Wednesday, October 28, 2020

BLACK VIOLENCE IN AMERICA - Chicago sisters accused of stabbing employee 27 times after being asked to wear a mask

 

KAMALA HARRIS AND BLACK SUPREMACY

https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/will-corrupt-lawyer-kamala-harris.html

Kamala Harris tweeted out a link to a group raising bail money for Minnesota rioters. Biden campaign workers contributed themselves. Biden described Antifa as “an idea.” Try to imagine Churchill calling the brown shirts “an idea.”

Senate Democrats like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker worked to prevent the FBI from even having a Black Supremacist category before two terrorist attacks that murdered four people. 

Judge Barrett might want to look up the Washington Post story about how the city council decided it was not really fair to keep violent black teenagers behind bars. So they let them out, creating a crime wave with more than 100 murders.

Chicago sisters accused of stabbing employee 27 times after being asked to wear a mask

Keydra Manns

Two Chicago sisters were denied bail after allegedly stabbing a store clerk 27 times over the request to wear a mask

A man was stabbed multiple times after asking two women to wear masks.

Two sisters entered a small shop in Chicago on Sunday when they were approached by a worker who asked them to wear a mask and to use hand sanitizer to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 according to Karie James who is a police spokesperson, the Chicago Sun Times reported. They refused and began to argue with the man at the store located on the 3200 block of West Roosevelt Road.

The argument escalated and the women Jessica Hill, 21, and Jayla Hill, 18, are accused of attacking the man. Jessica pulled a knife out of her back pocket and began stabbing the 32-year-old man. Jayla held the man in place by his hair while the victim was stabbed 27 times.

Chicago sisters Jessica and Jayla Hill thegrio.com
Jessica and Jayla Hill (Credit: Chicago Police)

Jessica allegedly taunted the employee as a “b- – – -” and said he had gotten “f- – – – – up” by the sisters. Jayla recorded the incident on her phone.

The Hill sisters were both treated for minor wounds at St. Anthony Hospital while the victim was treated at Mount Sinai Hospital.

The women were arrested at the scene and appeared in court for a bail hearing on Tuesday as their lawyer insisted they’d been overcharged and only acted in self-defense. A judge denied bail for the sisters. They are due in court again on Nov. 4.

This isn’t the first time requesting a customer to wear a mask went very wrong. In June, a Walmart employee in Florida was shoved after they asked a customer to wear a mask.  Also, in May, a Target worker found themselves in the middle of a brawl after requesting that two customers wear their mask.

According to The New York Times, retail employees are often the ones enforcing the rule to wear a mask indoors, and far too often they are being injured over it. During an intense exchange between a Trader Joes employee and a customer, the customer said they should not be forced to wear a mask.

“We are in America here land of the free. Look at all of these sheep that are here, all wearing this mask that is actually dangerous for them,” a woman refused according to NYT.


He was waiting in line for a hamburger in McDonald’s just a few blocks from the White House when a large group of fellas and lovely ladies started taunting him about Black Lives Matter. Outside, a few minutes later, they beat him within an inch of his life -- all on high tech video.

One way or another, sooner or later, Judge Barrett’s family will learn the real threat to their safety in their new hometown of Washington, D.C. is not white racism but black violence: How black crime is so wildly out of proportion and how so many reporters and public officials -- and federal judges -- are in denial, deceit, and delusion about it.

                                             COLIN FLAHERTY

Coming soon, food desert: BLM shakes down Seattle Trader Joe's for a 15% cut

By Monica Showalter

Grocery retailer Trader Joe's, which refused to cave in to political correctness in its product names, is experiencing new problems with Black Lives Matter protestors in Seattle, according to Breitbart News:

Black Lives Matter protesters pushed their way into a Seattle Trader Joe’s demanding the company give “15 percent at least.” The group has repeated the tactic of harassing the store’s staff and customers over the past few months.

A video tweeted Thursday night shows a large group of BLM activists entering a Seattle Trader Joe’s store. They chanted and beat drums as they marched through the grocery chain location.

Seattle has five Trader Joe's locations and Breitbart reports that three of them have been hit in this way. It shows that Trader Joe's, which resisted the demands, remains a target, based on Seattle's failure to send police to protect them.

 

This is exactly how mafia works. Either you pay us something - il “pizzo” it’s called in Italian - or we burn down the place at least. This can happen when the State is absent, that’s why defunding the police in crucial in every mafia system.

— Dadah Umpah (@UmpahDadah) October 23, 2020

 

No business of any kind can run a business with this kind of shakedown activity going on. The company is being held hostage to pirates, while the city stands by and does nothing.

As anyone familiar with hostage-takers knows, if Trader Joe's caves on the 15% ransom demand, the next move will be a bigger ransom demand, all in the name of keeping the peace, and BLM, which is obviously descending into a money-making mafia racket, can move on to the next target, taking them down one by one. The big corporate shakedowns of the past month, which have yielded millions of dollars in revenue, it seems, have not been enough. They want more. Trader Joe's is one of the few that resist, which makes it the holy grail for shakedown fanatics.

In Seattle, Trader Joe's has in fact resisted on related matters, and not just in the package labeling. According to the Seattle Spectator, the company has been hit by march-in protests in early October over its refusal to permit employees to wear BLM gear on the job, plus boycotts to boot. The Trader Joe's near the CHOP zone this past summer did shut its doors indefinitely, not just because of the chaos and disorder of CHOP, but also because of the wokesterism of many employees. Who'd want to do business with those kinds of employees in permanent opposition? They relented when 22,000 customers signed a petition asking them to stay. 

But don't bet on them staying so long as the shakedowns are now a thing from BLM now that the riot thing has grown old, and some leftists have noted that it's hurting Joe Biden's bid to oust President Trump.Shakedowns are a horrid reality in places like Sicily, Latin America, Russia, and any place where people flee.

We see this way of doing business all over Latin America, for one.

To take one example, just because I am familiar with it, FARC's Marxist narcoterrorists, who once terrorized Colombia and now Venezuela, also conduct business by shaking down business with no police protection as the police are occupied with arresting political prisoners.

The local shop owners and farmers in small towns were forced to pay what was known as "a vaccination" to the terrorists to ensure that their businesses didn't go up in flames, prompting vast numbers of them to just shut their doors. The example is not that farfetched for what's going on in Seattle, either.

BLM of course, is led by "trained Marxists" who just happened to have learned their tactics at Hugo Chavez's knee. Here's a piece I did on their pilgrimages to Caracas, where these kinds of shakedowns are what goes on in that hellhole. And don't think the Chavista agenda they embrace isn't to harm the entire U.S. Here's one I wrote from 2019. And Venezuelans have noticed the similarities.

Now their successors in the U.S. turning Seattle into a hellhole, too, complete with Venezuela-style shakedowns. 

