Donald Trump announced that he would close down his charitable foundation to avoid conflict of interest charges. How about to avoid going to jail? The foundation has been under intense investigation for using its funds to pay for $258,000 in corporate lawsuits and more to pay for paintings of Trump himself that now hang in various of his golf courses. That’s Trump’s idea of charitable causes.
It’s fascinating to find out what Trump thinks of as charitable giving, especially after all the negative things he has said about the Clinton foundation to which the Clintons themselves have given over a million dollars. It turns out that Trump told the IRS that between 2009 and 2014 he gave nothing to his own foundation but he did collect gifts of over five million bucks from Vince and Linda McMahon the wrestling people. Yes, that’s the same Linda McMahon who he has now nominated to head the Small Business Association. What you say? That sounds like a conflict of interest; the exact same kind, only multiplied by one hundred, of which Trump accused the Clintons. Well, yeah. It is. So what? You’re surprised?
Trump has already admitted to the IRS that he was guilty of self-dealing by using the charities funds for his own benefit. That’s typical Trump. After raising millions, various investigations were only able to account for ten grand in seven years actual charitable donations from the foundation. The rest went to Trump, his family or his businesses.
This is the way this thief and con man has operated his entire life. Get used to it. We have elected this bum as President of our country. Now the only question is do the Democrats try to block his every move and thereby have another four years when nothing gets done in Washington or do we figure out a way to edit what he wants to do in such a way as to move forward with whatever good ideas come out of his swamp and just block the ones that will be harmful to the nation. It’s a monstrous job and frankly this blog doesn’t see any way the Democrats are up to the above task. It really doesn’t look good.
******
Watched Joe Scarborough try to get around the conflict of interest noise about Trump and his family this morning. All agreed that a new set of rules is now in place. Ironically enough it was Trump’s accusations aimed at the Clinton’s for the way they appeared to raise money for the Clinton Foundation, one of the great charities extant, that forced these rules to the fore.
Scarborough kept dropping the name of St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, as a means of excusing the shameless fund raising that the Trumps have been involved in, for charities that benefited the Trumps themselves.
Of course this is going on while myriad lawsuits and criminal charges against Trump are in progress. This is the guy who called Hillary a criminal because she had her own email server and had his gangs of punks chant “Lock her up!” when his own criminal activities far surpassed even the stuff of which she was unjustly accused.
Trump is a criminal elected to the Presidency by a combination of woefully uninformed or consummately greedy voters who put him in the White House despite their knowledge of his history of cheating almost everyone who comes in contact with him.
They say that the office of the President elevates men to its demands. That hasn’t been what has happened over my lifetime but let’s hope that this degenerate criminal gains something by his association with the job that so many have held so functionally. If he can’t cut it we’re in deep shit.
*****
Trump continues his bait and switch with the American public. Some of us had been hoping that he would make a better president than he did a candidate but it is obvious that a man with no moral yardstick can never be what we expect our president to be. Everyone thought his Tweeting about the “Hamilton” incident was amusing but insignificant but as pointed out by Juan Cole in Informed Content, it was actually a shield to help bury unfavorable news that was emerging abut his previous conduct.
“Hamilton” took precedence in the news over the revelation that Trump and his lawyers had settled a suit against him for his Trump University scam for $25 million. That sounds like a lot of money until you realize that he made about $150 million after paying the fine.
Then there was the neo-Nazi conference that was held in DC to celebrate Herr Trump’s win. Yes, it was replete with raised armed Heil Trumps, accompanied by anti-Semitic shouts from the assembled white supremacists: very pro-Trump garbage.
Neither John McCain’s threatened suit against Trump for his support of waterboarding nor Trump’s appointment of Jeff Sessions, a confirmed bigot and racist rose to the level of the “Hamilton” Story. Nor apparently did the fact that members of the Israeli cabinet have openly supported the appointment of Steve Bannon to Trump’s cabinet despite the obvious racist, bigoted, anti Jewish leanings of the disgraceful Breitbart operation. It was an interesting choice, being as Bannon hates Jews only a little less than he does the darker skinned Palestinians who the Israeli’s are exploiting on the West Bank. It just proves what a bunch of whores Netanyahu and his Zionist punks really are that they would look to support an anti-Semite like Bannon just to curry a tiny amount of support in their abuse of the Palestinian population.
