Trump’s loyal campaign manager had been with him through the “Mexican rapists” speech, Macy’s dumping Trump’s ties, the “McCain isn’t a war hero” controversy, the Muslim ban, the “hand size” embarrassment, and on and on and on. But when all was said and done and Trump was still cruising to victory, Jared and Ivanka walked in and delivered an ultimatum to Trump: “It’s Corey or us.”
Jared would later shyly cop to being “[The Man Who] Won Trump the White House,” as a Forbes magazine cover story put it.
And who understood the beating heart of the Trump voter like Jared and Ivanka? With Javanka in charge, the campaign schedule was soon bristling with such items as “women’s empowerment week,” “education week” and “entrepreneur week.”
In no time, Trump was 16 points down and sinking fast. Steve Bannon was brought in, whereupon he promptly threw out all the Working Women’s Intersectional Global Warming weeks and got back to Trump’s issues.
Jared assured Bannon that the campaign had $25 million on hand. That’s when Bannon had to explain “debits” to Kushner. The campaign had $25 million — provided you didn’t count all the unpaid expenses. When those were included, it turned out the campaign was in debt.
As the SAT board had discovered, math wasn’t Jared’s strong suit.
Although it has been well reported that Jared’s Harvard admission was purchased for him by his father, Ward produces a shocking new detail. Of the five tracks at Jared’s high school, he wasn’t at the bottom of track one, perhaps suitable for a lesser Ivy League with solid SAT scores. He wasn’t even in track two. Jared was in track three. But now he has co-opted the Make America Great Again movement for his own personal advancement. I guess that makes him smarter than Trump.
Apart from staging photo-ops, including her “princess moment” at the inaugural ball (her words), Ivanka’s first order of business upon winning the presidency was assigning White House office space. Her map showed a big office for her, a big office for Jared — and also a nice corner office, which was designated “Trump family office.”
Transition officials, Ward reports, “were surprised that the first lady did not appear to have an office. So, too, was Melania Trump, who quickly put an end to Ivanka’s scheming.”
Jared’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ), refer to Jared as “the clown prince.” Bone-cutter MBS assured those around him that he had Jared “in my pocket.”
MBS and MBZ derided Jared’s Middle East peace plan as infantile, while using him to achieve their objective: war with Qatar. According to an American businessman’s leaked emails, their attitude was, “Nobody would even waste a cup of coffee on him if it wasn’t for who he is married to.”
As one former top White House official explained: “Jared never understands the details of anything. He’s just impressed by names.”
Following meetings at the White House and also with the Kushners over their 666 Fifth Avenue property, former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim reported back to the emir that “the people atop the new administration were heavily motivated by personal financial interest.”
After Ivanka’s speech introducing her father at the Republican National Convention — rivaled only by Billy Carter’s introduction of his brother, Jimmy! — she tweeted from her personal account: “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech.”
After the Trump family was interviewed on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Ivanka’s company emailed out a “style alert” advertising the $10,800 diamond bracelet she’d worn on the show — “available from Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry.”
Ivanka has managed to win a slew of trademarks in China since her father became the Figurehead President, with several approvals being fast-tracked at about the same time Trump was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago.
Instead of “Make America Great Again,” the motto of the Trump presidency is, as one of Trump’s legal spokesmen put it: “The advance team for Jared and Ivanka.”
This is not what anyone voted for.
One cautionary example is
President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose ticket into Harvard,
according to the 2006 book The Price of Admission:
How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, was his father’s $2.5
million dollar gift to the university. Jared got his Harvard degree, but he has
been the butt of social-media taunts precisely because his daddy had to pay a
fortune to get the school to admit him. The cost of a brag-worthy degree?
Millions. The cost of the right- and left-brain stuff? Priceless.
CITY
JOURNAL
WHAT
THE COLLEGE-ADMISSIONS SCANDAL TELL US ABOUT AMERICA’S BROKEN MERITOCRACY
If, like
me, you’re an avid observer of human affairs at their most vain and
status-crazed, you have been studying the College Cheating Scandal, or what
investigators called Operation Varsity Blues, with all the intensity of a rabbinical
scholar poring over Leviticus. Each reading yields delicious new details of
greed, ambition, hypocrisy, and decadence. “Ah! Vanitas, Vanitatum!” as the
author of the classic nineteenth-century novel Vanity Fair sighed. But eventually the mordant fun gives way to the
recognition that what we have here is evidence of a serious sickness in the
American meritocracy.
The story
is well known by now, but before it disappears into the overflowing landfill of
tawdry contemporary Americana, some of its more obscure gems deserve a farewell
salute. Let’s begin with the master of ceremonies, William “Rick” Singer, owner
of a Newport Beach, California college-consulting company. Singer bribed
college coaches and staged mockups of his clients’ slacker children at athletic
events, sometimes photoshopping their faces onto a picture of actual soccer
players or rowers, or, weirdly, pole-vaulters. A 36-year-old Harvard grad, Mark
Riddell, could take a standardized test and get an agreed-upon, specific score
with the precision of an expert archer. Singer hired him to take or to correct
tests for clients whose preliminary scores would put them on the reject pile:
Riddell is now Cooperating Witness #2. My favorite bit of chicanery was
Singer’s money-laundering operation. To hide the eye-catching sums that he was
earning for his ploys—and to give his clients the extra perk of a (legal) tax
deduction for their (illegal) contributions—Singer set up the Key Worldwide
Foundation, which he advertised as “provid[ing] guidance, encouragement and
opportunity to disadvantaged students around the world.” The IRS estimates that
Singer earned $25 million for his good works.
