Tuesday, May 14, 2019

SWAMP KEEPER DONALD TRUMP - AMERICA'S No. ONE HUCKSTER, CON MAN AND TAX EVADER

“Behind every great fortune there is a great crime” – Honoré de Balzac

Trump says he reported $1.17 billion in losses over 10 years to evade paying taxes


New York Times exposé published last Wednesday featured an analysis of the tax returns of President Donald Trump between 1985 and 1994. Over this 10-year period, Trump reported $1.17 billion in losses, a sufficiently high amount to legally except Trump from paying income taxes for eight of those 10 years.
The Times reporters were able to piece together the data from information in Trump’s tax returns that was provided by a source, who, according to the newspaper, had legal access to the information. They then found matching results in an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) public database providing information on top earners. Last week’s article follows a Times exposépublished last October that focused on the tax-dodging machinations of the Trump business under Donald Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump.
Donald Trump had blamed the 1990 recession for a series of reversals and bankruptcies that hit his business empire in the early 90’s. However, it now is evident that he had incurred significant losses well beforehand.
In 1985, Trump reported $46.1 million in losses. These mainly stemmed from his casinos, hotels and retail business. Every subsequent year, he lost more money than almost every other individual taxpayer in the US. His losses in 1990 and 1991, over $250 million each year, were more than double the losses of the nearest taxpayers in the top earner category.
The report provides insight into Trump’s main sources of income over this period. There were large winnings on the stock market, a $67.1 million salary earned one year, and $52.9 million in windfall profits. Each year, however, his losses vastly outweighed his earnings—meaning that most of his income was not taxed at all.
Trump’s earnings on the stock market underscore the corrupt and unstable character of the financial parasitism that developed during the 1980s, culminating in the 2008 financial meltdown and continuing unabated today. Between 1986 and 1988, while his core businesses remained deep in the red, Trump made millions by making a pretense of planning the takeover of companies. By the end of 1988, however, his gains plummeted as most investors realized it was idle talk.
Trump slammed the Times story last week in a series of tweets, which included the following astonishing admission: “Real estate developers in the 1980s & 1990s, more than 30 years ago, were entitled to massive write-offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases. Much was non-monetary. Sometimes considered ‘tax shelter,’ you would get it by building, or even buying. You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes… almost all real estate developers did—and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport. Additionally, the very old information put out is a highly inaccurate Fake News hit job!”
The Times story can be interpreted in one of two ways. It may very well expose the fraud of Trump’s supposed genius for business, of which he routinely boasted throughout his 2016 presidential campaign. Or, if Trump is telling the truth, it provides data on the vast scale of tax fraud and evasion carried out by the current occupant of the White House.
An unnamed senior official in a statement issued to the Times wrote: “The president got massive depreciation and tax shelter because of large-scale construction and subsidized developments. That is why the president has always scoffed at the tax system and said you need to change the tax laws. You can make a large income and not have to pay a large amount of taxes.”
While the recently released information provides some insight into Trump’s sordid dealings in the business underworld, little is known about his activities after 1994. It is entirely possible that he has dodged taxes for many more than just eight years. He has repeatedly refused to release his tax returns, a departure from the past 40 years of presidential tradition and an expression of Trump’s contempt for democratic norms. Following Trump’s order that administration officials ignore a string of subpoenas issued by the House Democrats, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rebuffed a summons from the House Ways and Committee for six years of Trump’s tax returns.
Just prior to assuming office, Trump made clear that he would not sever ties with his vast business empire as president. The Emoluments Clause (Article I, Section 9, Clause 8) of the US Constitution bars any person holding office in the US government from receiving any sort of present, salary, fee or profit from a foreign state.
Trump has business interests in real estate, management and branding in no less than 18 foreign countries, spanning virtually the entire globe. They are: Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, Panama, Bermuda, French Antilles, Scotland, Ireland, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Israel, South Africa, Indonesia, India and China. Over the course of his 16-month election campaign, he registered eight new companies based in Saudi Arabia.
The Donald J. Trump Foundation also admitted in IRS filings that it broke federal rules against “self-dealing,” a provision intended to prevent charitable organizations from using funds to help their leaders’ families or business interests. Trump was fond of using the foundation’s funds to settle his legal disputes. He appears to have spent some $260,000 in foundation funds on legal battles. The foundation reportedly also bought high-priced luxury items only to gift them to Trump.
If true, this would represent yet another component of the long history of tax evasion and fraud upon which Trump’s business empire was built. The exposé published last October by the Times presented a factual case that Trump and his siblings benefited from tax fraud to the tune of at least half a billion dollars. It found that Fred and Mary Trump transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, paying a total of $52.2 million in federal taxes, an effective rate of about 5 percent. The actual estate and gift tax rate at the time was 55 percent, meaning the Trumps paid less than 10 percent of the $550 million they owed to the government.
Even within the context of tax laws that are riddled with loopholes, some, if not all, of the tax dodges used by the Trumps to evade hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) in tax payments were very likely illegal. The picture of criminality and corruption that emerges from the Times reports is one that characterizes not just the Trump clan, but the corporate-financial oligarchy as a whole.

