Trump's Civil Trouble

An unsuccessful defendant who wants to stop collection a judgment's enforcement for he duration of an appeal is generally allowed to halt enforcement by posting a supersedeaas bond, which assures the court that delay won't prejudice collection because the amount due is available to pay the winner if the appeal fails. The bond isn't required to pursue the appeal, just to halt enforcement. Concerns about how fair this procedure is can appreciate the problem best by considering the alternative: should an aggrieved public bear the risk of delay and the possibility that deception or other creditors render a defendant judgment-proof during appeal? The bond is the compromise.

Lat month Mr. Trump induced the major insurer Chubb to underwrite the supersedeas bond to stay execution of a January judgment for his longtime defamation victim E. Jean Carroll. Chubb's CEO gave interviews explaining its position had been fully secured and that its terms with Trump were no special favor: the terms were meant to earn a return for investors. The bond was less than a hundred million dollars.

Donald J. Trump is no stranger to the courts, but he's no longer allowed to harm victims with impunity as when he bullied suppliers out of payment when he was setting up his long-failed casino in Atlantic City. the economic impact of his lies has grown. He's being sued, and successfully, in the communities upon which he's preyed. Now Mr. trump hopes to forestall execution of New York's judgment, awarded when New York proved that Mr. Trump and his co-defendants fraudulently misrepresented assets and collateral to obtain loan terms and outsized profits not available in the market. Disgorgement of profit from fraud in this one New York case amounts to nearly a half-billion dollars. Trump has been unable to get a surety to stand for him to make a supersedeas bond in New York, and he hasn't got the cash to post himself.

Newsweek published a list of properties subject to execution to cover the defendant's debt to New York from his financial frauds. While it may look impressive, the debts secured by these properties make clear that the properties are not all equity; Mr. Trump doesn't actually own them outright, and what he owes his creditors significantly erodes the equity in them.

Mr. Trump faces another deception case next month involving his treatment of a personal hush-money payment as if it were a business expense in order to cheat the government out of tax revenue.

The son of one of Mr. Trump's scam victims, a contractor Trump cheated out of his final payment for woodworking that had been completed and accepted as good work by Mr. Trump's own general contractor, said of his now-deceased father "He would be embarrassed that Donald Trump is actually going to be the nominee for president for the Republican Party in 2016." 

He hasn't apparently become any more reliable.

Russia Handling Sanctions Worse Than It Pretends

 The cost of shipping energy products to more distant customers, the loss of workers to frontline duty and to international flight, and the inability to tap foreign resources to support local operations have left Russia in an economic crisis that its propaganda efforts and international denials cannot hide. The price of eggs increased 18% last month (December 2023) in that one month alone. The Russian Federation has been propping up the economy by directing long-husbanded resources into military-oriented manufacturing, but causing an explosion in Ukraine does nothing for quality of life within Russia; the transformation of Russia into a wartime economy currently directs a third of the federation's national expenditures into the military. 

While Putin claims in his speeches that Russia's economy thrives despite foreign barriers to trade with most of the free world, much of the nation's current production does nothing for Russians: rockets aren't infrastructure, they destroy infrastructure. This game of economic chicken is profitable only if Russia ultimately seizes Ukraine and its natural resources and can compel the service of its millions of inhabitants. Forcing people to serve Russia's tyrants isn't a particularly efficient way to build national wealth, but it's all tyrants know. And they're used to the inefficiency: per-capita GDP within the Russia's empire is so small that despite having many times the population of Texas, the empire's overall GDP was lower even before sanctions cost Russia all the foreign expertise that had kept its energy industry in business. GDP per capita in Russia has been on par with China, at a fraction of GDPs typical of democracies in Europe or Asia.

If nobody throws the Russian tyranny a lifeline, it will likely digest itself trying to threaten neighbors into surrendering to Russia's appetite for geographic expansion. 

Halting Russia's advances into Ukraine has been an efficient investment for the United States. For only a few percent of the existing US defense budget, the United States has created a state of emergency in its most aggressive international adversary which is spending not just a third of its military budget, but a third of its entire national budget, to hand onto its untenable position. Especially since Ukraine is willing to contribute all the combat personnel, supplying them with equipment to test and improve American tactics and methods against Russia's current best technology and electronic systems is a fantastic investment in the future of our defense of American interests and the interests of democratic trading partners around the world.