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Blatter won without securing the necessary two-thirds support after his only opponent threw in the towel

Blatter Wins Re-election but FIFA Is Now a Boat That Won’t Stop Rocking



Dawn raids on glass towered corporate offices from Zurich to Miami! Indictments, extradition proceedings, executives in jail! But meanwhile the Kingpin of the entire operation puts on a brave face and says he will clean up the corruption, the same cleaning up he’s been promising for over a decade. You might think you’ve just stumbled across a preview of the latest Jack Ryan adventure or maybe a Washington expose by Bill O’Reilly. But this is the world of professional football (soccer), and the man at the top of the totem pole is every bit as skilled in politics and corruption as the Clinton’s.
Sepp Blatter, FIFA President since 1998, is the one man US Attorney General Loretta Lynch failed to get and she knows it. Blatter started out as a sports administrator in Switzerland, joining the staff of FIFA in 1975 and elected President in 1998. Since then he has made political bosses the world over proud, annihilating opposition at every re-election backroom style, all while becoming worth $10 million. The ridiculous payoffs have been known about for years but Blatter has always kept himself out of reach. One senior deputy after another took the fall from grace in order to protect the name of the good man from Switzerland; and to defend the lucrative status quo of non-stop first class air travel, along with high end restaurants and hotels in between matches and meetings. However time has caught up with the man who only last week compared himself to a mountain goat that "keeps going and going and going". When FIFA awarded the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in December 2010 to Russia and Qatar, Blatter’s reign had clearly reached a new low. Awarding Putin anything was suspect but Qatar is a tiny Middle Eastern nation that bakes in unsuitable heat and is nowhere near big enough for FIFA’s eight city stipulation. It was FIFA’s ‘jump the shark moment’. Blatter quipped that gays should refrain from sex at the 2022 tournament because of Qatar’s stance on it. It didn’t fly! Demonstrating how out of touch they were with reality and how obviously they’d been bought, FIFA brought in an ‘independent investigator’ in American attorney Michael Garcia to clear themselves.

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But the report was damning and FIFA refused to publish it. Instead, another apparently ‘friendly’ individual ethics judge Joachim Eckert issued a 42-page report clearing FIFA. Garcia took his information to the FBI where by now the liberal Obama regime may have decided enough was enough as evidenced by the Attorney General taking the lead. While Garcia had been investigating the FBI had run into Chuck Blazer, a senior executive with FIFA who had caught the IRS’s attention with $29 million of credit card charges in 20 years and for not paying any taxes the last ten. He was flipped and sent to the London Olympics in 2012 wired, where he spoke with dozens of senior FIFA officials and potential sponsors, providing the basis for an FBI case. The circle of justice began to close. Earlier this month ESPN show E:60 claimed that Sepp Blatter was avoiding setting foot in the U.S. due to fears of being served an arrest warrant in connection with an ongoing FBI probe into FIFA. Blatter, who has not visited America since 2011 dismissed the claims saying it was common not to visit countries frequently and that he hadn't been to China since 2008. He said he only goes to countries that "are in need." and if the FBI "want to speak with me there are the international relationships" to help make it happen. But reports in The Guardian said that FIFA would not co-operate with the FBI over Blatter's travel arrangements and said that during his four-year “mandate period” he usually tried to visit as many of the 209 member associations as possible. Then this week came the charges. As reported by USA Today “a 47-count federal indictment was unsealed in Brooklyn, charging 14 defendants — nine FIFA officials and five corporate executives — with racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering and bribery, among other offenses, in connection with a near quarter-century scheme to enrich themselves through their management of the sport. With soccer officials from all over the world congregating in Zurich this week to attend the annual FIFA Congress, Swiss authorities arrested seven suspects charged in the indictment. Federal investigators were also conducting a search at CONCACAF headquarters in Miami.” The FBI investigation focuses on the corruption. The Swiss have instituted their own proceedings to look at the legality of the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Putin has already accused the Americans of being complicit. Britain meanwhile has said it is assisting the FBI because money transfers went through London including £65m in bribes for the 2013 Copa America tournament. The Independent reports that “Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, told the House of Commons that the Serious Fraud Office was assessing evidence to see whether it should begin a formal inquiry.” All this happened just days before FIFA’s scheduled re-election of the President. Blatter was urged to postpone his re-coronation but as Sky News puts it “after two days in his bunker on the hill in Zurich, he and his advisors emerged with a self-preservation plan.” That plan, as Sky’s Paul Kelso opines, sounds an awful lot like what the Clinton’s would do. Kelso (making no political references) said: “It relied on a familiar strategy, one used to equally cynical effect in 2011 when he won his fourth term amid the burning wreckage of the scandalous 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding process. The game plan was to blame errant individuals, pledge to clean up the mess, and call for unity and solidarity from his beloved football family. Most important of all, at no point would he accept that as leader, he should accept responsibility for the contamination of FIFA's image. With depressing predictability, it may have worked.” Blatter won without securing the necessary two-thirds support after his only opponent threw in the towel, perhaps fearing that he too might suffer a loss of reputation resembling any one of the women that Bill Clinton was with. But a number of people are in custody! Loretta Lynch made it clear they are not done investigating and the US is hopeful of extraditing some of those picked up in Zurich. If some of those people flip then, as Kelso puts it, “there may come a day when the old goat regrets not putting himself out to grass when he had the chance.”


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David C. Jennings -- Bio and Archives

David Jennings is an ex-pat Brit. living in California.

A Christian Minister he advocates for Traditional & Conservative causes.

David is also an avid fan of Liverpool Football Club and writes for the supporters club in America

David Jennings can be found on Twitter
His blog can be read here


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