NY Times exposé on Trump fortune: An empire built on tax evasion and fraud

“Behind every great fortune there is a great crime” – Honoré de Balzac


In its print edition on Wednesday, the New York Times devoted eight full pages to a 14,000 word investigative report on the financial practices that gave rise to the multibillion-dollar fortune of President Donald Trump.
The article is the result of an 18-month investigation that included interviews with former employees of Trump’s real estate mogul father, Fred C. Trump, and a review of some 100,000 pages of financial records. It presents a detailed, factual case that Trump and his siblings benefited from tax fraud to the tune of at least half a billion dollars.
Even within the context of inheritance tax laws that are riddled with loopholes, some, if not all, of the tax dodges used by the Trumps to evade hundreds of millions of dollars in tax payments were very likely illegal. Whatever the legal issues, however, the picture of criminality and corruption that emerges from the Times report is one that characterizes not just the Trump clan, but the corporate-financial oligarchy as a whole.
The Times found that Fred and Mary Trump transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, paying a total of $52.2 million in federal taxes, an effective rate of about 5 percent. The actual estate and gift tax rate at the time was 55 percent, meaning the Trumps paid less than 10 percent of the $550 million they owed to the government.
This massive tax fraud was achieved through the setting up of shell companies owned by Donald Trump and his siblings and the systematic undervaluation of the assets of Fred Trump’s real estate empire, which resulted in a sharp reduction in inheritance taxes when the properties were transferred to the children prior to Fred Trump’s death in 1999.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) repeatedly cited Fred Trump in the 1950s and 1960s for underpaying taxes. In 1995, it audited his gift tax return and concluded that he had undervalued assets being transferred to his children by 38 percent. But it did nothing to stop the practice, exemplifying its role and that of the government as a whole in running protection for America’s financial aristocracy and facilitating its crimes.
In 1992, the Trump family established a company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance. Its purported purpose was to serve as the purchasing agent for Fred Trump’s buildings, buying everything from boilers and other equipment to cleaning supplies.
In reality, All County was a dummy firm. Its listed address was the Manhasset home of John Walter, a favorite nephew of Fred Trump. Walter was the legal owner of All County, along with Donald Trump and his sisters Maryanne and Elizabeth and brother Robert. The company did not actually organize the purchase of items for Fred Trump’s apartment buildings. Instead, it served as a middleman, systematically padding the prices it charged Fred Trump over and above the actual cost of the purchases, sometimes by 20 percent, sometimes by 50 percent or more.
By agreement with the father, the Trump children used All County as a vehicle for siphoning millions of dollars from the Fred Trump real estate empire to themselves without having to pay gift taxes to the government.
Fred Trump then used the artificially induced hit to the profitability of his apartment buildings to apply for and receive permission from the state to raise rents on tenants in his rent-regulated properties. The Times cites Robert Trump as acknowledging in a deposition, “The higher the markup would be, the higher the rent that might be charged.”
The Times reported Friday that New York City was joining New York State in investigating the allegations in its report on the Trumps’ finances. The newspaper cited First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan as pointing out that by driving down the profitability of his buildings, Fred Trump may have fraudulently reduced his city property taxes, which are based in part on the profits reported by owners.
In January of 1994, some two years after the founding of All County, the Trumps set up a new firm called Apartment Management Associates Inc. This was, according to the Times, yet another dummy company with a mailing address at John Walter’s home. Two months after its establishment, Apartment Management Associates, owned by Donald Trump, his siblings and cousin Walter, began collecting fees for managing Fred Trump’s buildings that previously went to the father’s firm, Trump Management.
Like All County, Apartment Management Associates was a mechanism for transferring wealth from Fred Trump to his heirs, without paying gift or estate taxes. The Times writes: “By 1998, records show, All County and Apartment Management were generating today’s equivalent of $2.2 million a year for each of the Trump children. Whatever income tax they owed on this money, it was considerably less than the 55 percent tax Fred Trump would have owed had he simply given each of them $2.2 million a year.”