The
charitable donors are a treasure trove of you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up farce.
Jane Buckingham, Beverly Hills mother and businesswoman, paid Singer $50,000 to
have Ridell take her son’s ACT for him so that he could score high enough to
get into the University of Southern California; Ridell got the boy a 35 out of
36. Earlier in her career, Buckingham had parlayed her expertise as a “youth
marketing specialist” into a TV show, Job or No Job, offering millennials
career advice. Evidently she forgot what she told an interviewer at the Observerwhen she
described some of the young people who came on her show as “so entitled that
you want to slap them.” Another donor was Willkie Farr & Gallagher co-chair
Gordon Caplan, named as The American Lawyer’s 2018 Dealmaker of the Year. Also in the lineup are actress Felicity Huffman and her husband
William Macy, most recently star of a television series called—will the dark
irony never stop?—Shameless. For reasons not
entirely clear, Macy has not yet been indicted.
First
prize for sheer gall goes to actress Lori Loughlin and her fashion-designer
husband Massimo Giannulli. The two paid Singer a half-million to package their
daughters as accomplished rowers in order to buy their place in the University
of Southern California freshman class, though evidently neither girl knew the
difference between a coxswain and an entry on Pornhub. Nor, at least in
Olivia’s case, were they thinking much about their course load. As it happens,
Olivia spent the first week of school in Fiji. She wasn’t there to visit the
renowned libraries of the South Pacific, but for a photo shoot in her role as a
“social media influencer.” Using the stage name Olivia Jade, she video-splained
to her 1.9 million followers that, while she would be doing a lot of traveling
for her career, “I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying. I
don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”
A few
final, irresistible details about the dewy Loughlin: the actress made her name
on the hit sitcom Full House. She played Aunt Becky
to the golden-girl Olsen twins. Aunt Becky was supposed to be the show’s moral
compass; in one episode, she marched into the office of a preschool admissions
director to tell on her husband for lying on his niece’s application. Back in
the real world, Loughlin went on to groom her own daughter for a future on the
red carpet—witness the Internet photos of the luminous mother and daughter
posing at celebrity events and gabbing on The Today Show. It seems unlikely that Olivia Jade could have
collected her Sephora, Amazon, and Dolce Gabbana deals on her own; her doting
mother was the influencer there. In short, the Hallmark-wholesome Aunt Becky
turns out to be a modern-day Becky Sharp.
This kind
of arrogance, greed, and ambition has been the stuff of literary satire and
philosophical reflection throughout the ages. What sets Operation Varsity Blues
apart and caused the public outrage, of course, is its American context. The
parents were not seeking riches, fame, or even elite status in any conventional
sense: they already had that. Between the two of them, Felicity Huffman and
Bill Macy are estimated to be worth $45 million; their daughters would never be
lacking in American Express black cards or invitations to friends’ Aspen
chalets. Olivia Jade was already on her way to online stardom, at least within
her peer group.
No, they
were not looking for financial rewards or klieg lights. What they wanted was
for their kids to fit in as members of the cognitive elite. Anand Giridharadas,
NBC political analyst and fire-and-brimstone scourge of America’s richest,
tweeted about the scandal that America’s ruling class “confuses its privilege
for merit.” That’s exactly backward. The Operation Varsity parents opened their
wallets precisely because they knew their children did not have the right stuff. They wanted elite status for their
children, and in a meritocracy, even one as tattered as our own, high SATs and
extracurriculars leading to a hoity-toity college degree are the ticket. The
parents of Operation Varsity will probably get over the humiliation of a
mugshot, but their kids will never live down being outed as meritocratic
losers.
Which
takes us to the only good news in this whole sordid affair: buying your way
into cognitive-elite respectability is trickier than anyone thought. Even if
you avoid jail, you are surrounded by people who are expert at sniffing out
meritocratic poseurs, namely those with modest IQs. One cautionary example is
President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose ticket into Harvard,
according to the 2006 book The Price of Admission: How America’s
Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, was his father’s $2.5 million dollar gift to the
university. Jared got his Harvard degree, but he has been the butt of social-media
taunts precisely because his daddy had to pay a fortune to get the school to
admit him. The cost of a brag-worthy degree? Millions. The cost of the right-
and left-brain stuff? Priceless.
The
current system of college admission doesn’t have many defenders at this point.
Everyone knows that it corrupts us all: the high school teachers who feel
obliged to inflate the talents of their ordinary students, the therapists
selling their professional credentials to parents who want special-disability
diagnoses for their healthy kids so that they have extra time to take their
exams, the middle-class parents who have neither the funds nor the stomach to
violate the law but help create the panic that is driving their kids (and their
educators) out of their minds. Worst of all, it demoralizes less-advantaged
kids and their parents, who are already tempted toward resentment-filled
hopelessness.
For all
higher education’s sins, though, there’s no easy way to fix its role in the
broken meritocracy. Limit legacies and sports admits? Sure. Look skeptically at
résumés filled with service trips to Guatemalan villages and computer camps?
Yes, please. But an increasingly high-tech economy will have to reward those
who can decipher complicated deals, program robots, and pursue similarly
complex cognitive tasks. The challenge is to reduce the prestige and honor
attached to those talents and rewards—and to the schools that develop them.
Ironically, Operation Varsity Blues may be a step in that direction.
NOW WHY
SHOULD AMERICANS (LEGALS) PAY FOR AN EDUCATION WHEN THE SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP IS
BRINGING OVER BOATLOADS OF “CHEAP” LABOR WHO ALL RECEIVED FREE EDUCATIONS?!?!