Seattle is getting pretty comparable to Caracas without police to enforce rule of law, but Trader Joe's is no battered Venezuelan storefront shop. They're a huge national private corporation whose structure protects them from activist shareholders stirring up the pot and calling for woke acts, and they have always put the interests of their customers first. Instead of pay the danegeld, they're in a position to walk out.

They've shown backbone in standing up to rioters, and who knows how many shakedowns they have fended off. But if it gets bad -- and Breitbart notes that three stores in Seattle have been targeted, they may well decide that the cost of doing business outweighs the benefits and pull out of the city. 

By then, the city may become a food desert. Self-inflicted, of course, based on the majority's voting choices.

 

Amy Coney Barrett has some ‘splainin’ to do on white racism

By Colin Flaherty

Amy Coney Barrett has some ‘splainin’ to do. 

Last week, Judge Barrett said the death of George Floyd from “racist” police was “very personal” to her. 

She worried that someday her adopted black children -- and grandchildren -- might suffer the same kind of “brutality.”

She even told the national audience turned in to her Supreme Court confirmation hearing that her family cried about all the violence white racism could wreak upon them.

One way or another, sooner or later, Judge Barrett’s family will learn the real threat to their safety in their new hometown of Washington, D.C. is not white racism but black violence: How black crime is so wildly out of proportion and how so many reporters and public officials -- and federal judges -- are in denial, deceit, and delusion about it.

What then?

How is Judge Barrett going to let her children know about all the Metros they cannot ride, all the schools they cannot attend, all the parts of town -- black neighborhoods -- they must not visit because white people are just not safe there?

So many examples. So few tears shed for the victims of black crime.

How about the white kids visiting D.C. on a college inspection tour?

From the moment they stepped on the campus of Howard University -- America’s most notorious black college -- they were threatened, assaulted, and robbed. Then run out of the cafeteria and off the college grounds because they were white, and one was wearing a Trump hat.

The school paper opined about how proud they were of the Howard students for protecting their school. Soon after the school president tweeted in agreement.

Judge Barrett should know the students and staff of Howard are equally hostile to white neighbors who want to stroll through their campus on a Sunday afternoon. 

They mutter something about black sacred ground and how they cannot let white people desecrate it. All that was A-Okay with the Washington Post.

Who is going to tell the judge and her family to beware?

How about the Marine so heroic that a statue of him rescuing a comrade under fire in Iraq greets every new recruit in Parris Island and Camp Pendleton?

He was waiting in line for a hamburger in McDonald’s just a few blocks from the White House when a large group of fellas and lovely ladies started taunting him about Black Lives Matter. Outside, a few minutes later, they beat him within an inch of his life -- all on high tech video.

When the Washington Post got around to reporting the story weeks later, dozens and dozens of Post readers said the Marine must have said something racist to them. After all, black people  do not just go around attacking white people for no reason whatsoever.

But that is exactly what happened there -- and it is hardly an isolated event.

Two years ago, during the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse reminded us that not all racial bias and violence is accompanied by signs and slogans. Prosecutors and judges use patterns to establish bias all the time in American courts, he said.

Judge Barrett better learn to recognize that pattern real quick. Pro tip: 85 percent to 95 percent of inter-racial crime and violence in America is black on white. Seventy-five percent of mass shooters are black. Black on white rape outnumbers white on black by a factor of 10,000 to one.

Violent crime in D.C. is a black thing.

How about all the black violence against commuters on the D.C. Metro? My favorite example is when a group of black people almost killed the husband of an NPR executive while his wife waited to greet him at the station.

That story never made it to NPR. But every hour of every day NPR reminds of us relentless black victimization, relentless white racism, all the time, everywhere that explains everything.

They call that Critical Race Theory.

And how many Capitol Hill staffers and media member have decided their adopted town is safe, only to find out the hard way -- often too late -- about their fatal misjudgment?

Maybe Judge Barrett lives in a legal bubble where solutions to violent crime are straightforward: Go to jail.

That’s not how they roll in D.C., where black crime is excused as a reaction to white racism. And if the perpetrator is really a victim of white racism, then they really don’t have any business in jail, do they?

A now-famous law professor at Georgetown University said just that in an opinion piece he wrote for the Post. He said if black jurors felt the black defendant was a victim of racism, they should not convict him.

And oh yeah, all black people are victims of white racism. That is why crime is the new black entitlement.

The city named an entire park to enshrine this fairy tale of black victimization and white racism: Black Lives Matter Plaza, right in front of the White House.

Judge Barrett might want to look up the Washington Post story about how the city council decided it was not really fair to keep violent black teenagers behind bars. So they let them out, creating a crime wave with more than 100 murders.

When do we tell the children that their mom’s predecessor, Notorious RBG, was also a victim of black violence in Georgetown? As was John Kerry’s wife.

This is a very long list of black crime, violence, murder  and denial in Washington D.C. on hiking and biking trails, restaurants, parks, homes, stores, restaurants, schools… you name it.

All wildly out of proportion. All ignored by Judge Barrett as she focuses on the minuscule percentage of white cop on black violence and ignores the tsunami of victims of black violence.

We call that the Greatest Lie of our Generation. And it is troubling to see how eagerly Judge Barrett has swallowed it hook, line and dangerously delusional sinker.

Colin Flaherty i(@ColinFlaherty) is the author of the #1 Amazon bestsellers, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry and White Girl Bleed A Lot.  You can also catch his podcasts everywhere except iTunes. 

 

DONALD TRUMP - STIFFING THE BANKSTERS - BUT HASN'T THAT BEEN HIS MEANS OF SURVIVAL ALL THESE DECADES?

 

How Trump Maneuvered His Way Out of Trouble in Chicago

David Enrich, Russ Buettner, Mike McIntire and Susanne Craig
The Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago on June 27, 2018. (Alyssa Schukar/The New York Times)
The Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago on June 27, 2018. (Alyssa Schukar/The New York Times)

The financial crisis was in full swing when Donald Trump traveled to Chicago in late September 2008 to mark the near-completion of his 92-floor skyscraper.

The fortunes of big companies, small businesses and millions of Americans — including the Trumps — were in peril. But the family patriarch was jubilant as he stood on the terrace of his gleaming glass tower.

“We’re in love with the building,” Trump gushed. “We’re very, very happy with what’s happened with respect to this building and how fast we put it up.”

He and his family hoped the Trump International Hotel & Tower would cement their company’s reputation as one of the world’s marquee developers of luxury real estate.

Instead, the skyscraper became another disappointment in a portfolio filled with them. Construction lagged. Condos proved hard to sell. Retail space sat vacant.

Yet for Trump and his company, the Chicago experience also turned out to be something else: the latest example of his ability to strong-arm major financial institutions and exploit the tax code to cushion the blow of his repeated business failures.

The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time that, since 2010, his lenders have forgiven about $287 million in debt that he failed to repay. The vast majority was related to the Chicago project.

How Trump found trouble in Chicago, and maneuvered his way out of it, is a case study in doing business the Trump way.

