Saturday, October 7, 2023

"I can't pay the lawyers": Mike Lindell's attorneys quit over "millions" in unpaid legal bills

"We can't pay. There's no money left over to pay them," Lindell lamented on Thursday

By TATYANA TANDANPOLIE

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 5, 2023

Lawyers for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an avid peddler of 2020 voter fraud conspiracy theories, have dropped the Trump ally as a client because he failed to pay for their services, Lindell announced on the Thursday edition of former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon's show. Captured by media watchdog Media Matters for America, Lindell told the "The War Room" host that all of the attorneys representing him in his defamation lawsuits with voting tech companies Dominion Voting Systems, which is seeking $1.3 billion in damages, and Smartmatic submitted filings declaring their departures in federal court 10 minutes prior to his appearance.

"This comes from the lawfare, basically, and from the media, the attacks on MyPillow, what American Express did — just devastating our credit. We — I — can't pay the lawyers. We can't pay. There's no money left over to pay them," Lindell said, noting that he made the announcement to preempt the "attack" from the media.

Lindell's attorneys asked to withdraw from the case in a court filing on Thursday, telling the court that Lindell is "in arrears by millions of dollars" and that they were informed that he is "not able to get caught up with or make any payment on the large amount they owe in arrears nor pay for anywhere near the estimated expense of continuing to defend against the lawsuits going forward." The filing comes after Lindell revealed that his pillow company is facing five audits from the IRS, adding to his growing financial woes.

Businessman and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell talks with reporters outside the club house at the Trump National Golf Club hours ahead of a speech by former U.S. President Donald Trump on June 13, 2023 in Bedminster, New Jersey. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

https://www.salon.com/2023/10/05/i-cant-pay-the-lawyers-mike-lindells-attorneys-quit-over-millions-in-unpaid-legal-bills/

For too many Christians, the lines between dominionism, nationalism and fascism are blurred

(RNS) — Everything I needed to learn about fascism, I learned from an ABC Afterschool Special called “The Wave.”

Before I ever knew what fascism or totalitarianism or demagoguery were, I learned from this kids’ show that vulnerabilities inherent to the human condition can draw people into such systems unaware.

I wonder if those being charged and sentenced for their participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot might have saved themselves — and our nation — a lot of trouble if they’d also watched this film when they were young. It may have been cheesy and facile (you can only do so much in an hourlong television show), but the story was profound for me at a vulnerable age, and I never forgot it. Stories are powerful that way.

The film (made in 1981) is based on a real-life classroom exercise conducted in 1967 by Ron Jones, a high school history teacher, to help his students who were struggling to understand how the people of Germany could have supported and participated in the Nazi movement and the systematic murder of millions of people. Students in the experiment were easily enticed — as most of us are — by the benefits that come with authority, efficiency, belonging and power. Within days of the experiment, the fictitious movement drew 200 high school students who agreed to “pledge allegiance to a social movement that promised acceptance and reward to those who obediently followed its rigid rules.”

The movie adaptation depicts a key moment in the experiment as a pep rally that becomes a catalyzing event for what the teacher soon tells the students is not just a classroom activity, but a national youth movement called the Wave. Now even more emboldened, the students grow more authoritarian and violent until finally the teacher — whose experiment has quickly spun out of control — ends the experiment by revealing his ruse. The students abruptly come face-to-face with the fact that the behaviors and values they’ve adopted parallel those of the German citizens who embraced fascism. They have learned the lesson. They finally understand.

The shock and horror of these students — in both the real experiment and in its fictional portrayal — are echoed in the statements of remorse and regret given by some of the hundreds of people who have been convicted and sentenced for their crimes in the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Many of those sentenced have expressed that “they were ‘caught up’ in the heat of the moment.” Some have said they simply “went along with the flow of the mob and gave little thought to what they were doing until it was too late.” One lamented, “I bought into a lie … and it’s embarrassing. I regret everything.” Another admitted, “I’m a complete villain.” (Of course, not all of those sentenced feel regret, and some who stated their remorse in court have turned defiant again.)

