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Trump's towerTrump MortgageBy Stephen Gandel In April 2006 (the actual height of the real estate bubble), Trump announced that, after years in the real estate business, he was launching a mortgage company. He held a glitzy press conference at which his son Donald Jr. predicted that Trump Mortgage would soon be the nation's No. 1 home-loan lender. Trump told CNBC, "Who knows more about financing than me?" Apparently, plenty. Within a year and a half, Trump Mortgage had closed shop. The would-be lending powerhouse was done in by timing (the housing market cratered in 2007) and ironically enough, given Trump's Apprentice TV show, poor hiring. The executive Trump selected to run his loan company, E.J. Ridings, claimed to have been a top executive at a prestigious investment bank. In reality, Ridings' highest role on Wall Street was as a registered broker, a position he held for a mere six days. (YEAH, THAT DRUMPF GUY HAS THE BEST PEOPLE) "Add Warren Buffett to the list of Donald Trump’s fellow billionaires who don’t believe the Republican presidential nominee’s claims of tremendous business acumen. The man famous for being one of the most successful investors in history looked back to 1995, when Trump took his casino business public, and said that in those years it was hard not to make money in the markets. "If a monkey had thrown a dart at the stock page, the monkey on average would have made 150 percent,” Buffett said. However, Trump’s company lost money every year it operated and his investors, rather than riding the stock market wave of the mid-to-late 1990s, lost the vast majority of the money they invested with Trump. Asked to respond to Buffett’s criticism on Tuesday morning, Trump began by dismissing the respected founder of Berkshire Hathaway out of hand. “Well, I don’t care much about Warren Buffett,” Trump told Fox News’ Stuart Varney. And then, to demonstrate just how much he doesn’t care about Buffett, Trump spent the majority of his interview with Varney explaining why the failure of his casino business wasn’t his fault. “You know, I had a public company,” he said. “It was based in Atlantic City. The numbers, and if you look at Atlantic City, Atlantic City was run down the tubes and look at everything that’s happened in Atlantic City, they’re, you know, bad. “I’ve been out of there for seven years. I had great timing, I got out and I made a lot of money in Atlantic City over the years, you know, I have to look at myself, I have to look at my company and I made a lot of money.” To be clear, Trump’s companies filed for bankruptcy and left a string of contractors and suppliers holding the bag and his investors wiped out. But Trump wanted to make it crystal clear that HE had done well. Rob Garver The Fiscal Times ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The trench warfare for the presidency traditionally doesn’t even begin until after Labor Day, but this time – as has been said ad nauseam – is different. At a recent rally in Ohio on, Trump told supporters that he is hearing “more and more” that the fix is in for the election in November. And he told (his current favorite lap dog) Fox commentator Sean Hannity (likely the most dishonest and creepiest among the multitude of faux newz creeps), "I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us*.” After railing to his angry audiences about a “rigged system” over the past year and always referring to his rival as “Crooked Hillary,” that seems like a logical progression – and also a convenient out should he decide he would rather end his candidacy than participate in a contest that he maintains won’t be fair. So what would happen if Trump packed it in and went back to his tower on Fifth Avenue to plot his next reality TV show and tweet venom into the long night of his discontent? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Democracies come in many different forms with various structures and systems. But authoritarian regimes all have four characteristics in common:
And those four characteristics practically define the Trump political message. Trump argues that he will make America “Great Again” — that he will address the legitimate grievances of those whose incomes have stagnated by throwing out the immigrants, the Muslims, the “others” that have made it so — none of which has anything whatsoever to do with the economic pain he alleges to address. Many Americans have seen what happens when a strong man blames the “other” for a nation’s sense of victimization. It always ends in tragedy, whether for the Jews of Europe or the Tutsis of Rwanda. Trump has no compunction creating and legitimating conspiracy theories such as his “birther” fantasy that President Obama was born in Kenya and is not the “legitimate” President. And Trump makes it clear every day that only he can fix the country’s problems — apparently through the force of his own will. The so-called Alt-Right Movement championed by Brietbart.com, whose CEO is now directing the Trump campaign, is the face of right-wing authoritarian nationalism in the United States. But it is