Ivanka
Trump Wants America to Kick Addiction to Four-Year College, Massive Student
Debt
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
America’s ever-deepening college
debt problem is really a symptom of a worse malady: our societal addiction to
college itself.
Any sober assessment of the facts would indicate that too many
Americans are going to college. As a result, college costs—and debt—have
skyrocketed while the rewards for college have plunged.
Yet this is something that has escaped the attention of our
political elites. And, as it turns out, our financial and cultural elites—as
the recent college admissions scandal indicates. Many Democrats want to
double-down, promising “free college” to young people—a euphemism for college
funded by taxpayers.
Perhaps surprisingly, Ivy-league educated Ivanka Trump has
recently come out as a skeptic about America’s love affair with college. The
first daughter has taken up a leadership role in the Trump administration’s
workforce development efforts—and shown a remarkable candidness when it comes
to our college problem.
“I think culturally, for a long time we have created and
perpetuated the narrative that there is one pathway to achieving the American
dream and its four-year university,” Ms. Trump said in a recent interview.
Trump goes on:
That has been instilled into American students, it’s often
American parents that feel that is the only viable path. So you have kids going
into school racking up enormous amounts of student debt that they’ll often take
decades if there ever able to pay it off without a skill, if they ultimately
graduate. So I think opening up the prism and saying there are many different
pathways. It depends what you want in your life and taking the stigma away from
those who choose alternative pathways who choose technical schools, vocational
education. At the end of the day, it’s about connecting workers with their
passion, with their jobs. There’s very little opportunity for somebody who
wants to the vocational route, the technical route because all the money pushes
you into a four-year college system.
Just as her father drew attention to the incredibly bad hand
American industrial workers had been dealt by decades of anti-American trade
deals, Ms. Trump is drawing attention to the bad hand the U.S. has dealt our
young people.
The facts are stark. Over the past
40 years, the U.S. has doubled the share of
high school graduates who go on to get college degrees. Forty-six percent of
high school graduates receive degrees from four-year colleges, and another 24
percent get degrees from two-year colleges.
This increase in college education, however, has come at a steep
cost. The relative benefits of a college degree have been declining for nearly
two decades, while costs have been escalating. College graduates still
earn more than high school graduates and are less likely to be unemployed—but
the gap has been contracting.
And the income and employment
benefits may overstate the lifetime effects of college degrees. The college
wealth premium—the amount of extra wealth college graduates have accumulate the
course of their lifetime—has declined even more rapidly than the income and
employment premium, according to a recent study by the
Federal Reserve. And among blacks, Hispanics, Asians—that is, everyone except
whites—there is no wealth premium at all, the study found.
After ten years, nearly one-third of
college graduates wind up in a job that does not require a college degree,
the Wall Street Journal reports.
That should not be surprising. It demonstrates that the supply
of college graduates has outpaced demand, which is exactly what you would
expect would happen when ample subsidies and societal pressure are applied to
increase college attendance. When, as Ms. Trump put it, “all the money pushes
you into a four-year college system.”
The average sticker-price of a
four-year college, including room and board, is now $50,000 per year. As Barron’s Jack Hough
recently pointed out, $200,000
in cash invested in the name of a 22 year old would produce a $3 million
retirement nest egg by the age of 68, if the money is invested at about a 6%
year return.
This high price is being financed by
debt. On average, a college graduate owes twice as much debt as she did twenty
years ago, according to the Wall
Street Journal. Educational loans now amount to more than
$1.5 trillion. More than one out of ten student loan borrowers will default on
their loans.
Federal Reserve economists
recently studied the impact
all that debt is having on those aged 24 to 32. They found that while it plays
a significant role in keeping young people from buying homes, although other
factors—including the high price of homes—were more important.
“In surveys, young adults commonly report that their student
loan debts are preventing them from buying a home,” Fed researchers Alvaro
Mezza, Daniel Ringo, and Kamila Sommer found. “Our estimates suggest that
increases in student loan debt are an important factor in explaining their
lowered homeownership rates, but not the central cause of the decline.”
This is having a profound effect on American society. People are
getting married later, which reduces the number of children they have. Women,
in particular, delay marriage when they bear lots of student debt. And a
significant number of people who say they do not want children cited student
debt as the reason.
Twenty-two percent of college
graduates were delayed by at least two years in moving out of a family member’s
home due to their student loans, a survey of millennials by the National Association of Realtors found. More than
half of respondents said they were delayed in continuing their education or
starting a family due to student loan debt.
Bernie Sanders and others who have endorsed the idea of
relieving students of the burden of paying for college address the debt side of
the problem only. And it’s not clear that this is really much progress at all
since professors will still have to be paid, buildings maintained, textbooks
purchased. So while a student might not have to foot the bill, that debt will
need to be borne by workers—which is really just a transformation of individual
debt into higher taxes. And if history is any experience, the government will
not effectively be able to contain the burgeoning costs. If anything, quite the
opposite: cost increases will accelerate once individuals no longer see the
bills.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, even if in a college
cafeteria.
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. We
have a problem, as Ms. Trump has indicated. Others in Washington, DC, should
take note.
you can't separate the Obomb from his Saudis paymasters!
Barack
Obama’s back door, however, was unique to him. Before prosecutors send some of
the dimmer Hollywood stars to the slammer for their dimness, they might want to
ask just how much influence a Saudi billionaire peddled to get Obama into
Harvard.
BARACK OBAMA and his SAUDIS PAYMASTERS: Did they build
his Muslim tower in Chicago?
