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by Wombaticus Rex » Mon Jan 09, 2017 12:21 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 12:40 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 1:19 pm
Russian Billionaires, Including Some Tied To Putin, Have Gained $29 Billion Since Trump's Election
Dan Alexander , FORBES STAFF
Tycoon Gennady Timchenko attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow on May 25, 2016. (SERGEI KARPUKHIN/AFP/Getty Images)
Russia’s richest men, some of whom have close ties to President Vladimir Putin, have gained $29 billion since the election of Donald Trump, thanks to the rising value of Russian stocks and currency.
Among the biggest beneficiaries: Gennady Timchenko, who was a primary target of 2014 U.S. government sanctions aimed at Putin’s inner circle. Shares of publicly traded natural gas producer Novatek are up 16% since the election, enough to boost the value of Timchenko’s estimated 23% stake by $1.8 billion.
The Russian businessman sold his 43% stake in the oil trading firm Gunvor, which he cofounded, one day before the U.S. Treasury Department leveled sanctions against him in March 2014. U.S. officials alleged that Putin was invested in the firm and may have had access to its funds. Today much of Timchenko’s $15.1 billion fortune is privately held and therefore more difficult to track on a daily basis than his shares of Novatek.
Russia’s richest man, Leonid Mikhelson, added more to his fortune than anyone else. Also an investor in Novatek, Mikhelson has gained an estimated $1.9 billion since the U.S. election, boosting his net worth to $18.2 billion. Mikhelson and Timchenko are also both invested alongside billionaire Kirill Shamalov, reportedly Putin’s son-in-law, in petrochemical giant Sibur.
Altogether, Russia’s billionaires have added an estimated $29 billion since Trump’s election, more than the combined gains of billionaires in any country besides the United States. Forbes counts more than six times as many American billionaires as Russian billionaires. While the Americans have boosted their net worth by an average of 2.8% since the election, the richest Russians have increased their fortunes by an average of 7.1%.
In addition to rising stocks, the oligarchs have benefitted from the comeback of the Russian ruble, which fell 55% against the U.S. dollar over 2014 and 2015 but rose 20% in 2016, thanks to increasing oil prices and hopes of better relations with the United States and Europe.
Steel magnates Alexey Mordashov and Vladimir Lisin were other big gainers, adding $1.6 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively, since the election. Roughly $830 million of Lisin’s gain came within three days of Trump’s victory.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexande ... c37cb7b204
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 1:38 pm
Donald Trump and His Cabinet of Criminals
Monday, January 09, 2017
By Dean Baker, Truthout | Op-Ed
Corruption in high places is hardly a new story in this country, yet Donald Trump seems determined to take corruption to a new level. He of course is setting the path himself, refusing to follow a longstanding precedent whereby presidents put their assets in a blind trust so that they are not in a position to profit personally from their policies. Trump has done the opposite, evidenced by including his business partners (i.e. his kids) in important meetings with foreign officials.
Not surprisingly, the lack of concern for ethics in his own dealings has spilled over into his picks for top administration positions. While his cabinet is filled with the incredibly rich who, thanks to Trump's proposed tax breaks, will be newly incentivized to steal, there are two individuals who stand out: Steven Mnuchin, Trump's pick for Treasury secretary, and Andrew Puzder, Trump's choice for Labor secretary.
These two nominees sat at the top of major corporations that had large scale violations of the law. They may not have known of the illegalities, but frankly as CEOs, they have the responsibility to ensure that their companies are following the law. Furthermore, if both are approved, they will be in a position where they are responsible for enforcing the laws that their own companies violated.
In Mnuchin's case, OneWest Bank, which he cofounded and ran, had a practice of rushing evictions to foreclose on underwater homeowners following the collapse of the housing bubble. An article in The Intercept by David Dayan reports on a memo from the California attorney general's office detailing the banks abuses. The article details a variety of dubious and illegal practices the bank pursued to dispossess homeowners.
In the former category, it mentions an instance where OneWest Bank pursued a foreclosure over a 27 cent payment shortfall. In the latter case, the memo documents backdated mortgage contracts. In several cases, the date listed was prior to date when OneWest Bank came into existence. This sort of backdating would be a clear case of fraud. The attorney general's staff recommended a civil case against the bank, which Attorney General Kamala Harris (now Sen. Kamala Harris) chose not to pursue. As Treasury secretary, Mnuchin will be overseeing a department that has substantial supervisory responsibilities over the banking system.
Puzder's run-in with the law is perhaps somewhat less egregious than Mnunchin's, but also involves violating laws that he will be expected to enforce if approved for his position. Mnunchin runs CKE Restaurants, which is the parent company for both Hardee's and Carl's Jr. Burger chain. According to the Huffington Post, Hardee's was forced to pay $58,000 in back pay to workers who were not paid overtime wages that were owed. There were also a number of instances in which franchisees of the companies were required to give back pay to workers who had been denied overtime they were owed.