When the project encountered problems, he tried to walk away from his huge debts. For most individuals or businesses, that would have been a recipe for ruin. But tax-return data, other records and interviews show that rather than warring with a notoriously litigious and headline-seeking client, lenders cut Trump slack — exactly what he seemed to have been counting on.

Big banks and hedge funds gave him years of extra time to repay his debts. Even after Trump sued his largest lender, accusing it of preying on him, the bank agreed to lend him another $99 million — more than twice as much as was previously known — so that he could pay back what he still owed the bank on the defaulted Chicago loan, records show.

Ultimately, Trump’s lenders forgave much of what he owed.

Those forgiven debts are now part of a broader investigation of Trump’s business by the New York attorney general. They normally would have generated a big tax bill, since the Internal Revenue Service treats canceled debts as income. Yet as has often happened in his long career, Trump appears to have paid almost no federal income tax on that money, in part because of large losses in his other businesses, The Times’ analysis of his tax records found.

Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, said the company and Trump appropriately accounted for and paid all taxes due on the forgiven debts.

“These were all arm’s-length transactions that were voluntarily entered into between sophisticated parties many years ago in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and the resulting collapse of the real estate markets,” Garten said.

On television back in those heady Chicago days, the future president was playing a wildly successful real estate developer, and the shimmering new skyscraper became part of that mystique.

It was the biggest thing Trump ever built. It was also the last.

The Money Behind the Project

Since at least the 1990s, Trump had dreamed of erecting a skyscraper in the Windy City. “I had hoped to build something fantastic in Chicago for some time,” Trump would later write in the Chicago Tribune.

He selected a riverside plot that was home to the squat, seven-floor Sun-Times building. In 2001, he unveiled plans for what would be the tallest high-rise built in the United States since the 110-story Sears Tower was completed in Chicago in 1973.

The Trump International Hotel & Tower would include 486 condominium units, 339 hotel rooms, restaurants, a bar, two parking garages, a health club, a spa, and tens of thousands of square feet in retail space and conference facilities.

The condos, some priced at more than $4 million, would have sweeping views of Chicago and Lake Michigan. Rooms in the hotel, occupying lower floors of the building, would be for sale, too. Trump’s company would make money from selling the units (and parking spaces) and operating the building.

To pay for the construction, Trump arranged for two of his LLCs, 401 North Wabash Venture — named for the project’s address — and its parent company, 401 Mezz Venture, to borrow more than $700 million.

Trump went to his longtime lender, Deutsche Bank, for the bulk of the money. Since 1998, he had borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from the German bank. It had been so eager to establish a foothold in the United States that it had overlooked his history of defaults.

This time, Trump assured Deutsche Bank officials, including Justin Kennedy, the son of now-retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, that the Chicago development was a guaranteed moneymaker. In a sign of the Trump family’s commitment to the project, Trump told his bankers that his daughter Ivanka would be in charge. (Trump also appointed the 2004 winner of “The Apprentice” as the development’s “president.”)

Deutsche Bank agreed to lend $640 million to 401 North Wabash Venture. Trump agreed to personally guarantee $40 million of the loan. If his LLC were to default, Deutsche Bank could collect that money directly from Trump.

Trump also went to Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund and private equity company, for $130 million. This was a so-called mezzanine loan, which meant that it would be repaid only after the Deutsche Bank debt had been satisfied. Because of the greater risk, the Fortress loan came with a double-digit interest rate. The agreement with Fortress also required Trump’s 401 Mezz Venture to pay a $49 million “exit fee” when it repaid the loan.

If Trump defaulted, his lenders could seize the building.

Deutsche Bank and Fortress both planned to chop up the loans and sell at least some of the pieces. Deutsche Bank sold them mostly to American, European and Asian banks, Fortress mostly to private equity and hedge funds, including Dune Capital Management, which had recently been co-founded by Steven Mnuchin, the future Treasury secretary.

The loans were due in May 2008. By then, the proceeds from selling condos, hotel units and parking spaces were projected to generate enough cash for Trump to repay what he owed.

Using a thick black pen, Trump signed the loan agreements Feb. 4, 2005. A month later, construction began.

Lenders Come Calling

Work on the project went more slowly than planned, and the residential portion was still under construction as the loans came due.

With the financial crisis enveloping the world, finding buyers for multimillion-dollar apartments suddenly became much harder. In the spring of 2008, Trump asked Deutsche Bank to delay the loan’s due date. The bank gave him an extra six months.

In mid-September, the crisis crescendoed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. Financial markets went haywire. The economy was on the precipice of a depression.

About a week later, Trump showed up in Chicago for the ceremony to mark the skyscraper’s near-completion.

After addressing the small crowd, Trump and three of his adult children — Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric — placed their hands in wet cement rectangles to commemorate the day. “I don’t want to tell you what that feels like,” Donald Trump cracked before waving his cement-caked hands for the cameras.

At that point, at least 159 units in the building were still unsold, and many more were under contract but hadn’t closed, according to New York court records. That meant hundreds of millions of dollars that Trump and his family had counted on to repay Deutsche Bank and Fortress hadn’t yet materialized. And the loans were due in barely six weeks.

Trump sought another extension. This time, Deutsche Bank said no.

Trump’s company still owed Deutsche Bank about $334 million in principal and interest, and Fortress $130 million, not including interest and fees.

Trump went on the offensive. In a letter to Deutsche Bank on Nov. 4, he accused it of helping ignite the financial crisis. This was important, because Trump went on to claim that the crisis constituted a “force majeure” — an act of God, like a natural disaster — that entitled him to extra time to repay the loans.

A few days later, Trump and his companies sued Deutsche Bank and Fortress, along with the other banks and hedge funds that had purchased pieces of the loans.

The suit accused Deutsche Bank of engaging in “predatory lending practices” against Trump. He sought $3 billion in damages.

Deutsche Bank soon filed its own lawsuit, accusing its longtime client of being a habitual deadbeat and demanding immediate repayment of the now-defaulted loans.

Inside Deutsche Bank, angry executives and lawyers vowed to never again do business with Trump, according to senior executives.

With the litigation pending (the parties soon entered into a series of “standstill agreements” that paused hostilities), the Trump family kept trying to find buyers for the condos.

“As it nears completion, it’s time for you to take your place in the one-of-a-kind Trump lifestyle this building offers,” Ivanka Trump said in an April 2009 sales video. “And you can be living it, right here, very soon.”

Turning Unpaid Debt Into Canceled Debt

Why didn’t the lenders seize the building?

Going to court to take over the unfinished skyscraper promised to be a costly, yearslong process, especially given Trump’s reputation for using the legal system to drag out fights and grind down opponents. It seemed simpler to resolve the dispute.

On July 28, 2010, lawyers for Trump, Deutsche Bank and Fortress notified the court that they had reached a private settlement. The terms weren’t disclosed.

But Trump’s federal tax returns, as well as loan documents filed in Cook County, Illinois, provide clues to what happened: Trump was let off the hook for about $270 million. It was the type of generous financial break that few American companies or individuals could ever expect to receive, especially without filing for bankruptcy protection.