Their surprise is what’s surprising. But this only confirms our need for powerful stories that can show us ourselves even before we know ourselves.

As a Christian, I find that the greatest surprise — shock, horror, dismay — is that so many were drawn to the riot and the narrative that led up to it in terms interlaced with Christianity. In fact, as reported by Baptist News Global, four of the six protest permits issued on Jan. 6 were requested by Christian groups. This and similar developments led David French to observe recently in The New York Times:

Years ago, I laughed at claims that Christian conservatives were dominionists in disguise, that we didn’t just want religious freedom, we wanted religious authority. Yet now, such claims are hardly laughable. Arguments for a “Christian nationalism” are increasingly prominent, with factions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals all seeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts Christians in charge.

Among Christians of all stripes, the lines between dominionism, nationalism and fascism are not only increasingly blurred — they are increasingly irrelevant. They all oppose the good news of freedom in Christ and Christ alone.

As for Jones, the teacher who conducted the famous classroom experiment on fascism over 50 years ago: He left teaching a couple of years later after being denied tenure because of his experiment despite enthusiastic support for him within the school community. However, in a follow-up story many years later, Jones offered more insights that — like his experiment and like the various adaptations, retellings and lectures on the event that have been made since then — bring lessons we might learn.

In that interview, Jones was asked if such an experiment would work today. He said it could because we as a society are still asking the same questions about how to effect change and correct the wrongs we see. He added that there was one particular aspect of his experiment that stuck out to him. That was the way in which the students who weren’t the standouts among their peers, neither at the bottom nor the top of the social hierarchy, embraced the Wave. He told the reporter:

Sometimes as a teacher, you miss the middle group, those who just want to be successful at something for once in life. What was interesting during the Wave was that the very bright kids were excluded and martialed out of the classroom by guards early on. That left the middle group, who then felt empowered. That’s probably what’s happening today in the United States. People who felt left out suddenly are in control, and it feels good.
Can it happen again? I say, ‘It’s happening.’

Notably, this interview took place in 2017, several years before the riot that has wreaked so much needless havoc in so many lives.

We still had — and have — lessons to learn. The sooner we learn them, the better.

https://religionnews.com/2023/07/11/for-too-many-christians-the-lines-between-dominionism-nationalism-and-fascism-are-blurred/

Moskowitz calls to increase Mar-a-Lago property taxes after Trump claims it's worth $1.8B

Mar-A-Lago was appraised by the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser at $18-$28 million depending upon which year between 2011 and 2021 you look at. Eric Trump recently stated that it is worth probably over a billion dollars. The former Palm Beach valuations would keep the property taxes lower, whereas the latter valuation would keep you on the Forbes List and would make it much easier to secure large loans from banks.

https://cbsnews.com/.../moskowitz-calls-to-increase.../...

CBSNEWS.COM

Moskowitz calls to increase Mar-a-Lago property taxes after Trump claims it's worth $1.8B

October 6, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

October 6, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

OCT 7

In a Washington Post op-ed today, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) offered House Republicans a “path to a better place” than the “dysfunction and rancor they have allowed to engulf the House.” Democrats have repeatedly offered both in public and in private to enter into a bipartisan governing coalition, he wrote, but under former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Republicans have “categorically rejected making changes to the rules [in order] to…encourage bipartisan governance and undermine the ability of extremists to hold Congress hostage.”

Jeffries offered to work with willing Republicans “to reform the rules of the House in a manner that permits us to govern in a pragmatic fashion.” Stating up front his willingness to negotiate, Jeffries wrote that the House “should be restructured to promote governance by consensus and facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support.” This would stop a few extremist Republicans from preventing “common-sense legislation from ever seeing the light of day.”

Jeffries called for “traditional Republicans” to “break with the MAGA extremism that has poisoned the House of Representatives since the violent insurrection on Jan[uary] 6, 2021, and its aftermath.”