According to the newspaper, Donald Trump, Fred’s favorite child and the one most involved in his business dealings, played an active role in these and other shady operations.
The Times article goes on to detail how the Trumps transferred assets from father to children in the 1990s, making use of a tax dodge widely used by the super-rich, a grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT, to drastically undervalue the assets being transferred and thereby pay only a fraction of the gift taxes legally owed. In this way, the Trumps evaded hundreds of millions in taxes.
The Trumps claimed that the father’s properties were worth $41.4 million. The same buildings were sold off over the next decade for more than 16 times that sum.
“In the end,” the authors write, “the transfer of the Trump empire cost Fred and Mary Trump $20.5 million in gift taxes and their children $21 million in annuity payments. That is hundreds of millions of dollars less than they would have paid based on the empire’s market value, the Times found.”
Much of the article details the vast sums Fred Trump transferred to Donald, which the Times estimates to have totaled $413 million in today’s dollars. The newspaper makes much of the fraud of Donald Trump’s claims to be a “self-made billionaire,” having received only a $1 million loan from his father that he parlayed into a multibillionaire-dollar empire.
This is significant in as much as it points to the immense role of inherited wealth in the fortunes piled up by the corporate-financial oligarchs. However, the Times focuses on the sham of Trump’s self-promoting narrative in order to score political points and distract attention from the more fundamental issue: the pervasive criminality of the corporate-financial ruling elite as a whole, its plundering of society and the complicity of the entire political establishment, which it controls.
The Times seeks to present the Trumps as an aberration from the norm for very definite class reasons. It and the Democratic Party with which it is allied are defenders of the capitalist system and the oligarchy that rules it. In fact, its own exposé gives a glimpse of the standard, everyday practice of the ruling class and the official institutions of government—the courts, the regulatory agencies, Congress and the Democratic and Republican parties.
This rampant corruption and criminality have only increased in recent decades, in tandem with the social counterrevolution carried out against the working class, over which both parties have presided. The decades of deindustrialization and decimation of industrial cities and towns have coincided with the ever more dominant role of financial speculation and manipulation in the economic life of the country and, indeed, the world.
Trump embodies the degraded and gangster-like social forces that have risen to the top. He is the product and expression of the decay of American capitalism and capitalist democracy. He is no aberration.
A key mechanism in the social counterrevolution and consolidation of a financial oligarchy has been the systematic skewing of the tax system in favor of the rich and the super-rich.
By 2009, the average federal tax rate on income from work and savings was 18 percent. This compares with 4 percent for inherited income.
Estate and gift taxes have fallen from 2.6 percent of federal revenues in 1972 to less than 1 percent today, even as the share of wealth and income monopolized by the mega-rich has dramatically increased. This process was vastly accelerated with the signing of Trump’s tax “reform” in December, which drastically slashed corporate taxes and tax rates for the rich.
Systematic tax evasion by the super-rich, facilitated by the government, is by no means a purely American phenomenon. As a team of economists headed by Gabriel Zucman documented in a study published in August, the 0.01 percent richest households worldwide evade about 25 percent of their taxes just through the hoarding of assets in offshore tax shelters.
With its detailed exposure of the Trump fortune, the Times has unwittingly confirmed the insistence of socialists that the continued existence of a parasitic oligarchy is incompatible with the most basic social and democratic rights of the vast majority of the population.

The sordid saga of the Trumps underscores the need for the working class to expropriate the wealth of the oligarchy and put its trillions to use providing good-paying jobs, decent schools and housing, clean air and water, a secure retirement and access to culture for all people. That is to say, the need for the unification and mobilization of the working class to carry out a socialist revolution and restructure society on the basis of social equality and common ownership and democratic control of the corporations and banks.