Before Trump defaulted, Fortress had expected to receive more than $300 million from his company: the $130 million in principal and roughly $185 million in anticipated interest and fees.

But Fortress and its partners — including Mnuchin’s Dune Capital, as well as Cerberus Capital Management, whose co-chief executive, Stephen Feinberg, would become a major Trump fundraiser and go on to lead a White House advisory panel — quickly realized they wouldn’t ever collect that full amount.

Ultimately, Fortress settled for $48 million, which Trump wired to the firm in March 2012, according to people familiar with the deal.

The forgiven debts showed up in Trump’s tax returns. For 2010, Trump’s 401 Mezz Venture reported about $181 million in canceled debts. Two years later, DJT Holdings, an umbrella company that the Chicago project had been folded into, reported that another $105 million of debt had been forgiven. Most of that appears to reflect the unpaid Fortress sum.

In many ways, it repeated a pattern that had played out more than a decade earlier at Trump’s Atlantic City casinos: a cycle of defaulting on debts and then persuading already-burned lenders to cut him a break.

The Last $99 Million

Trump’s companies got a pass on the money they owed on the Deutsche Bank loan, too.

The 2010 settlement gave Trump a couple of years to sell hotel units, condos and parking spaces to repay that loan, according to Steven Schlesinger, a lawyer who represented the Trump Organization in the Chicago litigation.

By 2012, the Trump Organization had drummed up about $235 million to repay the financial institutions to whom Deutsche Bank had sold pieces of the original loan. They included banks and asset managers in the United States, Germany, Ireland and China, according to court records.

But Trump still owed $99 million, according to people familiar with the debt. Where would he come up with that money?

Although Deutsche Bank had vowed to do no more business with Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, introduced him to his personal wealth manager at the bank, Rosemary Vrablic. Vrablic, with the support of her superiors, soon agreed to restart the relationship with Trump.

In 2012, Vrablic’s division made two loans secured by the Chicago skyscraper: one for nearly $54 million, another for $45 million, according to loan documents filed with the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. Trump agreed to personally guarantee the new loans, according to several people familiar with the deal.

The funds were used to immediately repay the $99 million that Trump still owed on the original Chicago loan, the people said. In other words, one wing of Deutsche Bank was providing Trump the money to repay another division of the same bank.

The following spring, the Trump Organization repaid $54 million, according to a person briefed on the matter and Cook County records. That left $45 million outstanding. But in 2014, Deutsche Bank agreed to lend another $24 million on the property and to extend the due date until 2024, records show. Trump now owed the bank $69 million. By May 2016, he had repaid the $24 million.

At that time, the Chicago loans were only one element of the relationship between Deutsche Bank and Trump. Vrablic’s team also lent Trump’s company $125 million for work on his Doral golf resort in Florida and up to $170 million to transform the Old Post Office building in Washington into a luxury hotel. Trump personally guaranteed those loans, too.

The guarantees were advantageous for him. Because they counted as investments in his business for tax purposes, the guarantees increased the amount of losses he could use to avoid income taxes in the future. Trump’s federal tax returns show that he has personally guaranteed the repayment of $421 million in debts.

Most of that is on loans from Deutsche Bank. At the end of 2018, Trump and his companies owed the bank $330 million.

Whittling Down Tax Bills

The IRS requires taxpayers to treat forgiven debts as income when calculating what they owe in federal taxes. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, is investigating whether Trump followed the law.

The tax records reviewed by The Times show that while Trump accounted for $287 million of income from his canceled debts, he managed to avoid paying income taxes on nearly all of it.

Trump reported $40 million of forgiven debt as income in 2010. But losses from his businesses — including $30.8 million in red ink on the Chicago project — meant he had no taxable income that year.

Trump avoided immediate income taxes on another $104.8 million of the forgiven loans in a way that could increase his taxes later. He would generally have been entitled to write off the total amount he spent on a building over a number of years, a process known as depreciation. Instead, he agreed to reduce those eventual write-offs by $104.8 million, an alternative allowed in tax law.

For the other $141 million, Trump took advantage of a law, passed after the 2008 financial crisis, that allowed income from canceled debts to be deferred for five years and then spread out over the next five. Each year from 2014 through 2018, Trump declared $28.2 million of canceled-debt income.

As it turned out, though, losses in other parts of his business wiped out most of his federal tax bill on that income. He paid nothing for 2014; $641,931 for 2015; and, after credits, only $750 a year for 2016 and 2017. It isn’t clear how much he paid for 2018.

Loans Coming Due

Like Trump’s other properties, the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago has benefited in some ways from its connection to the president.

Last year, for example, an aviation company that was lobbying the Trump administration for contracting work held an event there. Trump attended an October 2019 lunch fundraiser at the hotel, which generated about $100,000 in revenue for his company, The Washington Post reported.

But the skyscraper’s fortunes have withered. Most of its retail space has never been occupied, The Real Deal reported last year. Its revenue declined from $67 million in 2014 to $50 million in 2018, while profits plunged from $16.3 million to $1.8 million over the same period.

The problems intensified in 2020, as the coronavirus forced restaurants, including Trump’s in Chicago, to close. The Trump family sought financial relief from Deutsche Bank among others.

The bank offered to let Trump’s companies pause interest payments on their loans. The Trump Organization decided the bank’s proposal was insufficiently generous and turned it down.

The loans come due in 2023 and 2024.


THE LOOTING OF AMERICA:

BARACK OBAMA AND HIS CRONY BANKSTERS set themselves on America’s pensions next!

 http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/obamanomics-assault-on-american-middle.html

The new aristocrats, like the lords of old, are not bound by the laws that apply to the lower orders. Voluminous reports have been issued by Congress and government panels documenting systematic fraud and law breaking carried out by the biggest banks both before and after the Wall Street crash of 2008.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. 

 

 

Goldman Sachs Executive Who Profited Off Housing Collapse Pours $200K into Joe Biden Campaign

The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.

Former Goldman Sachs Chief Pours $100K into Joe Biden’s Campaign

26 Oct 2020374

1:41

A former Goldman Sachs president made a huge, last-minute donation to Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign against President Trump.

Harvey Schwartz, former president of Goldman Sachs, donated about $100,000 to the Biden Action Fund in October, according to Federal Election Commission data.

CNBC reports:

The filing lists Schwartz and a New York address and describes his work profession as “self employed.” The contribution was processed on Oct. 5, records show.

Schwartz retired from the bank in 2018 after being its president for just over a year. Prior to that role he was Goldman’s chief financial officer.

Wall Street executives and employees has been a major donor to the Biden campaign. One of the donors is a former Goldman Sachs executive who profited from the housing crisis.

While Biden has taken about 184 separate contributions from Goldman Sachs executives and employees, President Donald Trump has taken just 41 contributions from the big bank. Trump’s contributions from Goldman Sachs total less than $7,500.

As Breitbart News has noted, recent CNBC analysis revealed that Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s campaign this election cycle. CNN analysis found that “all the big banks” are backing Biden against Trump.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. 

 

Joe Biden-Donor-Rich Goldman Sachs Admits to Record $1.6B Bribery Scheme

JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images

25 Oct 2020711

2:30

Goldman Sachs, home to many big donors to Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign, has admitted to a record-setting $1.6 billion foreign bribery scheme this week.

The Justice Department announced charges against Goldman Sachs for their executives’ involvement in a foreign bribery scheme, the largest in United States history. As a result, Goldman Sachs will pay more than $2.9 billion as part of a settlement.

“Goldman Sachs today accepted responsibility for its role in a conspiracy to bribe high-ranking foreign officials to obtain lucrative underwriting and other business relating to [1Malaysia Development Bhd.],” said acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Rabbitt of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement.

“Today’s resolution, which requires Goldman Sachs to admit wrongdoing and pay nearly three billion dollars in penalties, fines, and disgorgement, holds the bank accountable for this criminal scheme and demonstrates the department’s continuing commitment to combatting corruption and protecting the U.S. financial system,” Rabbitt said.

The revelations of Goldman Sachs’ involvement in the foreign bribery scheme comes as Biden has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from executives and employees at the big bank.

Kathy Matsui and Richard Friedman, in executive and banker roles at Goldman Sachs, have donated nearly $105,000 to the Biden Victory Fund and the Biden Action Fund in June. Just this week, news broke that the former Goldman Sachs executive who profited off the U.S. housing crash has donated $200,000 to the Biden Victory Fund.

While Biden has taken about 184 separate contributions from Goldman Sachs executives and employees, President Donald Trump has taken just 41 contributions from the big bank. Trump’s contributions from Goldman Sachs total less than $7,500.

As Breitbart News has noted, recent CNBC analysis revealed that Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s campaign this election cycle. CNN analysis found that “all the big banks” are backing Biden against Trump.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

Wall Street Praises Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s VP: ‘What’s Not to Like?’

AP Photo/Richard Drew

13 Aug 2020996

4:20

Wall Street executives are praising Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s choosing Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate against President Trump, feeling they dodged a bullet from a progressive insurgency.

In interviews with the Wall Street JournalCNBC, and Bloomberg, executives on Wall Street expressed relief that Biden picked Harris for vice president on the Democrat ticket, calling her a “normal Democrat” who is a “safe” choice for the financial industry.

Morgan Stanley Vice Chairman Tom Nides told Bloomberg that across Wall Street, Harris joining Biden “was exceptionally well-received.”

“How damn cool is it that a Black woman is considered the safe and conventional candidate,” Nides said.

Peter Soloman, the founder of a multinational investment banking firm, told Bloomberg he believes Harris is “a great pick” because she is “safe, balanced, a woman, diverse, what’s not to like?”

As the Journal notes, many on Wall Street see Harris is another conscious decision by the Democrat establishment to stave off populist priorities to reform Wall Street:

To some Wall Street executives, Ms. Harris’s selection signals a more moderate shift for the Democratic Party, which its progressive flank has pushed to the left in recent years. [Emphasis added]

“While Kamala is a forceful, passionate and eloquent standard-bearer for the aspirations of all Americans, regardless of their race, gender or age, she is not doctrinaire or rigid,” said Brad Karp, chairman of law firm Paul Weiss, who co-led a committee of lawyers across the country who supported Ms. Harris during the primary. [Emphasis added]

Marc Lasry, CEO of Avenue Capital Group, called Harris a “great” pick for Biden. “She’s going to help Joe immensely. He picked the perfect partner,” Lasry told CNBC.

Executives at Citigroup and Centerview Partners made similar comments about Harris to CNBC and the Journal, calling her a “great choice” and “direct but constructive.”

Founder of financial consulting firm Kynikos Associates Jim Chanos was elated in an interview with Bloomberg over Harris joining Biden on the Democrat ticket:

“She’s terrific,” said Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates. “She’s got force of personality in a good way. She takes over a room. She certainly has a charisma and a presence which will be an asset on the campaign.” [Emphasis added]

Harris is no stranger to praise from Wall Street executives. In the 2019 Democrat presidential primary, Harris won over a number of financial industry donors, even holding a fundraiser in Iowa that was backed by Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

While criticizing “the people who have the most” in Democrat primary debates, Harris raked in thousands in campaign cash from financial executives from firms such as the Blackstone Group, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.

This month, the New York Times admitted the “wallets of Wall Street are with Joe Biden” in a gushing headline about the financial industry’s opposition to Trump:

Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.

Harris’s views on trade and immigration, two of the most consequential issues to Wall Street, are in lockstep with financial executives’ objective to grow profit margins and add consumers to the market.

On trade, Harris has balked at Trump’s imposition of tariffs on foreign imports from China, Mexico, Canada, and Europe — using the neoliberal argument that tariffs should not be used to pressure foreign countries to buy more American-made goods and serve as only a tax on taxpayers.

Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for national immigration policy — which seeks to drive up legal and illegal immigration levels to their highest levels in decades — offers a flooded labor market with low wages for U.S. workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been supported by Wall Street.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

Goldman Sachs fined $2.9 billion over role in 1MDB corruption case

Goldman Sachs has been fined $2.9 billion by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in a deal announced yesterday that closes one of the biggest corruption cases in the history of Wall Street.

Together with a settlement reached with Malaysian authorities in July, Goldman Sachs will pay more than $5 billion for its involvement in the 1MDB scandal.

While the amounts are large, the settlement follows the pattern of earlier deals on corruption. In return for an agreement to pay fines out of corporate revenue, the company and its executives escape prosecution for criminal activity. The financial penalties are simply written off as a cost of making profit.

Besides avoiding prosecution, Goldman will also escape the appointment of a government monitor to oversee its compliance department which had earlier been put forward by officials involved in pursuing the case.

While the financial penalties amount to around two-thirds of its annual profits, Goldman had already taken them into account, as they had been mooted for some time. Company shares actually rose by more than 1 percent after a report earlier this week by Wall Street Journal about the expected action by the DoJ.

Following the DoJ announcement, the bank’s share price barely moved. “This is already priced in. The stock price is already reflecting this kind of action,” Sumit Agarwal, finance professor at Singapore’s National University told the Financial Times.

Goldman’s involvement with 1MDB was in response to the situation it confronted in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, as its earnings prospects in the US declined and it went in search of profitable opportunities. The Malaysian government had launched the 1MDB fund, supposedly to finance infrastructure development. Goldman stepped forward to organise the sale of $6.5 billion in bonds, with the aim of collecting large fees, in 2012 and 2013.

The whole operation saw the development of a vast corruption ring. According to the prosecution, around $2.7 billion was stolen from 1MDB and more than $1.6 billion was paid out in bribes.