“House Democrats remain committed to a bipartisan path forward,” he wrote, but “we simply need Republican partners willing to break with MAGA extremism, reform the highly partisan House rules that were adopted at the beginning of this Congress and join us in finding common good for the people.”

Jeffries is reaching out at a delicate moment for Republicans. While the minority leader’s appeal to what is best for the country is an important reminder of what is at stake here, there are also political currents running under the surface of the speaker crisis. The speaker vote will force Republicans to go on the record either for or against former president Trump, a declaration most have so far been able to avoid.

There is enormous pressure from pro-Trump MAGA Republicans to stick with the former president and elect his chosen candidate, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), as House speaker. But Jordan is a very close ally of Trump’s and can be expected to demand an end to investigations into the former president in exchange for doing even the most basic business—Trump, after all, demanded a government shutdown until the cases against him were abandoned. Throwing the speakership to him will mean facing the 2024 election with a fully committed Trump party and government dysfunction as the Republicans’ main argument for why voters should back them.

That might play well in the gerrymandered districts of the extremists, but there are 18 Republicans who won election in districts President Biden won in 2020, and they will not want to run on a ticket dominated by Trump and Jordan. But a vote for the other declared candidate, Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA), means being on record against Trump and for a man who once described himself as Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke “without the baggage.”

The other calculation those wavering Republican members of Congress must make is what they expect for the future. A number of the state maps that gave Republicans their slim House majority have been found unconstitutional and are now being redrawn in ways that suggest the Democrats might well retake the House in 2024. If that happens, having forged a working relationship with the Democrats would be far more useful than standing with the hard right.

It would take as few as five Republican votes to elect Jeffries speaker, which is an unlikely outcome, but it would also take just a few Democrats to vote present and lower the number needed to enable the Republicans to elect someone more moderate than their current option. Jeffries might well be signaling that the Democrats are willing to enable that outcome, but only for a Republican who is not a bomb thrower.

Republicans who are not committed to Trump may also be paying attention to what increasingly feels like a shift in the country’s popular tide. Today’s news provided more evidence that Biden’s approach to the economy—using the government to invest in ordinary Americans—is working far better than the Republicans’ approach of slashing the government to enable capitalists to organize the economy ever did.

Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics released yet another very strong jobs report showing that the U.S. economy added 336,000 jobs in September, almost twice what economists had predicted. The unemployment rate held steady at 3.8%. The biggest gains were in leisure and hospitality and in government. Average hourly wages went up 4.2% over the past 12 months; more than the inflation rate of 3.4%. The bureau also revised its employment statistics for July and August upward, showing that the employment in those months was up 199,000 more than the gains already reported.

The country’s shift away from concentrating wealth upward also showed today in positive movement toward a historic settlement between the United Auto Workers and automakers. UAW president Shawn Fain announced that General Motors has agreed to include workers at plants making batteries for electric vehicles in the UAW’s national labor agreement.

While the UAW wanted—and appears to be obtaining—higher wages, its leaders were especially concerned about what the transition to EVs would do to workers. Fain said that automakers had been planning to phase out the engine and transmission plants worked by union laborers and replace those jobs with lower-wage jobs in non-union battery plants. Until now, automakers had said it would be “impossible” to permit the battery plants to be covered by the union umbrella.

Fain called the agreement a “transformative win” and, in light of that agreement, announced that the UAW will not expand its strike into GM’s most profitable plant in Arlington, Texas. Fain said he expects that Ford and Stellantis, which includes Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram, will agree to the same deal, and labor scholars agree.

Trump visited a non-union plant in this dispute, where he attacked the transition to EVs as job killers for autoworkers. This new agreement makes it unlikely that autoworkers will back Trump over this issue.

Biden, on the other hand, weighed in on the fight by joining the UAW picket line.

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/06/september-jobs-report-unemployment/

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/06/hakeem-jeffries-bipartisan-coalition-house-gop/

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2023/10/06/uaw-strike-update-gm-battery-plants/71085498007/

https://www.detroitnews.com/business/

https://newrepublic.com/article/175979/hakeem-jeffries-house-speaker-dare-say-it