Donald Trump has come under a lot of fire about divesting himself of his far-reaching business empire while he is president. To be fair, it is an almost impossible situation to which no one; either for or against Trump has come up with a solution. Of course it would be far less of a problem if Trump could be considered an honest businessman rather than the cheap crook he has always demonstrated himself to be.
Last week at his first press conference since July he trotted out Sheri Dillon of Morgan Lewis a firm that won the Russian Law Firm of the year in 2016. She has bee his tax lawyer for years. You know about his taxes. They are the ones that have been under audit since the birth of Christ. Well, Sheri went through a laundry list of what he actually proposed to do about this problem. The solution? He was turning his empire over to his two sons, Uday and Cusay, the endangered species murderers who get off on having their pictures taken with dead animals. The government ethics office has already stepped forward and stated that this will not fly. The idea that Trump will not be talking business with his sons while he is President is even more far-fetched than the concept that buying a course in Trump U. will make you a real estate millionaire.
And here’s why:
A serious shout out here to Rachael Maddow for the background on this matter:
A few years back there was a company, Titan Atlas Global, in South Carolina. They made building panels but they didn’t make very good ones. Donald Trump Jr. owned Titan Atlas Global. Before the company defaulted to the bank that had loaned it a lot of money, daddy stepped in and bought the company from Junior for three and a half million bucks. Trump then used the company’s seven-acre factory as rental property, leasing it to a variety of smaller companies until the buildings deteriorated so badly that they were unable to be occupied. Then the state of South Carolina along, with the EPA stepped in and declared the property, littered with collapsing buildings and rotting drums of chemicals, to be an environmental hazard.
The problem arises from the fact that Donald Trump now wants to develop the property. But everyone knows that you can’t develop property that is an environmental hazard so Trump senior wants the state to clean up the property he still owns.
The hook? South Carolina law states that if the current owner has no connection to the previous owner, the one who created the pollution, he has no responsibility to pay for the cleanup. But get this! Trump claims that he has no connection to the former owner, his son, so the state of South Carolina should be responsible for the cleanup, which will cost millions. Now if you believe that Donald had no connection with Junior and therefore no responsibility for this property then I have a bridge in Brooklyn on which I am going to make you an offer you cannot refuse. This, by the way, is the man who wants to be a model for American youth. This cheap crook that makes your average drug dealer look like a hero.
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The GOP congress led by Paul Ryan, came out loud and clear yesterday with a big FUCK YOU to the twenty million Americans who depend on the ACA for their health insurance.
Ryan and his creeps in the Republican congress are falling over each other trying to be the first to get rid of Obamacare. What they don’t want you to know, what no one mentions; is that the repeal of the ACA will mean a three hundred fifty billion dollar tax cut for them and their rich sponsors.
This is why scum like Ryan and Mitch McConnell are so hot to get rid of a system that supports, twenty million people who will, if they are successful, be without healthcare. This is obviously the America these degenerates in the GOP want to live in. Screw the guy whose kid is dying for lack of medical care as long as they can afford a second yacht.
This will be the result of Trump’s big mouth and his promise to reduce taxes for a segment of the population that should be paying much higher taxes then they now pay in order to pull us up to the level of other civilized countries that already acknowledge the need for people to actually live productive lives and not to just exist.
The repealing of Obamacare, and the resulting elimination of the tax that is built into the bill to pay for its services, will reduce federal revenue by $7 Trillion over the next 10 years. That’s because the tax increase implicit in the ACA actually raises more money than is currently needed to pay for its services. (Something that the GOP has lied about over and over.) Along with this tax cut, Trump has promised an infrastructure bill that will cost an additional one trillion. He has also made a lot of noise about building up the military while also swearing not to cut Social Security and Medicare. He obviously failed high school math, because mixed in with these tax cuts and budget hikes was a promise to balance the budget. These things are, of course, mutually exclusive. Obviously Trump doesn’t see this. Ryan and McConnell see it but they just don’t give a damn. All they care about is saving money for themselves and their sponsors.
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John Lewis, hero of the voting rights demonstrations has stated that he does not think that Donald Trump’s election was legitimate. He points to information contained in Russian hacks that support Trump, as well as information which has been reported to the FBI and published by Buzz Feed, that it is rumored can be used against Trump by the Russians.
So what is all this about? Well, it seems we are looking into the face of a real life John LaCarre novel. Repeated hints about available information, that would compromise Trump’s presidency, but that had been ignored by the FBI, were published last week prompting a congressional committee to call Comey to testify. Congressmen walked out of that briefing yesterday attacking Comey for his lack of cooperation. This is the same Comey whose handling of Hillary Clinton’s email mess weighed heavily on the election result. There seem to be two issues with Comey, aside from the way he handled the email investigation. One is that he was not forthcoming before the members of congress and the second is that he and his agency had first hand knowledge of this scuzzy information dug up by Christopher Steele, a British ex-MI6 member, who claims to have brought said information, which relates to material that the Russians could use to blackmail Trump, first to the FBI and when they refused to move on it, to David Corn of Mother Jones, in October.
The spy told Corn in an interview that he had first been contacted by a Republican operation that wanted material to use against Trump in the primary election. Once Trump won the primary, he was then contacted by a Democratic operation that paid him to continue his investigation. In late summer, he realized that the information he had uncovered was really important and he took his findings to a connection he had at the FBI where they went nowhere.
During his interview with Steele, Corn gathered information that Steele, while he was working for the American firm that paid him to gather the information, had decided that it was too important to be left to political forces to handle and that’s why he took the information to a contact at he FBI. Within a few weeks the FBI got back to him with a request for his sources. This was all going on while Comey was busy attacking Clinton. When the spy refused to reveal his sources, the FBI seemed to lose interest.
The questions thus far are myriad, the answers nonexistent. At this point Comey is so busy covering his ass that whether or not he has any time left to run our principal police agency is mute. The only thing left for him is resignation and as fast as possible. But the big question that Comey’s clumsy, biased work points to, is that something is rotten in Washington. This leaves Trump in a very awkward position. He, after all, is the one who first whined that the election was rigged against him. Those accusations made people begin to wonder about something they had never considered before, the idea that American elections could actually be rigged. He doubled down by calling Clinton, Crooked Hillary even though his record of illegal and criminal activity far exceeded hers. Now he approaches the Presidency with a gathering storm, forecasting his illegitimacy even as he tried to question the legitimacy Obama’s Presidency with accusations about his birthplace.
Do the Russians really have anything with which to blackmail Trump? Is it the information disclosed by Christopher Steele, the ex-spy real? Or is it something far worse? This is a question that must be answered truthfully before Trump becomes President.
Why is it so important to legitimatize Trump before he is sworn in? Mainly because once he is President Mike Pence becomes Vice –President and that means that if Trump is somehow thrown out of office he will be replaced by a religious fanatic, who thinks so far Right that he represents a true danger to the concepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in this country.