NY Times exposé on Trump fortune: An empire built on tax evasion and fraud

“Behind every great fortune there is a great crime” – Honoré de Balzac


In its print edition on Wednesday, the New York Times devoted eight full pages to a 14,000 word investigative report on the financial practices that gave rise to the multibillion-dollar fortune of President Donald Trump.
The article is the result of an 18-month investigation that included interviews with former employees of Trump’s real estate mogul father, Fred C. Trump, and a review of some 100,000 pages of financial records. It presents a detailed, factual case that Trump and his siblings benefited from tax fraud to the tune of at least half a billion dollars.
Even within the context of inheritance tax laws that are riddled with loopholes, some, if not all, of the tax dodges used by the Trumps to evade hundreds of millions of dollars in tax payments were very likely illegal. Whatever the legal issues, however, the picture of criminality and corruption that emerges from the Times report is one that characterizes not just the Trump clan, but the corporate-financial oligarchy as a whole.
The Times found that Fred and Mary Trump transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, paying a total of $52.2 million in federal taxes, an effective rate of about 5 percent. The actual estate and gift tax rate at the time was 55 percent, meaning the Trumps paid less than 10 percent of the $550 million they owed to the government.
This massive tax fraud was achieved through the setting up of shell companies owned by Donald Trump and his siblings and the systematic undervaluation of the assets of Fred Trump’s real estate empire, which resulted in a sharp reduction in inheritance taxes when the properties were transferred to the children prior to Fred Trump’s death in 1999.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) repeatedly cited Fred Trump in the 1950s and 1960s for underpaying taxes. In 1995, it audited his gift tax return and concluded that he had undervalued assets being transferred to his children by 38 percent. But it did nothing to stop the practice, exemplifying its role and that of the government as a whole in running protection for America’s financial aristocracy and facilitating its crimes.
In 1992, the Trump family established a company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance. Its purported purpose was to serve as the purchasing agent for Fred Trump’s buildings, buying everything from boilers and other equipment to cleaning supplies.
In reality, All County was a dummy firm. Its listed address was the Manhasset home of John Walter, a favorite nephew of Fred Trump. Walter was the legal owner of All County, along with Donald Trump and his sisters Maryanne and Elizabeth and brother Robert. The company did not actually organize the purchase of items for Fred Trump’s apartment buildings. Instead, it served as a middleman, systematically padding the prices it charged Fred Trump over and above the actual cost of the purchases, sometimes by 20 percent, sometimes by 50 percent or more.
By agreement with the father, the Trump children used All County as a vehicle for siphoning millions of dollars from the Fred Trump real estate empire to themselves without having to pay gift taxes to the government.
Fred Trump then used the artificially induced hit to the profitability of his apartment buildings to apply for and receive permission from the state to raise rents on tenants in his rent-regulated properties. The Times cites Robert Trump as acknowledging in a deposition, “The higher the markup would be, the higher the rent that might be charged.”
The Times reported Friday that New York City was joining New York State in investigating the allegations in its report on the Trumps’ finances. The newspaper cited First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan as pointing out that by driving down the profitability of his buildings, Fred Trump may have fraudulently reduced his city property taxes, which are based in part on the profits reported by owners.
In January of 1994, some two years after the founding of All County, the Trumps set up a new firm called Apartment Management Associates Inc. This was, according to the Times, yet another dummy company with a mailing address at John Walter’s home. Two months after its establishment, Apartment Management Associates, owned by Donald Trump, his siblings and cousin Walter, began collecting fees for managing Fred Trump’s buildings that previously went to the father’s firm, Trump Management.
