I seriously question how much cash he has. In the bank, probably not nearly as much as he wants us to think. And in his pockets? He’s one of those guys who never has cash on him and the people with him always have to pick up the tab.
Everyone really needs to read this article. The scope of criminal behavior exhibited by the Trump Crime Family is astounding. These parasites sucked every available penny out of Fred’s real estate empire while simultaneously using every legal and illegal tax dodge possible. Again, read it:
Donald Trump is a bloodsucking parasite whose wealth is derived off the backs of hard working New Yorkers. They paid their rent. And you know, that unlike the Trumps, they paid their taxes. We all know what happens to regular folks who break the rules. When organized crime families like the Trumps do it, they just get richer.
Donald Trump, like Madoff and Milken et al before him, belongs in a prison cell. Lock him up.
I don’t have a citation on this yet–I heard someone on one of the cable shows mention it, but it doesn’t seem to be online yet.
But the gist is: watch Trump’s tweets and remarks on this topic. The theory is that Trump himself could reactivate one of these old cases by making statements specifically denying the charges in the NYT story. The statute-of-limitations clock could be re-started if Trump commits an overt act (including verbal denials) intended to cover up past acts.
If true, Trump would have to submit every tweet for vetting before he hits ‘send,’ to prevent the disaster of re-activating a potential fraud case against him. How he’d hate that!
I posted some of this in another thread about this book in Elections but I don’t think that thread is going anywhere.
I got the book and finished it in one day. Michael Lewis is one of my favorite writers and I found this book very compelling.
It’s not really “another Trump book”. And it’s not about the transition, except for the first chapter. The quoted anecdotes about the transition are possibly the only direct mention of Trump in the book. (I’m guessing Chris Christie was the source behind those.)
The book is an exploration of the missions behind the various federal agencies (DOE, USDA, Dept of Commerce) that compose the “Deep State” and the ways in which they are being threatened by an incompetent executive branch. Lewis spends most of the book talking with administrators in these agencies, profiling them and describing their projects. Incredibly important stuff that no one ever thinks about.
For example, the USDA underwrites billions of dollars in loans for rural development. These loans are made to municipalities and private businesses for things like fire stations and medical clinics and water treatment and telecom in small towns and rural areas - services that are needed but aren’t necessarily profitable or low risk enough to attract private investment.
The thing is, the beneficiaries of these loans often don’t even know that they are getting a government loan. The loans are administered via banks, who identify applicants that qualify for these loans.
In the name of streamlining, this Rural Development program is being moved into the Office of the Secretary. The official Lewis interviewed suspects that they want to get their hands on the 200 billion dollar loan portfolio in order to sell it to their Wall Street friends. The program will become privatized and benefits will go to bankers instead of to the citizens that the programs are supposed to help.
There is a similar situation with happening with the vast amount of data accumulated by the Department of Commerce. This data is used heavily in weather forecasting, firefighting and farming applications. Private industry wants to restrict the free availability of this data as they greatly profit from applications that use this data. And it’s important, for example, if it weren’t for journalists poring through publicly available Medicare and Medicaid data we probably wold think even know we had an opioid epidemic.
The one thing that struck me was that the large majority of the vast number of programs that are being threatened exist to benefit areas that are typically very politically conservative. Because business and industry in urban areas have much better access to capital markets, a much larger tax base at the state and local level, and are much less dependent on the vagaries of climate, weather and nature in general. Which made me feel better and worse at the same time.
And I fear that the interview Lewis did with the guy at the USDA in charge of the food stamp program will end his career ( the bureaucrat’s career, not Lewis’s ).
Because the guy talked about maximizing participation among the eligible population as being a goal of the program. And he talked about how frustrating it was when state executives and legislators try to torpedo those efforts.
It’s a really good book, and it’s not centered around Trump’s antics.
TLDR - I think he should’ve called the book “You Didn’t Build That”. This is a important book, you need to read it.
From earlier in that press conference:
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME, YOU FUCKING HYPOCRITE??? What do you think Mitch “The Turtle” McConnell did with Merrick Garland’s nomination, if it wasn’t “undercutting the voice of the American people?”
She makes me want to puke every time she opens that gaping maw in her face.
Also: Popular vote.
Where are your compassion and humanity, Mr. President?
“I don’t remember.”
Impossible to miss what you never had.
If you’re talking about the provision of passenger rail services in the UK, it’s a “swings and roundabouts” situation - British Rail wasn’t exactly a paragon of public service either. If you’re talking about the infrastructure, yeah, Railtrack was a fucking stupid idea.
Humperdoo.
That’d be the same Deutsche Bank recently under investigation for facilitating money laundering activity, no?
A recurring theme in Lewis’s work is the issue of complexity. Over and over he explores the impact of things being more complex that people can understand. “The Big Short” and a lot of his shorter works about the fiscal crisis delve at length into the fact that financial instruments had become so bizarrely convoluted that most people in the financial industry had no idea what they were doing. “Moneyball” is about the difficulty in measuring how good people are, or aren’t, at their jobs. “the Undoing Project” talks about two scientists who found that human behaviour is much harder to understand than basically every economist in the world realized.
I have only read one part of the book so I’m interested in how he ties it together, but if you think about it, to a lot of Trumpists, Trump is the manifestation of a very common fantasy, of the outsider who can fix the government because everyone in the government’s crazy and just a little common sense will do. It’s like that scene in “Dave” where Kevin Kline and Charles Grodin fix the U.S. federal budget in one evening over beers and pizza because they’re Just Guys and all the government people are idiots. It’s fun but it’s exactly as logical and realistic as “Guardians of the Galaxy” and exactly as smart in real life as having your dog perform your heart surgery. Government is much more complicated than anyone can comprehend and you need experts and insiders to run it.
Thanks for the review. I also enjoy reading his books and look forward to getting this one. My small library only has one copy - I’m on the wait list.
I believe I’ve linked to this before, but a good bit of the transition story at the USDA was previously published in Vanity Fair: “Inside Trump’s Cruel Campaign Against the U.S.D.A.’s Scientists”. It’s quite eye-opening.
Same author. He’s published much of the book material already. This article, which focuses on the Department of Energy, is in the same series: Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House | Vanity Fair
Anyone here familiar with the Gamble v United States case coming before the Supreme Court?
Some of my conspiracy-minded friends mentioned it to me. In a nutshell, the theory goes that the case above could possibly give the President the power to pardon state crimes if it overlaps with a federal crime or prevent prosecution if there’s already a federal pardon. Kavanaugh would be predicted to vote for this. The result would be that Trump could then pardon federal and state crimes and use this newly granted power to try to effectively shut down the Russia probe.
Could a Case Currently Before the Supreme Court Result in a Stronger Presidential Pardon?
:eek:
The Russian handler of Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian “lawyer” who met with Donnie Jr. and other Trump associates in the Trump Tower, has died in a “helicopter crash”.
I think the quotes around “helicopter crash” imply that the helicopter didn’t actually crash - I’d be pretty sure it did. Now, if you had said accident instead of crash, then the quotes would have been appropriate.
Started a so far brief GD thread on this: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=863048
From the linked article:
Wow, those allegations are just looking more and more baseless and provocative every time another Russian turns up mysteriously dead.
Why would the Ruskies kill the handler and two other guys? Why not arrange an umbrella accident for her?