Malia,
Michelle, Barack and the College Admissions Scandal
What
shocked even the old timers in my hometown was that Mayor Hugh Addonizio, the
man who gave me my Eagle Scout Award, would accept kickbacks in cash right
across his desk. They were troubled less by his criminality -- that was
expected in Newark -- than by his lack of subtlety. Addonizio paid for his
indiscretion with a lengthy prison sentence.
So
it is with the current college admissions scandal. People have been scamming
their ways into prestige universities for decades, maybe centuries, but in the
past they have had the good sense not to put the cash on the table. It seems
that in this scandal a few of the bribers and their brokers may well pay for
their indiscretion with prison sentences as well.
The
media pretend to be shocked. In an editorial on the scandal, the New YorkTimes singled out Harvard
University for its “special admissions preferences and back doors for certain
applicants.” This is the same New York Times, however, that
published an entirely uncritical article three years prior headlined, “Malia Obama Rebels, Sort
of, by Choosing Harvard.”
Malia is the fourth member of the Obama family to attend that
august university, none of whom, save perhaps for Grandpa Obama, deserved to be
there.
Let’s
start with Obama Sr., the only member of the extended family to attend college
before the affirmative action/diversity era. Obama arrived at Harvard in the
early 1960s with the goal of getting a Ph.D. in economics. According to
biographer Sally Jacobs, Obama “struggled” with his studies but managed to get
a Masters degree.
Alas,
the university booted him on moral grounds before he could get his doctorate.
An inveterate playboy despite his two ongoing marriages, Obama had an affair
with a high-school girl. Denied his Ph.D., says Jacobs, “He goes on to claim
the title, nonetheless. He's Dr. Obama. The older he gets, the more he claims
it.” As will be seen, intellectual fraud runs in the family.
Michelle was the next to attend Harvard, in her case Harvard Law
School. “Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades
weren’t good enough for an Ivy League school,” writes Christopher Andersen
in Barack and Michelle, “Michelle applied to Princeton and
Harvard anyway.”
Sympathetic
biographer Liza Mundy writes, “Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance
on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well.” She did
not write well either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis,
"Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community," as “dense
and turgid.”
The less charitable
Christopher Hitchens observed, “To describe [the thesis] as hard to read
would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of
the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language.” Hitchens
exaggerated only a little. The following summary statement by Michelle
captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of grammar and most of logic:
The study inquires
about the respondents' motivations to benefit him/herself, and the following
social groups: the family, the Black community, the White community, God and
church, The U.S. society, the non-White races of the world, and the human
species as a whole.
Michelle even typed badly.
Still, she was admitted to and graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law.
I have been told by those on the inside that there are ways of recognizing
affirmative-action admissions. Still, one almost feels sorry for
Michelle. She was in so far over her head it is no wonder she projected
her angst onto the white people around her. “Regardless of the circumstances
underwhich [sic] I interact with whites at Princeton,” she wrote in the
opening of her thesis, “it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black
first and a student second."
Barack was the smarter and better
educated half of the couple. That said, had Obama’s father come from Kentucky
not Kenya and been named O’Hara not Obama, there would been no Harvard
Law Review, no Harvard, no Columbia.
In his overly friendly
biography, The Bridge, David Remnick writes that Obama was
an “unspectacular” student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop
before that going back to grade school. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of
reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think
[Obama] did too well in college.” As to Obama’s LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa’s body
will be unearthed before those are.
How such an indifferent student got
into a law school whose applicants’ LSAT scores typically track between 98 to
99 percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.80 and 4.00 is a subject Remnick
avoids.
Obama does too. Although he has
admitted that he “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs”
during his academic career, he has remained mum about some reported “back door”
influence peddling that may have been as useful to him as affirmative action.
In late March 2008 the venerable
African-American entrepreneur and politico Percy Sutton appeared on a local New
York City show called "Inside City Hall." When asked about Obama by
the show’s host, Dominic Carter, the former Manhattan borough president calmly
and lucidly explained that he had been “introduced to [Obama] by a friend.”
The friend's name was Dr. Khalid
al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about twenty years prior.
Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser to one of the
world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi prince
Al-Waleed bin Talal, the same billionaire whose anti-Semitism caused Mayor Rudy
Giuliani to reject his $10 million gift to New York City post 9/11.
According to Sutton, al-Mansour had
asked him to "please write a letter in support of [Obama]... a young man
that has applied to Harvard." Sutton had friends at Harvard and gladly did
so.
Three months before the election it
should have mattered that a respected black political figure had publicly
announced that an unapologetic anti-Semite like al-Mansour, backed by an
equally anti-Semitic Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama’s career perhaps
for the last twenty years, but the story died a quick and unnatural death.
As for Malia, whose grades and scores
are as much a state secret as her father’s, the old man damns with the faint
praise of “capable” and “conscientious.” But hell, Bill’s daughter
Chelsea got into Stanford and George’s daughter Barbara got into Yale, so this
particular path to the back door was well worn.
Barack Obama’s back door,
however, was unique to him. Before prosecutors send some of the dimmer
Hollywood stars to the slammer for their dimness, they might want to ask just
how much influence a Saudi billionaire peddled to get Obama into Harvard.
TRUMP’S
CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
*
Only a
complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers
than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
*
“Trump
Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
*
The
latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump
to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall
Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch
brothers.
*
Efforts by the big business
lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include
increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered
for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
*
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border.