*****
There seems to be a lot of talk about the decline of new business start-ups in our current economy, especially over the last ten years. The reasons for this have been debated upon vigorously between the left and the right. The Brookings Institute has discovered that the start-up rate, as seen against all companies, has fallen by nearly half since 1978. Why is this going on?
Well it depends who you talk to. The Right claims it’s all about big government, big regulation and higher corporate taxes. But if you look at the 70’s and 80;’s when start-ups were booming, you are looking at an era of high taxes, big regulation and economic stagnation.
Ever-multiplying regulation does hamper star-ups. It costs more money than they usually have to spend and it slows down and complicates the process but once they are up and running it also protects them from h ravages of their big business opponents. Maybe it has something to do with who starts them. Kaufman data shows that the percentage of people starting companies in their 20’s and 30’s fell from 35% in 1996 to 18% in 2014 while the share founded by people in heir 50’s and 60’s increased over the past decade. I don’t know what that means, but maybe it’s that experience is important or maybe it means being young in a risky world makes you more risk averse. Baby Boomers were shaped by he 60’s and grew up in a world where they tended more than normally, to seek a life outside the “little boxes” of conventional society.
From where this column stands the real reason why start-ups are slowing is more about a lack of entrepreneurial investment capital. There was a time when investment money tended to back new ideas and new business. Now they just dump it into the Market, which is notoriously conservative.
*****
There’s been a lot of noise made about Barak Obama’s legacy, but nothing could possibly top his locking up the Supreme Court with another appointment of Merrick Garland. Impossible, you say. Not at all! At 12:00 noon on Jan.3, 2017 the terms of 34 Senators will expire. It is then the job of the Vice President, Joe Biden as President of the Senate to swear in the newly elected Senators that will fill the momentary vacancies.
In that brief moment, Biden, if he has the guts, will have the ability to pull off the coup of the century. It’s called an intersession recess appointment. He will be presiding over a Senate made up of 34 Democrats, 2 Independents and 30 Republicans and he will be able to maneuver the nomination and approval of Merrick Garland as Justice of the Supreme Court before the newly elected Senators are sworn in.
In order to pull this off, Obama will also have to have the guts to re-nominate Garland and present this nomination to Senator Dick Durban who will be the ranking Democrat in the Senate, and Durban, who we know has the guts, will then present Garlands nomination to Biden before the Senate count changes from 66 to 100. At that point the Democrats, with a clear majority, will be able to vote Garland onto the court and there’s not a damned thing the GOP can do about it. It is all constitutional, all legal and I might add, all sweet as sugar.
Yes, the Republicans will raise all kinds of hell, but considering the kind of crap that Mitch McConnell pulled when Obama was elected, this is only just retribution. After all, it was the GOP that refused to allow Garland’s nomination to come to a vote when it should have. In so doing they left the Court without a full number of judges and hamstrung it the same way they hamstrung congress for the last six years. That act of judicial piracy must be punished and this is the just way to do it. It’s about time the Republicans get a little of the same crap they have been handing out.
Now it must be understood that the interim appointment will only last until December 2017 but a lot can happen in a year. Mitch McConnell bought almost a year with his ability to block Obama’s nomination of Garland. Why shouldn’t Obama buy that year back with his re-nomination of Garland or for that matter, if Garland doesn’t want to leave his current job as Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals, with someone else, even more progressive.
Marc Ash has stated that the perception of the voters is that Democrats don’t fight. It may have cost them the last couple of elections. It’s time for an intellectual like Obama to show how you punch the bully in the nose. Take back SCOTUS mister President. Give the nation a fighting chance.