critical to understand that Trump and his Alt-Right, white supremacist colleagues are not an isolated phenomenon. Right-wing nationalist parties are once again growing stronger and stronger in Europe as well. They too have fed upon the discontent spawned by wage stagnation and growing income inequality that — while not as severe as it is in the United States — has created fertile ground for the revival of grievance-based nationalist fervor. In Western Europe, their villains are the flood of immigrants from the Middle East that have fled the violence of the Syrian civil war, and workers emigrating to the West from Eastern Europe. In fact, the leader of the British right-wing nationalist party, Nigel Farage, spoke at Trump’s rally last night in Jackson, Mississippi. Of course, the right-wing nationalists of Europe ignore entirely the fact that the major cause of income stagnation is the fact that billionaires like Trump have taken an increasing share of their country’s economic output, just as they have in the United States. Incomes are not flat for most Americans because the economy as a whole has failed to grow. In fact, per-person gross domestic product in the United States has increased 48 percent over the last 30 years. America is wealthier per person today than at any other time in its history. Incomes are not flat because immigrants and poor people have taken money from the pockets of ordinary workers. Incomes are flat because billionaires like Donald Trump have siphoned off virtually every dime of that per-person economic growth and kept it for themselves. They have used their political influence to manipulate the tax system, and cut their own taxes so they often pay lower tax rates than their secretaries or janitors. One of the few Trump tax returns that is publicly available showed that in the early seventies he paid virtually no taxes. Now, he has steadfastly refused to disclose his more recent tax returns — either because they too would show how little he has paid, or because they would show he is not as wealthy as he claims, or because they would lay bare his deals with oligarchs and other unsavory business schemes — or all of the above. And Trump has made a tax proposal that would give himself even more tax breaks. A tiny fraction of wealthy Americans have siphoned off most of the increased income generated by our economy over the last three decades, and at the same time they have managed to avoid paying taxes on much of that increase. That has left most ordinary Americans with three bad options:
This is not rocket science. If the increased economic growth had been equally distributed, we would all be 48 percent better off economically today than we were 30 years ago. But wages for most workers have remained stagnant. That growth went somewhere — and we know from the data where; it is no mystery. It did not go to immigrants. It did not go to the poor. It did not go to pay “lazy workers.” Virtually all of it went to the Donald Trumps of the world. Right-wing authoritarian narratives may not be supported by the facts — but they have a deep emotional appeal to ordinary people looking for someone to blame for their own economic frustration. And that makes those narratives very dangerous. Robert Creamer *Us? Who is this "us" that Trump represents? Until he went full throttle crazy a$$ birther - which clearly underscored his deeply ingrained racist underbelly - Trump's entire adult life was spent doing what was best for him, above all else. He voted for Bill Clinton, twice, he voted against Junior twice. Yes, the Dems certainly have their fair share of weasels, but a weasel of Trumps type could only run as a Republican. Only there could his true inner self be exposed and appreciated by the angry mob that faux newz has been baiting for decades now. The "liberal" minded folks who appreciate some truth with their news (hello even minded, even tempered NPR listeners) aren't the folks that Drumpf is hoping to con and capture with his angry buzz words, his mind boggling hypocrisy. How in the world does anyone believe that Drumpf knows what's best for the working class? Drumpf has spent his entire life chasing the crowd that runs totally opposite of the working class, screwing everyone and anyone he could in the process, over and over, again and again. What social class do you think he screwed over the worst in his multitude of bankruptcies. I would guess small business owners and employees. " Tell people that he isn’t the incredible self-made genius that he plays on TV. Tell them about all the money he inherited from his daddy. Tell them about the bailouts that saved him from ruin. Tell them about all his cratered companies. Then find people who suffered from multiple failures, one fiasco after another — workers laid off following his bankruptcies, homeowners who bought through Trump Mortgage, people who ponied up for sham degrees from Trump University." |
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Msg # | Subject | Author | Recs | Date Posted |
547658 | Re: Trump's tower - Yuuuuge hypocrisy, bigly, bigly, bigly so | field-this | 0 | 8/26/2016 11:47:08 AM |