///
THE DEATH OF THE
AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
THE ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER BY
PHONY POPULIST SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP
Companies say they often pay good
wages to their imported H-2B workers, often around $15 per hour. But that price
is below the wages sought by Americans for the seasonal work which leaves them
jobless in the off-season. The lower wages paid to H-2Bs also allows companies
to pay lower wages to their American supervisors. NEIL MUNRO
///
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND
HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE
SAUDIS!
*
*
JOHN DEAN: Not
so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s charter.
He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and
understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the
President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no
evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process
of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General
William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
*
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and
Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with
third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by
its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
///
ANN COULTER EXPOSES
TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite
direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
///
TRUMP’S CATCH AND RELEASE… all the “cheap” labor climbing our
borders, jobs and welfare lines!
*
THE ENTIRE REASON TRUMP
NOMINATED KIRSTJEN NIELSEN WAS BECAUSE OF HER LONG HISTORY OF ADVOCATING OPEN
BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
*
In newly confirmed federal data from the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency, Breitbart News has learned the massive scale and
scope of DHS’s ramped up Catch and Release policy.
For months, DHS officials have said privately that the Catch and
Release program has been taken to new heights, while ICE
union officials declared this week that the program was
in “overdrive” under the direction of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. JOHN BINDER
TRUMP AND THE
MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp
Keeper and his family of parasites up their ar$es??
///
TRUMP’S TAX BILL:
A massive tax cut
for his plundering Goldman Sachs infested administration.
///
TRUMP’S SECRET
AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS DOCTRINE TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
"During the same month that
Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”
agenda, Nielsen’s committee
released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting
the European migrant crisis
as a win for big business who would profit greatly
from a never-ending stream
of cheap, foreign
migrants."
///
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE
RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report:
Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit
After He's Gone
"Trump's
alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in
power is going to do a damn thing about it."
///
TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S
TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the
super-rich, on top
of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of
the supposed
recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1
percent income
bracket."
TRUMPS INFORMS NARCOMEX:
THE PACT BETWEEN
MEXICO AND TRUMP… NO WALL, NO REAL ENFORCEMENT.
Swamp Keeper Trump prepares
for the inevitable move to impeach him and ask for asylum in Scotland.
Fox News host Tucker
Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded
as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign
promises.
“His chief promises were
that he would build the wall, de-fund Planned Parenthood, and repeal Obamacare,
and he hasn’t done any of those things,” Carlson told Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.
///
TRUMP POSITIONS HIMSELF FOR IMPEACHMENT
MAY LEAVE THE COUNTRY FOR HIS GOLF COURSE IN
SCOTLAND
*
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral
Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
*
“Mueller and the anti-Trump camp within the ruling elite know
very well that the billionaire New York real estate and gambling speculator-turned
president is mired in criminal activity, which is certain to be reflected in
the material seized from Cohen. They have Trump by the throat, and Trump knows
it.”
*
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
*
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight
Committee Wednesday that the “whole Trump family” was potentially
comprised by a foreign power ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
///////
SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP’S BIGGEST DEAL EVER:
Saving the 9-11 invading Saudis’ arses!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/11/mike-lee-swamp-keeper-trump-and-his.html
"I doubt that
Trump understands -- or cares about -- what message he's sending. Wealthy
Saudis, including members of the extended royal family, have been his patrons
for years, buying his distressed properties when he needed money.
“The Wahhabis finance thousands of
madrassahs throughout the world where young boys are brainwashed into becoming
fanatical foot-soldiers for the petrodollar-flush Saudis and other emirs of the
Persian Gulf.” AMIL
IMANI
I
recommend that Ignatius read Raymond Ibrahim's outstanding book Sword and Scimitar, which contains accounts of dynastic succession in
the Muslim monarchies of the Middle East, where standard operating procedure
for a new monarch on the death of his father was to strangle all his
brothers. Yes, it's awful. But it has been happening for
a very long time. And it's not going to change quickly, no matter
how outraged we pretend to be. MONICA
SHOWALTER
////////
SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP’S SECRET SAUDI MISSION:
“You saved my a rse again and again… So, I’ll
save yours like Bush and Obama did!
WHO IS FINANCING ALL THE TRUMP AND
SON-IN-LAW’S REFINANCING SCAMS???
FOLLOW THE MONEY!
"I doubt that
Trump understands -- or cares about -- what message he's sending. Wealthy
Saudis, including members of the extended royal family, have been his patrons
for years, buying his distressed properties when he needed money. In the early
1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's flashy yacht so that the
then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to stave off personal
bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the Plaza Hotel, one of
Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an entire floor of his
landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in 2001."
“The Wahhabis finance thousands of
madrassahs throughout the world where young boys are brainwashed into becoming
fanatical foot-soldiers for the petrodollar-flush Saudis and other emirs of the
Persian Gulf.” AMIL
IMANI
I recommend that Ignatius read Raymond
Ibrahim's outstanding book Sword and Scimitar, which contains accounts of dynastic succession in
the Muslim monarchies of the Middle East, where standard operating procedure
for a new monarch on the death of his father was to strangle all his
brothers. Yes, it's awful. But it has been happening for
a very long time. And it's not going to change quickly, no matter
how outraged we pretend to be. MONICA
SHOWALTER
TRUMP AND HIS SAUDIS
The Saudi Challenge
Jamal
Khashoggi's murder -- and no one now questions whether the Washington Post
contributor was killed by Saudi agents in the kingdom's consulate in Turkey --
has far-reaching implications for the Trump administration. President Donald
Trump appears to want to help sweep the incident under the rug, providing cover
for the Saudis' ludicrous suggestion that the killing was a rogue operation or
an interrogation gone awry. And he's enmeshed the highest officials of his
administration in the mess by sending Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Riyadh,
where the secretary was photographed, all smiles, sitting with Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman, who most likely ordered Khashoggi's murder. The
administration is giving itself little leeway to take serious measures to
protest the killing, signaling to the world that the U.S. cannot be counted on
to stand up against bloodthirsty autocrats, even when a U.S. resident and
member of the American press is the victim.
I doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about -- what message
he's sending. Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended royal family,
have been his patrons for years, buying his distressed properties when he
needed money. In the early 1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's flashy yacht
so that the then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to stave off
personal bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the Plaza Hotel,
one of Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an entire floor of
his landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in 2001. During
the campaign, the Trump Organization registered more than a half-dozen limited
liability companies in the kingdom, in anticipation of cashing in on Trump's
enhanced renown. When Trump actually won (which apparently he didn't think he
would at the time), someone must have explained he couldn't move ahead with new
business there as president, because he withdrew the registrations. Of course,
a little thing like benefiting from the office of the presidency hasn't stopped
the Trump Organization, run by the president's two eldest sons, from accepting
Saudi largesse since the election. With many Trump properties and brands losing
customers in today's highly polarized political atmosphere, Saudis are spending
lavishly on Trump properties in Washington, New York and even Chicago as many
others avoid them.
But
if Trump doesn't get why looking the other way when an American journalist is
tortured, beheaded and hacked to pieces by a team of Saudi government
operatives is bad, surely national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary
Pompeo do. Autocrats are stepping up their game around the world. Russian
President Vladimir Putin didn't hesitate to order a hit on British soil of an
ex-KGB agent and his daughter earlier this year. But the United Kingdom
responded quickly, kicking out Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions. The
United States followed suit, but only because Congress, not Trump, knew that to
do otherwise would have let down an ally and encouraged a despot. When asked in
a "60 Minutes" interview Sunday whether he believes that Putin was
involved in the poisoning and other assassinations, Trump's response was:
"Probably he is, yeah. ... But I rely on them. It's not in our
country."
The
Trump administration relies on Saudi Arabia, too. It is the enemy of our enemy
Iran, which, in political calculus, makes Saudis our "friends." But
even friends require reining in at times. And these friends need us more than
we need them. We are no longer dependent on oil imports; our oil reserves
surpass those of Saudi Arabia. Although Trump worries about losing that
promised $110 billion Saudi arms purchase he keeps touting (but which has yet
to materialize), the Saudis don't have anywhere else to go if they want to keep
their airplanes in the air. They are locked in by past purchases; no one else
can deliver the spare parts for U.S.-built weapons. As for the help in
challenging Iran, they have no choice there, either. Iran is far more a direct
threat to the kingdom than it is to the U.S. And as for their most crucial role
-- the war on Islamic terrorism -- the Saudis claim to fight terrorism but are
also a major source of funding for radical Islamic schools and mosques that
recruit terrorists around the world.
The
administration has only a short time to come up with a proper and proportionate
response to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The president thinks Americans will
move on -- but his inaction makes the world a more dangerous place. And next
time, the attack just might be on American soil.
Trump
scrambles to cover for Saudi regime as crisis over Khashoggi murder mounts
By Barry
Grey
19 October 2018
Following US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s emergency talks in
Riyadh and Ankara, and amid mounting reports implicating Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal
Khashoggi, the Trump administration is scrambling to shield Washington’s
closest ally in the Arab World.
On Thursday, Trump continued to suggest that Prince Mohammed and
his father, King Salman, may have had nothing to do with the disappearance and
evident torture and murder of Khashoggi on October 2 in the Saudi consulate in
Istanbul. However, after being debriefed by Pompeo following the latter’s talks
with Prince Mohammed and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump told
reporters it appeared that Khashoggi was dead.
The official line is that Pompeo secured a pledge from the Saudi
leadership to hold accountable anyone found in the course of the regime’s own
investigation to have played a role in Khashoggi’s disappearance. On that
fraudulent basis, Pompeo advised Trump to give Riyadh several more days to
provide an accounting, after which the White House will decide its response.
Meanwhile, unnamed Turkish officials and the pro-Erdogan
newspaper Yeni
Safak reported Wednesday on the contents of what they claim is
an audio recording of the events that transpired in the Istanbul consulate
following Khashoggi’s entering the building on the afternoon of October 2. The
60-year-old self-exiled Saudi national and resident of Virginia in the US, who
went from being a regime insider to a Washington
Post columnist and critic of the new crown prince, ostensibly
went to the consulate to obtain documents in advance of his impending wedding
to a Turkish national. He never emerged from the consulate.
According to the Turkish accounts, he was almost immediately
attacked by a team of 15 men who had flown that day to Istanbul from Saudi
Arabia, brutally tortured, drugged, murdered, beheaded and dismembered. These
sources say his fingers were cut off, but do not stipulate whether that
occurred before or after he had expired. One of those reported to have been in
the group is a forensic doctor who carried a bone saw.
The Washington
Post on Wednesday published a detailed profile of the 15 men,
complete with photos and scans of travel documents. It reported that at least
nine of the men have ties to Saudi security. The New York Times reported
Wednesday that at least four are directly linked to the crown prince, having
traveled with him as part of his personal security detail.
The claim of Crown Prince Mohammed that he had no foreknowledge
of a plan to kill the former regime loyalist-turned critic is absurd on its
face. He is an absolute ruler in a brutal totalitarian dictatorship, and is
known to closely oversee the activities of his security apparatus and to be
personally extremely cruel.
