Trump... Tax Schemes... Reaped Riches From Father (NYT)

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Trump... Tax Schemes... Reaped Riches From Father (NYT)

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Oct 03, 2018 1:56 pm

This is big, so I will make an exception to my avoiding CE. Headline too long for board, hence the shortening.

.

An empire of fraud, Made in America:

Before it disappears, allow me to summarize the most important article yet about the Life of Trump. (Link. It is 13,000 words. Read it.)

On the front end, Fred Trump's fortune drew from decades of post-World War II federal housing development loans and subsidies worth tens of millions. On the back end, tax evasion was vast, multifarious and constant. That was the business model. Properties were wildly undervalued, expenses inflated, revenues hidden. Tenants were systematically victimized. The family cultivated a deep contempt for the government that provided them with such largesse.

Over decades, hundreds of millions were shifted from Fred to his children via untaxed gift-loans and hidden property-transfer schemes. Donald received tens of millions in such never-to-be-repaid "loans" on a near-quarterly basis, contrary to his ridiculous legend that he made billions starting with nothing more than a million-dollar stake from Fred. A friend of the family enacted one payoff from Fred to Donald by buying 3.5 million in casino chips and leaving Atlantic City without making a bet. In Fred's final years, the children set up a scam company that overcharged on building services to drain the father's holding companies of $50 million in excess cash. After Fred's death, his properties were assessed at a small fraction of the value, allowing the children to evade at least $50 million in estate taxes. The IRS let almost all of this pass, sometimes making minor revisions in assessments. All of the late father's holdings were sold in 2004 at near full value for more than $800 million.

The lion's share of all this went to the "self-made" son and chosen successor, Donald. He was probably never a billionaire until recently, but for many years a gambler entangled in many schemes, often on the knife's edge of ruin. He got away with it in large part thanks to the corporate media.

The New York Times confesses to jump-starting Donald's celebrity career with a 1976 puff-piece that legitimated his absurd claim to be worth $200 million. This helped launch him as a suitor in the lobbies of higher-level finance. Today the paper describes their own article as a con-job. This kind of media coverage became routine and enabled the many side-scams based on the Trump name: the airline, the golf clubs, the steaks, the "university." Trump was made synonymous with the good life, with the American vision of success.

Now, finally, the Times presents the underbelly they mostly failed to cover for 42 years, drawing on thousands of documents to expose the workings of a crime family. Nothing about it is surprising, but confirmation in this much detail is big news. This was never a "business" in the sense that many Americans still believe.

Two vital takeaways:

1. Of course the system is designed to favor the rich, but tax evasion and scams with public money on this scale for this long do not happen without protection. New York developers exploiting government welfare in the postwar era could hardly have avoided collaboration with the mobsters that controlled the construction trades and the protection rackets, but this is not merely a truism. The Trump links to New York-New Jersey mafia figures and their shared lawyers (like Roy Cohn) are known. The most explosive parts of this story are implicit but still need to be told: payoffs to officials, bought politicians, the likelihood of blackmail and extortion. In the Donald years, this morphed into global money laundering through real estate and casinos. For all the legal mutations and shell-games, the resulting concerns remain active today. Anything done after 2012 is still liable to prosecution.

2. Given that, and with this piece landing on the desks of attorney generals from New York to California, the speculation no longer appears outlandish that Trump needs to get Kavanaugh seated before the Supreme Court considers the Gamble "double jeopardy" case, which could end state-level investigations into Trump Organization emoluments and scams.

3. The corporate media was complicit at every stage. They did not report on the businesses. They did not take up the investigative research published by the likes of David Cay Johnston, Wayne Barrett, and several others starting already in the 1980s. They did devote decades of puff to the fake playboy. This relationship blossomed into 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the WWE venture, and the years of uninterrupted transmission of his every poisonous word that powered the presidential campaign, long before the first primary. Today they still enable him by coddling the violent, racist politics as "populist" and, paradoxically, by pretending anything bad about the regime is the product of an obscure foreign conspiracy.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Trump... Tax Schemes... Reaped Riches From Father (NYT)

Postby Elvis » Wed Oct 03, 2018 3:33 pm

Great post, thanks.

(Don't worry about copying exact headlines; the current mod squad is not likely to be enforcing that particular edict.)
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7411
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Trump... Tax Schemes... Reaped Riches From Father (NYT)

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 03, 2018 6:22 pm

Trump’s federal judge sister is heavily implicated in NY Times report on family tax evasion
Sarah K. Burris
02 OCT 2018 AT 17:34 ET

Image
retired Judge Maryanne Trump Barry


President Donald Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, was heavily implicated in the latest New York Times expose on the family’s history of tax evasion.