Like All County, Apartment Management Associates was a mechanism for transferring wealth from Fred Trump to his heirs, without paying gift or estate taxes. The Times writes: “By 1998, records show, All County and Apartment Management were generating today’s equivalent of $2.2 million a year for each of the Trump children. Whatever income tax they owed on this money, it was considerably less than the 55 percent tax Fred Trump would have owed had he simply given each of them $2.2 million a year.”
According to the newspaper, Donald Trump, Fred’s favorite child and the one most involved in his business dealings, played an active role in these and other shady operations.
The Times article goes on to detail how the Trumps transferred assets from father to children in the 1990s, making use of a tax dodge widely used by the super-rich, a grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT, to drastically undervalue the assets being transferred and thereby pay only a fraction of the gift taxes legally owed. In this way, the Trumps evaded hundreds of millions in taxes.
The Trumps claimed that the father’s properties were worth $41.4 million. The same buildings were sold off over the next decade for more than 16 times that sum.
“In the end,” the authors write, “the transfer of the Trump empire cost Fred and Mary Trump $20.5 million in gift taxes and their children $21 million in annuity payments. That is hundreds of millions of dollars less than they would have paid based on the empire’s market value, the Times found.”
Much of the article details the vast sums Fred Trump transferred to Donald, which the Times estimates to have totaled $413 million in today’s dollars. The newspaper makes much of the fraud of Donald Trump’s claims to be a “self-made billionaire,” having received only a $1 million loan from his father that he parlayed into a multibillionaire-dollar empire.
This is significant in as much as it points to the immense role of inherited wealth in the fortunes piled up by the corporate-financial oligarchs. However, the Times focuses on the sham of Trump’s self-promoting narrative in order to score political points and distract attention from the more fundamental issue: the pervasive criminality of the corporate-financial ruling elite as a whole, its plundering of society and the complicity of the entire political establishment, which it controls.
The Times seeks to present the Trumps as an aberration from the norm for very definite class reasons. It and the Democratic Party with which it is allied are defenders of the capitalist system and the oligarchy that rules it. In fact, its own exposé gives a glimpse of the standard, everyday practice of the ruling class and the official institutions of government—the courts, the regulatory agencies, Congress and the Democratic and Republican parties.
This rampant corruption and criminality have only increased in recent decades, in tandem with the social counterrevolution carried out against the working class, over which both parties have presided. The decades of deindustrialization and decimation of industrial cities and towns have coincided with the ever more dominant role of financial speculation and manipulation in the economic life of the country and, indeed, the world.
Trump embodies the degraded and gangster-like social forces that have risen to the top. He is the product and expression of the decay of American capitalism and capitalist democracy. He is no aberration.
A key mechanism in the social counterrevolution and consolidation of a financial oligarchy has been the systematic skewing of the tax system in favor of the rich and the super-rich.
By 2009, the average federal tax rate on income from work and savings was 18 percent. This compares with 4 percent for inherited income.
Estate and gift taxes have fallen from 2.6 percent of federal revenues in 1972 to less than 1 percent today, even as the share of wealth and income monopolized by the mega-rich has dramatically increased. This process was vastly accelerated with the signing of Trump’s tax “reform” in December, which drastically slashed corporate taxes and tax rates for the rich.
Systematic tax evasion by the super-rich, facilitated by the government, is by no means a purely American phenomenon. As a team of economists headed by Gabriel Zucman documented in a study published in August, the 0.01 percent richest households worldwide evade about 25 percent of their taxes just through the hoarding of assets in offshore tax shelters.
With its detailed exposure of the Trump fortune, the Times has unwittingly confirmed the insistence of socialists that the continued existence of a parasitic oligarchy is incompatible with the most basic social and democratic rights of the vast majority of the population.