Pompeo’s meetings on Tuesday with King Salman and Crown Prince
Mohammed were aimed at signaling continued US support while making a pretense
of seeking a full accounting of Khashoggi’s disappearance. The same is true of
his meeting the following day with Erdogan, at which he evidently did not ask
for a copy of the audio recording of the events inside the consulate.
For his part, the Turkish president has yet to publicly make any
accusation against the Saudi leadership or endorse the reports being leaked by
Turkish officials and the media. At odds with Riyadh over the Saudi regime’s
support for US-allied Kurdish forces in Syria, its backing for the el-Sisi
dictatorship in Egypt, and its lineup with Washington over Iran, Erdogan
appears nevertheless to be reluctant to sever relations with the oil-rich
Saudis and may be seeking to use Riyadh’s crisis as leverage in obtaining
concessions.
On Wednesday after meeting with Erdogan, Pompeo told reporters
on his plane back to the US: “I do think it’s important that everyone keep in
their mind that we have lots of important relations, financial relationships
between US and Saudi companies, government relationships, things that we work
on all across the world. The efforts to reduce the risk to the United States of
America from the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, Iran.
“We just need to make sure that we are mindful of that as we
approach decisions that the United States government will take when we learn
all of the facts.”
This amounts to an unwitting admission of the outright
criminality of both governments.
As the former CIA director and current secretary of state,
Pompeo’s reference to the “things we work on all across the world” includes
conspiring to strangle, destabilize and potentially wage war against Iran, in
alliance with Israel and most of the other Gulf oil sheikdoms.
These “things” also include the near-genocidal Saudi-led war in
Yemen, which has already killed some 50,000 men, women and children and
threatens another 14 million with starvation and deadly epidemics of cholera
and diphtheria. The Saudis could not carry out their relentless bombing and de
facto blockade of the Arab world’s poorest country without US arms, its mid-air
refueling of Saudi bombers, its provision of intelligence and help in selecting
targets and the assistance to its naval forces.
It is notable that in all of the US press commentary critical of
Trump and the Saudi crown prince, there is virtually no mention of the US role
in the slaughter in Yemen.
There is as well the collaboration between Washington and Riyadh
in suppressing the Palestinians and propping up Israel, and their joint support
for Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist terrorists in the war for regime-change in Syria.
The US is particularly reliant on the Saudi monarchy at the
present moment, in advance of its November 5 deadline for imposing sanctions
against all Iranian exports. It is counting on Riyadh to open its oil spigot to
prevent a spike in oil prices as a result of a sharp reduction in Iranian oil
exports.
At the same time, the administration is coming under increasing
pressure, both internationally and at home, to distance itself from the crown
prince. It made a reluctant concession to this pressure on Thursday with the
announcement that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin would join the swelling
ranks of Western officials, bankers and media organizations that have announced
they will not attend next week’s international investors’ conference in Riyadh,
to be hosted by Crown Prince Mohammed.
Dubbed “Davos in the Desert,” the event is on the brink of
collapse. On Wednesday, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine
Lagarde pulled out. Businesses that have made similar announcements include
Uber, JPMorgan Chase, Viacom, BlackRock and Blackstone Group. CNN, the Financial Times, CNBC,
Nikkei and the New York
Times are among the media organizations that have withdrawn as
media sponsors.
The likely debacle of the investors’ conference will intensify
an already acute crisis facing the Saudi monarchy. The Wall Street Journal reported
Thursday that global investors are growing increasingly alarmed at what the
newspaper called Saudi Arabia’s “debt binge” in recent months. In the
two-and-a-half years since May 2016, the country has floated $68 billion in
dollar-denominated bonds and syndicated loans—up from zero.
In addition, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund took out its
first-ever bank loan last month, raising $11 billion. And the national oil
company Saudi Aramco plans to raise up to $50 billion.
Reflecting declining confidence in the regime, the cost of
insuring against Saudi default has risen by 30 percent since the disappearance
of Khashoggi, and even before the Khashoggi allegations, foreign direct
investment had fallen to historically low levels.
Also on Thursday, the Washington
Post published Khashoggi’s final column for the newspaper.
Introducing the piece, Global Opinions Editor Karen Attiah explained that
the Post had
received the column one day after Khashoggi’s disappearance, but had decided to
hold it in the hope that he would reemerge. In publishing the piece, the
newspaper acknowledged that the author had died.
The content of the column points to Khashoggi’s likely links to
sections of the US state and intelligence apparatus. A former aide to the Saudi
chief of intelligence and one-time ambassador to the US, Khashoggi had long
been known as an interlocutor between the Saudi regime and Western media and
government officials. He also had close ties to Osama bin Laden.
In his final column he compares the suppression of speech and
expression in the Arab world to the Soviet “Iron Curtain,” and calls for the
development of an “independent” news source in the Middle East modeled after
the cold war-era propaganda organ Radio Free Europe.
This would in part explain the furious reaction of Trump critics
in both political parties, the media and the intelligence establishment to the
administration’s efforts to alibi for the Saudi leadership. Obama’s CIA chief
John Brennan, for example, has repeatedly denounced Trump’s attempts to cover
for the regime and insisted that the crown prince personally ordered the murder
of Khashoggi
Trump’s Gentrification
Scheme to Enrich Real Estate Developers
A tax
loophole intended to help the poor is funneling money to wealthy investors.
By BRYCE
COVERT
December 28, 2018
Buried within the more
than 500 pages of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut was an unobtrusive line item with
potentially damaging consequences. Proposed by Senator Tim Scott of South
Carolina, the provision allows governors to select certain census tracts in their
states, in economically distressed areas, as “opportunity zones.” The Treasury
certified the last of these zones in June, bringing the total number to 8,700.