The report details the brazen fraud in wake of the senior Fred Trump’s death. Prior to his death, his son Donald urged his father to set up some ways for his brothers and sisters to score big without having to pay taxes. The elder Trump turned to Barry to consult about the legality of the idea.

“This doesn’t pass the smell test,” he told her, she recalled during a deposition.

Judge Barry read the codicil in Fred Trump’s will, and agreed with her father it was problematic.

“Donald was in precarious financial straits by his own admission,” she said, “and Dad was very concerned as a man who worked hard for his money and never wanted any of it to leave the family.”

Their father then asked Barry to find new estate planning attorneys and asked that the assets be protected “from Donald’s creditors.”

That’s when the son lost sole control over his father’s finances.

“Simply put, without immediate action, Fred Trump’s heirs faced the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars to estate taxes,” The Times described. “Whatever their differences, the Trumps formulated a plan to avoid this fate. How they did it is a story never before told.”

Barry then joined with the other siblings to generate a series of scams to transfer the wealth without paying gift taxes.

“The Trumps’ plan, executed over the next decade, blended traditional techniques — such as rewriting Fred Trump’s will to maximize tax avoidance — with unorthodox strategies that tax experts told The Times were legally dubious and, in some cases, appeared to be fraudulent,” the report revealed. “As a result, the Trump children would gain ownership of virtually all of their father’s buildings without having to pay a penny of their own. They would turn the mountain of cash into a molehill of cash. And hundreds of millions of dollars that otherwise would have gone to the United States Treasury would instead go to Fred Trump’s children.”

Barry only gave a short statement when called for comment and refused to say more. President Donald Trump’s attorney made a statement saying that they relied on professionals to outline these legal parameters and then claimed it was fake news.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/10/trumps ... ms.twitter
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Trump... Tax Schemes... Reaped Riches From Father (NYT)

Postby Spook » Wed Oct 03, 2018 7:52 pm

What a fascinating read. It shows how with enough wealth you can access people and means to perpetuate even greater wealth.

I remember a friend once saying to me "The first million is always the hardest"

Thanks for that.
Spook
 
Posts: 49
Joined: Mon Sep 18, 2017 9:27 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Trump... Tax Schemes... Reaped Riches From Father (NYT)

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Oct 03, 2018 8:52 pm

That's true starting from zero but I figure it takes several liquid millions to start getting away with this kind of shit.

Clearly, the first access to low-interest government loans in the millions is what did it for Fred, and Fred did it for Donald.

But under all of it is doubtless the first protection from the mob or a comparable granter of impunity.

That other cliche: It's who you know.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Trump... Tax Schemes... Reaped Riches From Father (NYT)

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Oct 08, 2018 8:03 pm

.

Lightly revised version of the above was published in Counterpunch.

I got a correction or comment really from David Cay Johnston, of which I am SO PROUD!!!

Yeah, mofo!


https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/08 ... e-whistle/

OCTOBER 8, 2018

Trump’s Financial Schemes and the Press: Some Blew the Whistle

by DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

I have a bone, a small one to be sure, to pick with Nicholas Levis’s piece “Empire of Fraud, Made in America.” But first a thank you to Levis for the nice shout out.

In accurately dissecting the awful conduct of the Trumps, white collar criminals who grew richer by cheating our government while using their many mob connections, Levis is spot on.

But when Levis asserts that “the corporate media” were fully complicit he goes too far, writing that the commercial news organizations “did not take up the investigative research published by the likes of David Cay Johnston, Wayne Barrett, and several others starting already in the 1980s.”

In fact many of my stories ran on the top of the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer, then part of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. Its editor, Gene Roberts, encouraged my work as did the other senior editors.

So, to be fair as well as accurate, Levis should have said something like “with a few exceptions.” Monoliths are exceedingly rare, but on the whole Levis is right that the fake news Trump put out got far more attention than the hard realities.

Levis asserts that “recently” Trump has become a billionaire. No evidence supports that, as I have written and said in broadcasts many times and as I revealed in 1990.

Candidate Trump insisted he was worth more than $10 billion, but his disclosure when he became president showed $1.4 billion. Wow, about $9 billion just went poof in ten weeks. That’s because those billions never existed except as a Trumpian lie/delusion. Replace Trump’s inflated asset values with realistic ones and consider the debt that federal law does not require him to disclose and he’s not even within striking range of three commas. Please don’t buy into the nonsense that Trump is now a billionaire. Not a scintilla of verifiable evidence supports that.

David Cay Johnston’s most recent book is It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Trump... Tax Schemes... Reaped Riches From Father (NYT)

Postby Elvis » Mon Oct 08, 2018 9:20 pm

Good comments there from Johnston. Keep up the good work!
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7411
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)


Return to SLAD Newswire

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest