Front Page

IT’S A CRIME, I SAY, A CRIME!

But it’s not a crime these days, not in the USA and not certain things being done by the USA abroad. There are infractions, violations and simple bad behavior when it comes to keeping reasonable rules, which the word crime is used to describe the most severe of such breakage of such rules.

Here are a few violations, deemed somehow acceptable today that used to be crimes but are now, at least temporarily, semi-acceptable:

1. The oil producers and refiners of America have known since the beginning of the war in Iran that the U.S. gets no oil from ships passing through the Straits of Hormuz and that the U.S. remains the world’s largest source of oil by a wide margin over all countries and sources of the world.  So how is it that the oil companies declared, only days ago, that they were setting all-time records for profits?  Huge numbers.   Supply is there, and that is evident because there have been no lines at stations or shortages even discussed.  What happened to allow such outlandish profits while so many in the country are financially hurting?  They figured out that they could use the war as an excuse to violate the entire public by skyrocketing the prices of gas and oil.  Nobody is saying anything except the leader of the U.S. announcing last week that the income from taking over Venezuela and its oil was yielding nine billion so far.  No answer to where the revenue is going.
   How about inviting the problematic leaders of Iran to a peace conference and then, when they showed up, killing them all?  How about killing 150 school kids in a surprise strike against the country and lying about it, and even upon discovery of the truth, still denying and not even apologizing.  Why is Iran not seeking peace?  Because such heinous behavior cannot be accepted, and therefore the real war with Iran will continue, as so many have before.  The president and the head of the Department of Defense are war criminals, but nothing is being said about that.
2. How about the American leader and his cohort, Elon Musk, committing a truly and vastly outrageous crime, killing hundreds of thousands of people, many thousands of them children, by first building the world’s poorest up with USAID over the years and then pulling the rug out, leaving them nothing?  And little is said.
3. At home, how about Apple and Microsoft getting together to shock so many customers by making Microsoft products, like Word, Office, Excel, and more, force everyone with older but still wonderful computers to find them useless relics of the past, leaving a great segment to have to buy new Apples and new Microsoft software to begin again?  That all happened with little notice or fanfare on July 13^th; if you are wondering why most of your computer will not function properly, it will never again.  Now, as life goes on, you will only think you own Apple or Microsoft products, just like owning a Tesla…no, you are renting, as they can take your product or shut it down at will.  They are owners and you, without being designated as such, are a sharecropper or a renter.
4. In Lake Geneva, the state quietly, a few years back, was getting forty percent of the city’s room tax collections. They changed that to seventy percent, and there went a ton of money which could have gone to infrastructure costs.  There’s only one serious street repair project going on in all of the city, yet the feeder roads that will feed the coming nightmare of next year’s redevelopment of the downtown area, and that one’s being done by the county, are cracked, cratered, and potholed beyond endurance.  It’s not a crime, just like the other things listed in this article.  They are all violations and infractions now, not even misdemeanors.