Much of the money was stolen by an adviser to the fund, businessman Jho Low, who was aided by two Goldman bankers working for its Malaysian subsidiary as well as associates in the Malaysian government. It is claimed that the former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, now serving a 12-year jail term, received $700 million.

The DoJ said Goldman had played a “central role” in the looting of 1MDB and should have detected warning signs. The acting head of the DoJ’s criminal division, Brian Rabbitt, said: “Personnel at the bank allowed this scheme to proceed by overlooking or ignoring a number of clear red flags.”

The attempts to claim that one of the largest corruption operations in history was a matter of oversight simply does not pass muster. In court yesterday, Karen Seymour, Goldman’s senior counsel, admitted its Malaysian subsidiary had paid bribes “in order to obtain and retain business for Goldman Sachs.”

According to court papers, when an employee told an unnamed senior executive he was concerned that a 1MDB deal was being delayed because one of the participants was seeking a bribe, he was told: “What’s disturbing about that? It’s nothing new, is it?”

The deals were organised by two Goldman bankers, Timothy Leissner and Roger Ng. Leissner, the former head of Goldman’s Southeast Asian business, pleaded guilty to his role in the 1MDB case in 2018. He received more than $200 million from 1MDB and paid bribes to government officials.

Goldman chief executive David Solomon, who took over from Lloyd Blankfein—author of the infamous comment in 2009 that big profits for banks meant they were doing “God’s work”—said: “We recognise that we did not adequately address red flags and scrutinise the representations of certain members of the deal team.”

As details of the corruption began to emerge, Goldman sought to blame its involvement on “rogue operators.” In fact, their activities were encouraged. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the 1MDB bond deals organised in 2012, “won one of Goldman’s most prestigious internal awards, praised for its ‘spirit of creativity and entrepreneurial thinking’.”

In an effort to clean up its image, Goldman announced that four senior executives, including CEO Solomon, would forfeit $31 million in pay this year, and that it would attempt to claw back bonuses paid to Blankfein in the past. But the penalty imposed on current executives amounts only to about one-third of what they were paid in 2019.

The notion that Goldman was somehow the victim of “rogue” activity and that its involvement in massive corruption is simply the result of oversight is belied by its history, in particular, the role it played in the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2008.

The Senate investigation into the crisis, which found that the financial system was a “snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing,” singled out Goldman for special mention.

In 2006, Goldman determined that subprime mortgage assets it was selling to clients were destined to flounder. Goldman went short in the market in the expectation that it would crash and it would make a profit on the other side of the very trades it had been promoting. The sums were not small. At one point the firm held short positions amounting to $13 billion.

In an email, referring to an unsuspecting investor, a Goldman executive wrote: “I think I found a white elephant, flying pig and unicorn all at once.”

But the exposure of criminal activity did not bring any prosecutions, let alone jail terms, merely fines, which Goldman and others simply wrote off. In 2013, President Obama’s attorney-general, Eric Holder, clearly recognising the extent of the malfeasance, said that prosecutions would impact on the stability of the US and global banking system.

Since 2008, notwithstanding claims by authorities that there would be a clamp down, the corrupt practices have extended, of which Goldman’s involvement in 1MDB is only one expression.

Last month, documents published by BuzzFeed News from the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, showed that between 1999 and 2017, major banks has been involved in financial transactions of $2 trillion flagged as potentially involving money laundering. The banks involved were some of the biggest in the world including JP Morgan, HSBC and Standard Charter Bank.

Earlier this month, JPMorgan Chase was fined $920 million over “spoofing” activity involving the quick placing and withdrawal of buy and sell orders to create the impression there was a surge of activity around a particular financial asset in order to create a profitable opportunity.

According to one of the lead investigators in the case, “a significant number of JP Morgan traders and sales personnel openly disregarded US laws that serve to prevent illegal activity in the marketplace.”

But despite the fact that the practice was not only well known but was actively promoted, no one in the upper echelons was prosecuted, and the fine has been written off as an operating expense.

The issue which clearly arises is: what is the underlying cause of this system of corruption and illegality?

Commenting on the latest Goldman case, Seth DuCharme, the acting US attorney in Brooklyn, might have gone further than he intended when he remarked: “This case is … about the way our American financial institutions conduct business.”

It certainly is. However, it would be wrong to simply ascribe it to the greed of the financial executives and others, and thereby able to be countered through tighter regulations.

Of course the greed of executives and others exists in abundance. But their activities are, in the final analysis, the expression of processes rooted at the very heart of the profit system—they are the personification of objective tendencies.

While the aim and driving force of the capitalist system is the accumulation of profit the mode of accumulation has undergone profound changes, above all in the US. No longer is the chief source of profit investment and production in the real economy.

It occurs through operations in the financial system based on speculation, clever trades, the securing of fees for the passage of money (without questioning its source) and where the “value” of assets is determined by arcane algorithms and other forms of “financial engineering.”

Consequently, in conditions where profits are increasingly divorced from the underlying real economy, lies, deception, misinformation, corruption and criminality come to dominate the entire financial system.

Goldman Sachs Executive Who Profited Off Housing Collapse Pours $200K into Joe Biden Campaign

The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.

Donald Mullen Jr., as first noted by the Washington Free Beacon, gave $200,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in August. Mullen was a key architect of the “Big Short” scheme that allowed Goldman Sachs to profit from the housing collapse.

New York Magazine detailed the scheme:

In the years leading up to the financial crisis, a team of mortgage executives and traders at Goldman Sachs predicted that the housing market was in trouble. So they designed a massive bet against it, using a bunch of esoteric financial instruments known as collateralized debt obligations that would pay off in the event that housing prices fell and homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. [Emphasis added]

That bet, now known colloquially as “the big short,” allowed Goldman and its clients (including hedge-fund managers like John Paulson) to avoid losses and make billions of dollars when the housing market collapsed, at the same time that people around the country lost their homes to foreclosure. [Emphasis added]

Meanwhile, millions of America’s working and middle class lost their homes, as Business Insider reported in 2018:

After the real estate bubble burst in 2008, many families living in the US found that the cost of running their homes was no longer affordable, resulting in many of those people losing their homes. [Emphasis added]

The widespread consequences were that, between 2006 and 2014, nearly 10 million homeowners in America saw the foreclosure sale of their own homes, which entailed having to give up their property to lenders or selling it as quickly as possible via an emergency sale, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. [Emphasis added]

Livelihoods were threatened and the financial damage was colossal — not to mention the emotional damage suffered by victims of the crisis — a 2014 study shows a correlation between the crisis and an increased suicide rate. But where are the victims of the real estate and financial crisis now? [Emphasis added]

It’s not just Mullen Jr. who is showering Biden with campaign cash to defeat President Trump on November 3. Biden has taken nearly 200 contributions from employees at Goldman Sachs — including contributions of nearly $50,000 to $55,000 from the bank’s top executives.

Altogether, a recent CNBC analysis revealed, Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s campaign this election cycle and CNN has noted that “all the big banks” are backing Biden and Harris against Trump.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:

And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER

The Rise of Wall Street Thievery

How corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.

by Ryan Cooper

MAGAZINE

America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.

Clearly, something has happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era. Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is, their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.

Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.

Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and pensions. 

Lemann then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”

Jensen and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.

The best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.

Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands. 

And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.

Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.

In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”

This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

If concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African Americans.

Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings. 

Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.

Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.

Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.

Fact Check: Big Banks that Kamala Harris ‘Took on’ Now Support Her

2020 Democratic National Convention / YouTube

Volume 90%

19 Aug 202017

2:53

CLAIM: Former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis suggested that because Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) “took on” the big banks as attorney general of California, she will stand up to them as vice president.

VERDICT: While Harris was among 49 state attorney generals who secured a $25 billion settlement from big banks, many executives from those banks now support her as Democrat nominee Joe Biden’s vice presidential choice.

“When millions of families lost their homes, my friend in California, Sen. Kamala Harris, took on the big banks and won,” Solis said in reference to the case which involved Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Ally Bank.

BLOG EDITOR: AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA, KAMALA HARRIS REFUSED TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTE ANY OF HER GENEROUS BANKSTERS DESPITE THAT FACT THAT CA WAS GROUND ZERO FOR BANKSTER-CAUSED MORTGAGE MELTDOWN AND FORECLOSURE!

A number of executives on Wall Street with links to Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America now support Harris in her effort with Biden to defeat Trump.

As Breitbart News reported recently, Wells Fargo Vice Chairman for Public Affairs Bill Daley, who served as Obama’s chief of staff from 2011 to 2012, called a Harris a “reasonable, rational person who has worked in the system.”

Citigroup executive Ray McGuire called Harris a “great choice” for vice president. During the Democrat presidential primary, Harris raked in campaign donations from executives and employees with Bank of America.

In These Times reported the donations at the time:

Then there’s Cal­i­for­nia Sen. Kamala Har­ris, who received a total of $44,947 from these 12 firms. Har­ris, who was once brand­ed a ​“bankster’s worst night­mare,” and has tout­ed her pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al record against banks as evi­dence of her pro­gres­sive cred­i­bil­i­ty, received dona­tions from five exec­u­tives of these firms. They include Black­stone man­ag­ing direc­tor Tia Break­ley, Mor­gan Stan­ley’s new head of inter­na­tion­al wealth man­age­ment Col­bert Nar­cisse, Bank of Amer­i­ca senior vice pres­i­dent for diver­si­ty and inclu­sion Alex Rhodes, and Gold­man Sachs vice pres­i­dent of finan­cial crime com­pli­ance Mar­garet Cullum. [Emphasis added]

Har­ris’s most enthu­si­as­tic source of sup­port among these firms, how­ev­er, is Wells Far­go, from whose employ­ees she received a total of $16,713 — the most fund­ing from the bank out of any oth­er can­di­date exam­ined. The donors span mul­ti­ple tiers of the bank’s hier­ar­chy, from bankers and con­sul­tants, to a region­al direc­tor and a man­ag­er, to exec­u­tives like Nation­al Head of Cards and Retail Ser­vices Bev­er­ly Ander­son, both of whom gave the max­i­mum indi­vid­ual dona­tion of $2,800 to Harris. [Emphasis added]

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008

OBAMA CRONY DONORS Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin embodies the plutocratic principle that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Eric Levitz@EricLevitz

 

Steve Mnuchin knows his way around a crisis. Twelve years ago, the Treasury secretary was still a middling multi-millionaire of little renown or historical import. But whenever God closes a door on an underwater home-owner, he opens a window to an unscrupulous speculator, and in 2008, the Big Man began closing a lot of doors. Mnuchin didn’t miss his opening. He may have been just a humble Goldman Sachs nepotism hire turned Hollywood financier back then, but he had a few million dollars to play with and a few friends with many millions more. Together, they bought up a failing mortgage lender, rapidly foreclosed on thousands of borrowers, and resold the homes at a nifty profit. By the end of his tenure as a bank CEO, Mnuchin had earned himself the title “Foreclosure King” — and a return of $200 million. That’s the kind of money that can buy you entrance into the good graces of a Republican nominee, especially if he’s already alienating a lot of the party’s biggest donors. And from there, it’s walking distance to the White House.

Thus far, the COVID-19 crash has been as kind to Mnuchin as the Great Recession once was. If the last global economic crisis made him rich enough to purchase a lofty perch in our government, this one is making the Treasury secretary powerful enough to claim a prominent place in U.S. history. Before the novel coronavirus made its presence felt, Mnuchin’s most memorable achievement as a public servant may have been commandeering a government plane for a solar-eclipse-themed day trip. Since the pandemic sickened global markets, he has brokered the largest stimulus legislation ever passed and won control of a multi-trillion-dollar bailout fund.

Which is to say: We’ve put one of the primary beneficiaries of America’s inequitable response to the last economic crisis in charge of crafting our nation’s response to this one.

Of course, it wasn’t really God who opened the window to Mnuchin’s foreclosure profiteering or the profiteering of all the well-heeled investors who bought low during the financial crisis, then sold high amid the bailout-buoyed recovery (the Almighty contracts out those jobs to protect his brand integrity). Rather, it was an economic system that keeps a wide swath of Americans one bad break from financial ruin — and another tiny class draped in gold-plated armor.

From the first capital-gains-tax cut of the modern era in Jimmy Carter’s day to the supply-side bonanza of Donald Trump’s, this system’s essential rationale has remained the same: If capitalists cannot reap big rewards from their winning bets, they will have no incentive to take the great personal risks that fuel collective prosperity.

Mnuchin’s career and the pandemic response he has overseen belie most of that sentence’s premises. In truth, the Treasury secretary owes his success to a series of low-risk, high-reward bets of little-to-negative social value. Which makes sense. After all, if America’s brand of capitalism actually required the superrich to assume great personal risk in order to reap outsize returns, they wouldn’t be so invested in it.

Steve Mnuchin wasn’t born on third base so much as a few inches to the left of home plate. His grandfather co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons. His father was a Yale-educated partner at Goldman Sachs. If his family’s name didn’t secure Steve’s own Yale admission, its wealth certainly covered his tuition, books, personal Porsche, and “dorm” at New Haven’s Taft Hotel. From this perch, it would have been harder for Mnuchin to tumble down America’s class ladder than to climb higher still. The former would have required prodigious acts of self-destruction; the latter mere fluency in ruling-class social mores and the art of strategic sycophancy — and the wallflower cipher Steve Mnuchin is a master of both.

At Goldman, Mnuchin’s colleagues did not consider him “especially book smart.” And some have suggested that his steady ascent at the firm was fueled less by merit than pedigree (Mnuchin’s elevation to partner in 1996 came at the expense of Kevin Ingram, an African-American trader who’d risen from a working-class childhood up through MIT’s engineering school, then Goldman’s ranks, where he struck one colleague as both “much smarter than Steven” and more “accomplished”).

After Mnuchin paid his dues at Goldman, he founded a hedge fund called Dune Capital and a motion-picture-financing company called Dune Entertainment (both named after a stretch of beach near his house in the Hamptons). He helped bankroll Avatar and the X-Men franchise, hobnobbed in Beverly Hills, and hoarded his investment profits in a tax haven. He had everything America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” imagine a person could want. But Mnuchin longed for higher things. And when the housing market collapsed, he knew he was in luck.

Early in his career, Mnuchin had watched his superiors turn America’s savings-and-loan crisis into their own buying-and-selling bonanza. In the summer of 2008, Mnuchin was watching television in his New York office when an invitation to emulate his old mentors flashed across the screen: Out in California, frightened depositors were lined up outside IndyMac, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, waiting to withdraw their cash. “This bank is going to end up failing, and we need to figure out how to buy it,” Mnuchin told a colleague. “I’ve seen this game before.”

He played it like a natural. Mnuchin reached out to George Soros, John Paulson, and other billionaires whose trust he’d cultivated. They marshaled a $1.6 billion bid. Eager to unload the bank — whose balance sheet was chock-full of toxic assets — the FDIC agreed to cover any losses that might accrue to the investors above a certain threshold. Which is to say, the government agreed to partially socialize Mnuchin & Co.’s downside risk. This public aid came with one major condition: The new bank, which Mnuchin dubbed OneWest, would need to make a good-faith effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. The FDIC would ultimately pay OneWest more than $1.2 billion.

This was not enough to buy Steve Mnuchin’s good faith.

Purchasing IndyMac secured OneWest a claim on a lot of undervalued housing. The catch, of course, was that much of it was full of broke people. And California’s foreclosure laws make the process of separating low-net-worth humans from high-value housing stock long and arduous. But this was nothing a little entrepreneurship couldn’t solve: Mnuchin’s bank (ostensibly) bet it could get away with “robo signing” and backdating documents to expedite foreclosures. One-West got caught red-handed on the first count but emerged with a slap on the wrist. Investigators at the California attorney general’s office concluded the bank was guilty on the second and requested authorization to pursue an enforcement action. It’s unclear exactly why then–Attorney General Kamala Harris denied this request. But as the investigators themselves noted, to pursue legal action against an entity with OneWest’s resources would mean investing years of time — and large sums of the public’s money — in a deeply uncertain enterprise. The government could afford to take only so many risks, which meant the idea that the state could hold all its superrich residents accountable to its laws was a bluff. Mnuchin called it.

In the spring of 2016, another promising investment opportunity caught the eye of the now-former One-West CEO. Mnuchin had crossed paths with Trump several times over the years; his hedge fund had invested in (at least) two of the mogul’s projects. So when Donald invited Steve to swing by his tower on the night he won the New York primary, Mnuchin obliged. A dozenish hours (and a glass or two of Trump-branded wine) later, Mnuchin agreed to become the finance chairman of the future GOP nominee’s campaign.

This decision baffled some of Mnuchin’s Hollywood pals. The bankroller of The LEGO Batman Movie didn’t strike them as a political animal, let alone a Trumpist. But his motives weren’t mysterious. For someone in Mnuchin’s socioeconomic position, Trump’s presidential campaign was just another low-risk, high-reward bet. Or, as Mnuchin himself put it in an interview in August 2016, “Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?,’ if I end up in the administration.”

Mnuchin is the last of the “adults in the room” — that cabal of semi-credentialed advisers whose presence in the West Wing eased the troubled minds of Never Trump pundits circa 2017. None of the others — not Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, or John Kelly — could marshal the requisite combination of unscrupulous sycophancy and patient politicking to weather each turn in Trump’s tempestuous moods. Only the former Foreclosure King has what it takes to unequivocally defend the president’s kind words for alt-right marchers in Charlottesville or echo his attacks on NFL players who dared to protest police abuse. So when the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression hit, Mnuchin became — in The Wall Street Journal’s appellation — “Washington’s indispensable crisis manager.” Unburdened by ideological conviction or economic literacy, Mnuchin has proved to be the GOP’s most able dealmaker. Working out of a temporary office in the Capitol’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, Mnuchin spent the closing weeks of March running (and massaging) messages between the Senate’s Democratic and Republican camps as they sought consensus on a gargantuan coronavirus relief bill. “Mnuchin played the middleman, and he must have been in my office 20 times in three days,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Journal, going on to praise the reliability of the Treasury secretary’s word. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she and Mnuchin can communicate through a “shorthand” devoid of time-wasting “niceties or anything like that.”

The soft skills Mnuchin had once deployed to ink billion-dollar investment deals now eased the passage of a $2.2 trillion economic-relief package. And there was much to admire in the legislation’s headline provisions: an unprecedented expansion in federal unemployment benefits that would leave many laid-off workers with as much — if not more — income than they’d earned at their old jobs, forgivable loans for small businesses that agreed to forgo layoffs during the crisis, and onetime cash payments to all nonaffluent Americans.

But this is still a Republican stimulus, however much schmoozing Steve has done with Chuck and Nancy this spring. Congress’s persistent underfunding of the small-business aid has kept America’s most vulnerable mom-and-pops out in the cold. And our nation’s decrepit unemployment-insurance offices have struggled to administer benefits as the ranks of the jobless grow millions stronger every week. The Treasury Department has allowed debt collectors to garnish the relief checks of cash-strapped Americans, and Congress has essentially refused to bail out hospitals whose budgets have suddenly been destroyed by COVID-driven shortfalls, meaning that over the next few years, whole essential health systems and services could abruptly be suspended.

Most of all, the legislation’s largest appropriation — $454 billion to backstop a $4 trillion Federal Reserve lending program to large corporations — gives Mnuchin significant personal discretion over which firms will have access to low-cost credit and on what terms, thereby leaving a connoisseur in the art of subverting federal crisis management for personal profit in charge of preventing America’s corporate titans from subverting federal crisis management for personal profit.

The White House’s next big idea for promoting economic recovery is, reportedly, to formally suspend the enforcement of labor and environmental regulations on small businesses, a measure that would enable petit bourgeois tyrants to suspend all pretense of concern for their workers’ health and well-being in the midst of a pandemic.

Nevertheless, could we have reasonably expected anything better, all things considered? A GOP president and Senate majority were always going to comfort the comfortable and toss crumbs to the afflicted. And when Congress approved $2.2 trillion in coronavirus relief funds last month, nurses were intubating patients without proper PPE, grocery-store clerks were jeopardizing their health to keep others fed, and delivery drivers were forfeiting the security of social distancing so others could more comfortably enjoy it. The legislation included zero dollars in hazard-pay benefits for those workers. It did, however, provide $90 billion in tax cuts to the owners of pass-through businesses, such as, for instance, the Trump Organization. Such “relief” was necessary, the American Enterprise Institute later explained, to mitigate the “penalty” on economic risk-takers.