>>4022818 last bread
Reconcile
Hope you'll understand if I don't want to open up 100 different spreadsheets to "reconcile" all the gazillion corrupt things slithering out of Arkansas over the past 75 years
Arkansas sketchiness pretty much goes back to pre-statehood days.
Too many people don't even know that the Clintons' Rose Law Firm history goes back to fucking 1820. Not a typo: EIGHTEEN TWENTY.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Law_Firm
and it is inextricably tied to the history of Arkansas which everybody should really read to see how hardscrabble and desperate it was for so long, which incubated the corruption:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Arkansas
It wasn't good when the Civil War erupted, then Reconstruction made it worse, and then the Depression made it still worse.
Not making excuses for them but it't the same reason everybody in the South hated the federal government and made/ran moonshine. Basically, fuck you and your taxes and regulations. My family's had it hard enough for long enough already.
Again, am not making excuses for illegal behavior. Just trying to explain why people would have done whatever they could to feed their families.
It is almost as if the rest of the South began to recover after the Depression when work was finally available due to WWII, but Arkansas got left behind for the most party.
As always, desperate people do what they have to do under desperate circumstances. And you get Arkansas.
My grandfather died leaving my grandma with 5 kids under age of 10 and no insurance in 1939 in the South. My mom and her siblings were really fucked up by the deprivation. Throw a bunch of traumatic events at human beings, and they strike out and do whatever they have to do.
Entire state of Arkansas, it could be said, is in need of therapy. They're fucked up.