Now, investors who fund projects in these areas will get sizable tax
breaks—even on unrelated investments. As long as they dump profits into a fund
earmarked for the opportunity zones, they can defer or even eliminate the
capital gains they would otherwise have owed.
Some of the census tracts
that have been identified as opportunity zones may be truly distressed. But
it’s dubious whether others should qualify—this summer, for example, much of
Long Island City in New York was named an opportunity zone. Now that Amazon has
announced it’s moving one of its two HQ2 branches there, the retail behemoth could
nab a $225 million tax break simply because the site happens to fall in one
such zone—this, on top of the $1.7 billion New York has already offered Amazon.
Investors who purchase apartment buildings for the influx of tech employees
will also see tax breaks. So will anyone building office parks, or grocery
stores. That money may well be better spent elsewhere, but during the debate
over the tax bill, such questions received very little attention. Neither,
really, did the zones themselves. Since its passage, though, President Donald
Trump has enthusiastically promoted the plan, issuing press releases boasting
that “new investment will flow into blighted developments, stalled
infrastructure projects, and other desperately needed economic enhancements”
and create fiscal improvements that will “help turn dreams to reality.”
The thinking behind the
zones reflects Republican faith in privatization as a cure-all. If Trump has
departed from conservative orthodoxy on trade and entitlements, he is squarely
with the party when it comes to this issue. On the campaign trail, he promised
to spend $1.5 trillion on the country’s infrastructure, but when the details of
his plan were released a month before the election, it was merely a proposal to
privatize roads, bridges, and waterways. Trump has similar plans for the
nation’s air traffic control system, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and
even the Postal Service. Each one offers huge upsides for a select group of
financiers and business owners, but does little to nothing for the American
people.
None of these promises
has fully gone into law—apart from opportunity zones, the first of which the
Treasury implemented this spring. Since then, a number of funds have cropped up
to cash in on the boom. Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Trump’s director of
communications for all of ten days, plans to launch a $3 billion “opportunity
fund” at his hedge fund Skybridge Capital. Cadre, the real estate crowdfunding
platform partially owned by Jared Kushner and his brother, Joshua, is also
focused on exploiting the zones. As Charles Clinton, the CEO of EquityMultiple,
a real estate investment startup, said in September, they are “one of the
biggest real estate investment opportunities in decades.”
Similar efforts have been
undertaken in the past. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher created eleven
“enterprise zones” in the United Kingdom, which produced fewer jobs than
promised. Each cost the government between $35,000 and $45,000, indexed for
inflation. The areas are still home to some of the poorest people in the
country. During the 1990s, Bill Clinton set up 104 “empowerment zones” in six
urban areas around the United States, including Atlanta, Baltimore, and New
York, as well as three rural areas, in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas. Clinton’s
plan (unlike Trump’s) tried to encourage not just capital investment, but also
hiring and upfront investments in equipment. But research on empowerment zones
has found that they had little to no effect on economic growth or poverty. They
were expensive, too, costing $850 per resident.
One of the reasons why
these zones often fail to deliver an economic boost is that governors and
investors tend to pick areas that are already on an upswing. (Long Island City
is a good example; it had been gentrifying for years before Andrew Cuomo
nominated it as an opportunity zone.) In May, the Urban Institute found that 28
percent of the census tracts governors had designated as opportunity zones
already benefit from some of the highest levels of private investment. They’d
be attractive areas in which to invest with or without a big tax giveaway. In
other words, opportunity zones are a massive handout for investors, and there
is scant evidence that they bring investment to the places that need it most.
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Of course, Trump himself
has experience bilking tax breaks and subsidies to make massive profits. He
accumulated at least $885 million in tax breaks, grants, and other subsidies
from New York to build his empire of hotels and high rises, according to The
New York Times, including the longest tax abatement the city ever handed out,
40 years, to rehabilitate the Grand Hyatt Hotel in the ’70s. He even pocketed
$150,000 from a fund meant to help small businesses damaged in the September 11
attacks. (He owned a Wall Street skyscraper not far from Ground Zero, but it
wasn’t damaged when the planes hit the Twin Towers.) Trump may be the country’s
preeminent expert in spotting a government handout to developers and squeezing
it for all it’s worth. It’s no surprise that he’d be as excited to stamp his
name on these opportunity zones as he would one of his hotels.
Trump may be the
country’s preeminent expert in spotting a government handout and squeezing it
for all it’s worth.
But these misguided
policies have lasting consequences. For one, there is no way to ensure that
investors who were already planning to put money into housing or infrastructure
don’t just decide to do it in opportunity zones to reap the tax benefits. Second,
the zones typically allow investors to retain complete control over their
projects. After state governments designate the areas, local communities get no
say over what is invested in and by whom. Don’t like the new toll road in your
town financed by a hedge fund? You may have no way to vote it down or give
input into how it’s implemented.
There’s a better way.
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society directly financed construction across the
country. Dwight Eisenhower built the country’s network of highways. The
bipartisan Community Development Block Grant program, enacted in 1974 by
Republican President Gerald Ford, gives local communities money for projects
they decide are most important for their economies—a program that Trump wants
to eliminate.
The Joint Committee on
Taxation has estimated that the tax incentives in opportunity zones will cost
$1.5 billion a year for the first eight years. Just think what that money could
do if directed to build new water lines in Flint, affordable housing in Fresno,
decent school buildings in Baltimore, or better roads in Akron. Bankers on Wall
Street might not get a payday. But do we care more about their dreams, or those
of poor residents in neglected communities?