THE SKUNK AT THE GARDEN PARTY
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Well despite the high level publicity stunt pulled by the United States Justice Department on Wednesday 27th May on the world’s most popular game, the man who they were trying to get rid of survived so far without indictment and also as leader of FIFA again. Yes Sepp Blatter once again leads FIFA, re-elected on Friday 29th May. No doubt he has not seen the end of the Americans. They mean to get him. Yes you will remember that on the eve of the election, the US Attorney General Loretta Lynch called a press conference and with much drama and grave faces pronounced that they were indicting people across the globe for using the US financial system and the geographical offices in the US to bribe officials to decide where world cup games in football are to be held. The next games are set for 2016 in arid hot Qatar. They are going to be held in the winter because it’s so darned hot in Qatar in the summer it will simply be impossible to play them. The choice of Qatar in 2016 and then Russia in 2018 as against the United States by the FIFA board did not sit well with the Americans. So they decided well it must be because the Russians and the Qataris bribed officials to do it. What better targets than the products of small island developing states, after all they are always with their hands out. So Jack Warner of Trinidad who in the midst of attacks on him about the subject in 2011 abandoned his job as a minister and as a FIFA official. Jeffery Web who heads the Americas and Caribbean Division who is from the Cayman is also indicted. The Americans said that poor old Jack who is in the middle of an election campaign against his former party took ten million dollars. They didn’t say how much Mr. Webb got but they had Mr. Webb arrested and another 83 year old and put them all in the clink in Switzerland and in Trinidad. Mr. Warner couldn’t make bail despite the fact that he is not a security risk, no flight risk. The Magistrate suddenly had difficulty determining whether his property was good enough to stand surety for his bail. So now these people will have their reputations and fortunes destroyed because of all of this. If this column seems skeptical about all of this you are right. The American Justice system is corrupt. 
There are too many instances of it, from a Supreme Court that threw an obvious win from one person to the next in the presidential race where the winner’s father put the judges on the Supreme Court that made the decision to hand him the election. Then you had the case of the black people in a small town in Texas all locked up by the police only for all the cases to fall apart. Similarly a white family all locked up for molesting kids and the cases fell apart. The examples now of policemen shooting down black men in the streets unarmed and no justice. The US justice system cannot defend itself as one of integrity. So for this well dramatized show , one of the prosecutors said this was “ the world cup of fraud”, too many people smell a rat. It smacks of vengeance justice because they lost the bid to host the World Cup. We hold no brief for these people but this act by the US Justice Department is not right. Soccer is a game they don’t even play really in the US. How does any of this get to be their business. They use as the jurisdictional point that the money passed through their banking system and that the offices were in Miami. Now you see why the Chinese are trying to create a separate banking system so one does not have to put up with this kind of nonsense. The US argues free trade, tells you are good to do business in their country, and then ends up arresting you on the flimsiest of pretexts. Well we will watch for the outcome. Problem is there is such a high cost to defending oneself that the US at bottom forces people who are innocent to give in and pronounce yourself corrupt just to get rid of the problems with the government. Sad on all accounts. No doubt there is a rush to judgment throughout our region: Jack did it. Few will one see it the way we see it. So we are the skunk at the garden party.