The sordid saga of the Trumps underscores the need for the working class to expropriate the wealth of the oligarchy and put its trillions to use providing good-paying jobs, decent schools and housing, clean air and water, a secure retirement and access to culture for all people. That is to say, the need for the unification and mobilization of the working class to carry out a socialist revolution and restructure society on the basis of social equality and common ownership and democratic control of the corporations and banks.

The case of Sydney Schanberg

How the NY Times shielded Trump and the Manhattan real estate mafia


The October 3 edition of the New York Times featured an eight-page exposé on the systematic tax evasion and fraud carried out by New York real estate billionaire Fred Z. Trump and his son Donald to transfer the father’s fortune to his children, while paying less than 10 percent of the $550 million they legally owed to the government in inheritance taxes.
The report presents a detailed, factual account of how Donald Trump and his siblings benefited from tax fraud in the amount of at least half a billion dollars. (See: “NY Times exposé on Trump fortune: An empire built on tax evasion and fraud”).
Taken as a whole, the exposé opens a small window into the criminality and corruption that characterize not only the Trumps, but the entire corporate-financial oligarchy of which they are a part. In their presentation and framing of the report, however, the Times editors do their best to deflect attention from what the material says about the capitalist system as a whole and instead direct the reader's attention to the personal attributes of Donald Trump, as though he were a mere aberration.
The New York Times is intimately familiar with the corruption, tax evasion and bribery that are the stock in trade of the New York real estate industry, including the Trump empire. It could have published a similar exposé of the Trump clan 40 years ago had it so desired. But it was—and remains today—deeply involved in covering up for and promoting the profiteering and plundering operations of the city’s real estate speculators and their allies on Wall Street.
Perhaps the most notorious example is the Times firing in 1985 of its Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Sydney Schanberg. In July of that year, Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal and publisher Arthur Sulzberger summarily closed down the twice-weekly column by Schanberg, who had been the newspaper’s metro New York commentator since 1981. Schanberg resigned from the Times, where he had worked since 1959, and went on to write for New York Newsday, followed by the Village Voice and occasionally for the Nationmagazine.
Schanberg had attained international fame and respect for his reporting as the Times correspondent first in Vietnam and then in Cambodia. He was one of a very few American journalists who remained in Phnom Penh to report the bloody Khmer Rouge occupation of the city in 1975. Narrowly escaping with this life, he wrote an article for the Times Sunday magazine in 1980 about his Cambodian colleague and friend titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” which he later turned into a book. The book, in turn, served as the basis for the 1984 film The Killing Fields.
The Times got rid of Schanberg because he was writing column after column exposing the Westway project—a $4 billion highway-luxury apartment development in Manhattan’s lower west side that was being avidly promoted by Trump and his fellow real estate speculators, along with Chase Manhattan CEO David Rockefeller, the construction unions and leaders of both political parties, from President Ronald Reagan to Governor Mario Cuomo, Mayor Ed Koch and Senators Al D’Amato and Daniel Moynihan. Among the project’s staunchest boosters was the Times editorial page.
The scheme involved reclaiming hundreds of acres from the Hudson River and turning them into landfill for a partially underground highway and a high-rent apartment and office complex. Its estimated cost was the staggering sum for that time of $4.2 billion, or about $1 billion for every mile of newly constructed highway.
This boondoggle for Wall Street and the real estate mafia was being pushed at a time when New York City had barely recovered from its brush with bankruptcy in 1975, which was averted by placing the city’s finances under the control of an unelected state financial control board dominated by bankers and imposing cuts in city workers’ jobs and benefits and slashing social services. New York’s subway and mass transit systems, starved of funds, were on the brink of collapse.
Westway became mired for years in federal lawsuits brought by conservationists and others who opposed the project, claiming it would produce an environmental disaster and devastate aquatic life in the Hudson. In the course of several trials, which Schanberg followed and commented on and the Times and the rest of the New York and national media ignored, Judge Thomas Griesa berated government officials, lawyers and others backing the project for covering up information, distorting scientific data, giving false testimony and committing perjury. In the end, Griesa ruled for the opponents of Westway and blocked the project from going forward.
The Times silenced Schanberg after two of his Westway columns, published in July of 1985, denounced the New York press, implicating his own paper, for refusing to report the revelations of corruption and deception surrounding the development scheme. Here is an excerpt from Schanberg’s last New York Times column, dated July 27, 1985:
As a public works project, the Westway plan may be this generation’s largest misuse of scarce public funds, but we do owe it an educational debt—as a wondrous, unfolding case study of wheeling and stealing on a grand scale. Rather than using the money to build this brief underground highway through landfill that will gouge 200 acres out of the Hudson so that developers can erect luxury apartment towers on Lower Manhattan’s West Side waterfront, we could spend it for rehabilitating the subways, which can use all the help they can get…
The big unions say Westway will mean jobs. Big business says it will mean big business. The politicians don’t want to offend anyone big because it’s the big people who pay for their election campaigns.
So the mayor is for it and the governor is for it. And so are Senators Moynihan and D’Amato. Not least, David Rockefeller is for it…
The city’s newspapers, like the big politicians, have also ignored most of the scandal. The New York dailies, strangely asleep, run only occasional bland stories, sometimes just snippets—rarely about the chicanery. That, too, is part of the shame of Westway.
The following month, a reader bemoaned the sacking of Schanberg in a letter to the editor that read:
In a city gone mad with greed and avarice, Sydney Schanberg’s was the one voice of reason, taking on such powerful targets as the developers, landlords, the advocates of that gigantic boondoggle, Westway, and other miscreants. Who is now going to speak out against these forces which are remaking our city into an overbuilt monstrosity inhabited only by the world’s very right or the very poor and homeless?
By its actions, the Times delivered an unequivocal answer: No one! Its firing of Schanberg sent an unambiguous message to all New York Times writers: Don’t mess with Donald Trump and the real estate industry.

No comments: