Monday, August 26, 2019

DEMOCRATS JOIN TRUMP IN SUCKING OFF BRIBES FROM THE RICH AND WALL STREET - BOTH PARTIES ARE NOTHING MORE THAN FACTIONS OF THE CORPORATE PARTY

Democrats join Trump in fundraising from the moneyed elite

It’s August in the Hamptons, Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard in the year before a US presidential election. That means it’s time for the moneyed elite of New York and Boston to throw open their palatial summer residences to fundraisers for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates.
President Donald Trump made the circuit in early August, vacuuming up $12 million in campaign contributions in a long weekend. His Democratic opponents have been following suit throughout the month.
Trump’s poll numbers may be plummeting—his approval rating has fallen to 40 percent, and he posted an average of only 38 percent in hypothetical matchups with four top Democratic rivals—but he has deep support among the super-rich, for whom his 2017 tax cut provided a bonanza of more than $1.5 trillion.
Among those hosting Trump were Hamptons real estate magnate Joe Farrell, at his 17,000-square-foot Sandcastle mansion and hedge fund billionaire Stephen Ross, who held a fundraiser at his Southampton home.
Similar social types—with the occasional film director and rock star thrown in—have mobilized to back Democratic candidates.
The weekend of August 17-19 brought Kamala Harris and Cory Booker to the region for a slew of fundraisers; the current weekend features Joe Biden; Labor Day weekend will bring Pete Buttigieg. The four are the big favorites of the Democratic Party wing of the Wall Street, hedge fund and investment banking crowd who occupy seven-figure and eight-figure premises along the beaches of Long Island and Nantucket Sound.
Senator Harris held a fundraiser hosted by director Spike Lee on Martha’s Vineyard, the island off the Massachusetts coast, and a separate reception hosted by real estate developers Nancy and Dick Friedman, who had bundled money for the Clinton campaign in 2016, as well as five separate fundraisers in the Hamptons, with tickets ranging from $1,000 to $2,800, the maximum that any individual can donate to a presidential candidate.
Bloomberg News headlined its report on the Harris fundraisers as follows: “‘I Believe in Capitalism’: Kamala Harris Courts Big Donors in the Hamptons.”
The report began: “Teslas and Maseratis lined the street as Kamala Harris greeted guests sipping drinks from plastic cups with her name on them and eating cinnamon sugar donuts from Dreesen’s at a fund-raiser hosted by movie executive Jamie Patricof and his wife Kelly as the summer of Democratic fund-raisers rolled on in East Hampton.”
Harris reportedly told her well-heeled audience that she no longer supported the Medicare for All plans proposed by Democratic rivals Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, although she was a co-sponsor of the bill Sanders introduced in the Senate.
Among those hosting fundraisers for Harris, besides the Patricofs, were public-relations executive Michael Kempner, at Water Mill, private equity boss Frank Baker, in Southampton, and Jon Henes, a partner at the Wall Street law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, at his home in Sagaponack. Combined, the events raised more than $1 million for the Harris campaign.
Among those identified in local media reports as attending the Harris fundraisers in the Hamptons were Ray McGuire of Citigroup, Blair Effron of Centerview Partners, Peter Borish of Quad Group, Bennett Goodman of Blackstone, J. Michael Evans, formerly of Goldman Sachs, now with Alibaba, financier Richard Perry, and Brad Karp, chair of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Several top fashion industry figures, including shoe designer Steve Madden and Lauren Santo Domingo, also made appearances. 

The final fundraiser on Sunday night went head-to-head with another at the home of musician Jon Bon Jovi, raising money for another Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Cory Booker. Tickets started at $1,000 per person.
Former Vice President Joe Biden appeared at two Cape Cod fundraisers the same weekend, one at Harwich Port, before a larger group at a local beer garden, followed by a dinner at the South Yarmouth home of financier Alan Leventhal. At the second venue, Biden was at pains to reject the “left” pronouncements of several of his rivals for the Democratic nomination.
“We don’t have to go out and spend $30 trillion to deal with health care,” he said, referring to the supposed price tag of Medicare-for-all. His own plan would cost only a tiny fraction of that, $740 billion over 10 years, meaning it would also cover only a tiny fraction of those left with little or no coverage under Obamacare.
He likewise rejected calls for eliminating college student debt. “I don’t think everybody should have a free college education, but I do think we’re in a position where for $6 billion a year, you can put every single qualified person that needed to go back to community college to get an education, or go to community college in the first place,” he claimed.
Biden went out of his way to conciliate with congressional Republicans, recalling that under the Obama administration he was the principal liaison to figures like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “There’s an awful lot of really good Republicans out there,” he said. “They’re decent people. They ran because they care about things, but they’re intimidated right now.” If Trump were defeated, he claimed, these Republicans would be open to working with a Democratic administration.
This weekend, Biden has made further appearances at fundraisers, including one Friday at the summer home of Peter Shields, managing partner of the Washington, DC law firm Wiley Rein, at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. On Saturday he was in the Hamptons, at a fundraiser attended by former White House press secretary Anthony Scaramucci, another Manhattan multi-millionaire, who said that he was still a registered Republican and not yet ready to announce support for Biden, but praised him and declared that President Trump “has lost his mind.”
Biden has already appeared at elite fundraisers in Aspen, Colorado, Sun Valley, Idaho and Cape Cod, according to media reports.
Next weekend, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg will attend a series of fundraising events in the Hamptons, including an August 31 “Cocktails & Conversation with Mayor Pete & Chasten Buttigieg” at the East Hampton home of Robert Marc and Gunnar Spaulding, with Friends of the High Line board chair Mario Palumbo and his JPMorgan executive husband, Stefan Gargiulo, as co-hosts.
Buttigieg will also appear at the Sagaponack home of “Hamilton” producers Jeffrey Seller and Josh Lehrer, and at an event hosted by Insight Partners managing director Deven Parekh and his wife, Monika.
While Harris, Biden, Booker and Buttigieg dominate the Wall Street funding, their two main “left” rivals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have sworn off high-dollar fundraisers in favor of online contributions. This reflects a division of labor among the Democratic presidential candidates.
Warren and Sanders seek to give a left face to a fundamentally right-wing party of big business. Disavowing direct contributions from Wall Street is part of the pretense. Warren has already indicated that if she wins the nomination, she will not engage in “unilateral disarmament” in the general election campaign against Trump: in other words, she will rake in as much corporate and Wall Street cash as possible. Sanders will do the same in the event he wins the nomination, but the question has not yet been directly posed to him.

