's hard to figure out if he is a net job creator or not due to the extreme complexity of his business dealings.

Sorry, are you making an ends justify the means argument here right after Imaginos's furious rant about how liberals supposedly contemptibly do that? Because that would be pretty chuckle worthy.

This reminds me of Godwin's law re Hitler. Trump has nothing to do with Bernie's wife and to my knowledge hasn't even commented on her situation.

When Imaginos started hurling accusations of negative characteristics of the evil liberals and his list read like Donald Trump's personal biography it kind of had to be pointed out. He's raging about a small time one off incident while supporting the guy who has spent his entire life engaging in this behavior on a massive scale like he was training in anticipation of it becoming an Olympic sport.

gcomeau wrote:..snip..
When Imaginos started hurling accusations of negative characteristics of the evil liberals and his list read like Donald Trump's personal biography it kind of had to be pointed out. He's raging about a small time one off incident while supporting the guy who has spent his entire life engaging in this behavior on a massive scale like he was training in anticipation of it becoming an Olympic sport.

Remember - if someone on the left side of the political spectrum does something it's 'evil liberal agenda' and 'communist tactics' but if someone on the right side of the political spectrum does the same thing 'it's just a mistake' or 'business as usual'..

Does sound not good, as innocent third parties seem to have been harmed as well.
Following on from the last comments though I'd like to add a comment from outside the US.
Now retired, I spent my last working years in a senior military procurement position for a staunch ally of the US.
I soon realised that senior executives of what is called the "industrial/military/political complex of the US" have their own set of values and standards. When caught red handed trying to rip off a valuable repeating client their response was "Aw shucks boy, that's just business, now about this next contract". We have a clause in our government procurement laws that enables us to declare a supplier to be not further invited to tender because of moral turpitude. I invoked this a few times, and when I retired I was amused that I was one of the very few not to be invited to become a consultant to these thieves.