Trump just lost another lawsuit.

Courtesy of Law Newz:  

A Florida Court of Appeals decision went against one of President Donald Trump‘s businesses earlier this week, upholding a decision ordering them to pay more than $300,000 to a paint supply company that was working on renovations of the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort. Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, the President’s business, argued that they shouldn’t have to pay due to a technicality, but the court wasn’t buying it. 

The Paint Spot had gone after Trump’s business after not receiving $32,535.87 for paint and supplies they had provided through a subcontractor that was working on renovating part of the Doral. It turned out that the subcontractor had left the job due to not being paid, at which point The Paint Spot had already provided resources for the job, which Trump’s company then continued to use without paying for them. The Paint Spot then tried to foreclose on a property lien due to non-payment, but Trump Endeavor 12 claimed it shouldn’t be allowed because they didn’t receive proper notice. As it turns out, when The Paint Spot turned in their required Notice to Owner when they were signing on for the job with the subcontractor, they filled in the name of the wrong main contractor because Trump’s own representative gave them the wrong information. 

In the end, the court ruled that it didn’t matter because the notice still went to the same address, it was Trump’s company’s own fault that the wrong contractor was listed, and there was enough evidence that both Trump’s business and the main contractor were aware of The Paint Spot’s work on the project.

As you probably know Donald Trump has a history of not paying his bills, and of stiffing contractors who have already done work for him. 

If Americans really believed that a businessman could run the country better than a politician, the least they could have done was find a GOOD businessman who does not go around ripping everybody off. 

What am I saying? He was chosen by Republicans, and assisted by the Russians.

Who else could have met their unethical criteria?

US soldiers raped and sexually assaulted dozens of Colombian children between 2003 and 2007, filmed the attacks to distribute as pornography, and face no charges due to treaty granting immunity.

Colombian children

Courtesy of WSWS:  

US soldiers and military contractors were responsible for the rape and sexual abuse of scores of Colombian children, but faced no legal repercussions because of a treaty between Washington and Bogota granting them full immunity. 

A fresh revelation of these appalling crimes came as a byproduct of ongoing peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement taking place in Havana, Cuba. 

Last month, a Historical Commission on the Armed Conflict and its Victims in Colombia, formed jointly by the Colombian government and the FARC, presented an 800-page report documenting the causes and consequences of the decades of civil war that have claimed millions of victims in terms of dead, wounded, abused and displaced. The commission was composed of leading Colombian academics and intellectuals acceptable to both parties. 

A section prepared by Renan Vega Cantor, a professor of history at the National Pedagogical University of Bogota, dealt with the role played by the US military. The Pentagon has sent advisers and contractors to the country as part of Plan Colombia, which has included $6 billion in mostly military aid directed at combatting both drug trafficking and the anti-government guerrilla movements. 

The report cites 54 cases of rape and sexual abuse of minors, some as young as 12. “In one of the best known cases, in Melgar and in Giradot [both are to the southwest of the capital of Bogota, with a major Colombian air base that housed US “advisers” located in Melgar], 53 minors were abused sexually by mercenaries, who also filmed it and sold the tapes as pornography,” the report states. The young girls were subsequently threatened with death, and they and their families had to leave the area.

This post is the result of a late night message from my daughter demanding that I write something about this and let people know what we have done. 

She was of course quite horrified and wanted to know how we could not only allow this to happen, but also protect those who committed these atrocities.

My response is of course to refer to the Ted Cruz post from earlier today.

After all how can Americans be held accountable when they are clearly agents of the "American civil religion" whose every action is divinely inspired?

This is the result when you see the military, and military contractors, through rose colored glasses and believe that their every action overseas "protects us over here."

How dare we even think of prosecuting them for helping to keep us free by spreading American exceptionalism to every corner of the planet?

For those who want to learn more about this you can read here, here, and here as well.

When we pull our troops from Iraq what happens to these guys?

The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq — a mission criticized as being undermanned.

"These numbers are big," said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting. "They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It's the coalition of the billing."

"We don't have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That's dangerous for our country," said William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert. The Pentagon "is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that's obscene."

And who pays the tab for these contractors in Iraq? Oh you know.

The numbers include at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreign contractors and about 118,000 Iraqis — all employed in Iraq by U.S. tax dollars, according to the most recent government data.

You know the tab is not paid out of the money allocated to fight this war. So where does the money come from? It is just another deception used by this administration to keep Americans from really understanding just how much this war is costing us in treasure and lives.