LETTER FROM WASHINGTON Trump’s working against the global economic order As the world slips toward recession, he’s making it worse by lashing out DOYLE MCMANUS Warning flags are flying: The world economy is heading into a slowdown, and possibly a recession. 


FRENCH LEADER Emmanuel Macron, right, and President Trump are joined by their wives at the G-7 on Saturday. Macron says “it’s pointless” for members to do a consensus statement; Trump disavowed last year’s. (Francois Mori AFP/Getty Images) 8/25/2019 Los Angeles Times - eNewspaper https://enewspaper.latimes.com/desktop/latimes/default.aspx?edid=f3e8e57b-807b-425d-9582-8d288eff1c11 2/3 Germany, normally the engine of Europe, has seen its growth rate fall below zero. Britain is steeling for a potentially chaotic exit from the European Union this fall. Trade wars are buffeting China, Japan and South Korea. U.S. growth has slowed, too — partly because of the same damaging trade battles. Before Donald Trump was president, leaders of the world’s biggest economies would react to those worrisome signals with a flurry of meetings and announcements. They’d promise to make their economic policies reinforce one another and reassure financial markets that someone was in charge. That’s what happened amid the financial crisis of 2008, and in earlier recessions and financial crises as well. But it’s not happening this time — and Trump is one of the reasons. Case in point: this weekend’s Group of 7 summit in Biarritz, France. The G-7 was organized in 1975 for this kind of situation: joint action to head off a recession. (In that case, the recession was already underway.) Its members are the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada. A normal G-7 meeting produces a long, often boring declaration in which the leaders list everything they agreed on, beginning with efforts to bolster growth and resist trade protectionism. This year, there probably won’t be a joint communique for the first time since 1975. “It’s pointless,” French President Emmanuel Macron, the unlucky host, shrugged last week. After all, Trump disavowed the consensus statement last year. The main roadblock is trade — specifically, Trump’s decision to make punitive tariffs a central part of his economic strategy. He’s embroiled in a full-scale trade war with China, and he’s threatened to escalate the battle in Europe, with tariffs aimed at German automobiles and French wines. On Friday, Trump and China fired tariffs at each other, sending stock markets plummeting. In a Twitter tirade, the president also “ordered” U.S. businesses to stop doing business with China, although he has no legal authority to do so. On Sunday, the president plans to lecture the other G-7 leaders on why they should accede to his demands. It sounds more like a campaign stunt than a serious attempt to stave off a recession. Let’s get real: Economists say Trump’s tariff wars have made a recession more likely. They include his own appointee as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, who said Friday that trade battles appear to be hurting U.S. manufacturing and capital spending. “Who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” a furious Trump responded on Twitter, comparing his Fed chief to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Neither presumably enjoyed being labeled an “enemy.” But the obstacles to international action run deeper than the president’s trade policies. 8/25/2019 Los Angeles Times - eNewspaper https://enewspaper.latimes.com/desktop/latimes/default.aspx?edid=f3e8e57b-807b-425d-9582-8d288eff1c11 3/3 Trump believes that the United States, as the world’s most powerful country, is usually better off acting alone, seeking one-on-one deals with other nations. In his view, politics — like business — is a zero-sum game. Every encounter has a winner and loser. Other countries, including those who claim to be your allies, are generally plotting to steal you blind. “Our allies take advantage of us far greater than our enemies,” Trump recently declared. That doesn’t leave much room for cooperative efforts. And it doesn’t engender confidence among smaller countries that the United States might look after their interest as well as its own. This isn’t only about the G-7. There are other ways major powers can work together to confront an economic crisis. Central banks and the International Monetary Fund can act, too. But in recent history, those efforts have worked only when the United States has stepped up to lead. No other country has the wherewithal. The European Union is too disunited, China too widely mistrusted. Trump doesn’t appear interested in assuming that leadership role — not, at least, when it means accommodating others who don’t always agree with his views. “In the last financial crisis, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama were able to persuade the rest of the world that everybody in the lifeboat should row in the same direction,” Stewart M. Patrick, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “With Trump the message might be ‘Every man for himself.’ ” “You need a president who engenders confidence that he has the best interest of everyone in mind,” Patrick added. “Trump hasn’t done that.” If a recession arrives, international cooperation could — with luck — make it shorter and milder. But what happens if the United States no longer wants to lead in that effort? Under Trump, we may find out. Doyle McManus’ column appears on Wednesday and Sunday

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