One of the responsibilities of the Labor Department is enforcing wage and hour laws, which includes making sure that employers make required payments. While it is usually good to have a person as Labor secretary who has familiarity with these laws, being the target of an enforcement action is not the best sort of familiarity. It raises the obvious question of whether Puzder is likely to take seriously his responsibilities to protect workers or whether he will have more sympathy with the employers seeking to evade the law, possibly including his former colleagues.
These are the sort of conflicts of interest and questionable practices that would ordinarily be drawing considerable attention in the media as Donald Trump prepares for his inauguration. Unfortunately they have been largely ignored as issues like Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act and gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics have occupied center stage. While these other issues are certainly important, they should not distract enough attention to allow Trump to install cabinet members whose conflicts of interest and past practices make them unqualified for their positions.
But the conflicts and questionable practices by his cabinet picks pale in comparison with Trump's plan to maintain his business empire even as he assumes the presidency. It speaks to the incredible degradation of ethical standards that this could be tolerated. Every president in the last half century, of both parties, has put their assets in a blind trust upon assuming the office.
If Donald Trump is not prepared to divest his empire, then he shouldn't have run for president. It is that simple. (It's also not hard for Trump to avoid conflicts of interests, even with his far-flung business interests.) If Congress allows Trump as president to flagrantly violate longstanding ethical standards, then we certainly can't expect anything better from cabinet nominees like Mnuchin and Puzder.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/3 ... -criminals
Trump has the habits of a showman, not a manager. Get ready for chaos
Doyle McManus Doyle McManusContact Reporter
To outward appearances, Donald Trump’s transition has been humming steadily toward his inauguration on Jan. 20. The president-elect has named all but a few members of his prospective Cabinet, and some will begin confirmation hearings this week. Meanwhile, Trump Tower has issued a torrent of White House staff announcements, from a new chief of staff, Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus, to a reality TV star, Omarosa Manigault.
Yet there are signs of trouble, and veterans of past administrations from both parties have warned that chaos almost surely lies ahead.
“Trump is farther behind on taking control of the bureaucracy than any president in recent history,” Paul C. Light of New York University, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars of public management, told me last week. “He’ll be ready to move in on inauguration day, but he won’t have much that’s ready to go, except for cancelling a lot of Obama’s regulations.”
While Trump’s appointees have business experience, political campaign experience, and military experience, few have any experience in the executive branch.
The problem begins with the man at the top. The president-elect comes to the job with the habits of an entrepreneur and a showman, not a manager of large organizations. He’s known for making decisions based on the last advice he heard. He makes policy pronouncements on Twitter, often without his aides knowing in advance. And he’s impatient with hierarchy.
If you own a home, you should read this. Thousands of homeowners did this yesterday, and banks are furious! Do this now before it's...
“You'll call my people, you'll call me. It doesn't make any difference,” he told tech executives last month. “We have no formal chain of command around here.”
In the White House, dozens of issues jostle for attention and crises constantly threaten to derail long-term strategy. Usually, it’s the chief of staff’s job to act as a gatekeeper; he controls the president’s meetings and flow of information to make sure the chief executive can focus on his priorities.
In Trump’s case, that will be Priebus, a seasoned political operative who rose from the Wisconsin Republican Party to become chairman of the Republican National Committee and won Trump’s confidence in the process.
But Priebus may not be fully in charge. Instead, aides have described a structure with three top aides: Priebus, political strategist Stephen K. Bannon, and communication strategist Kellyanne Conway. That’s a recipe for confusion.
Defenders of Trump’s troika plan point out that in President Reagan’s successful first term, he had three top aides, too: James A. Baker III, Michael Deaver and Edwin M. Meese. But in that White House, Baker was clearly designated as first among equals; that hasn’t happened in the case of Priebus.
The picture is complicated by the fact that Priebus and Bannon come from intermittently hostile factions in Trump’s coalition.
Priebus, who’s close to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), represents the institutional Republican Party of orthodox conservatism. Bannon, former chief executive of the Breitbart media organization, has said he wants to “hammer” the GOP establishment and oust Ryan as speaker.
Nor is it clear which version of Trumpism the president-elect wants. Trump’s campaign never produced a policy blueprint to settle the question.
Earlier administrations did. “We weren’t confused about what the policy priorities were,” Joshua Bolten, a former chief of staff for George W. Bush, said last month. “We had a 450-page policy book that spelled it out. My concern for the current transition is that they’re not in that sort of position.”
Despite its recent personnel announcements, the Trump team has also been slower than most administrations in filling out its staff.
“They didn’t name a director of personnel until this [last] week,” Light noted. “Most campaigns have one by July or August. He’s got something like 3,300 appointments to make. That’s going to take a lot of time.”
And while Trump’s appointees have business experience, political campaign experience, and military experience, few have any experience in the executive branch.
“Trump has never dealt with a bureaucracy like this,” Light said. “His businesses are flat, and that’s fine. But the federal government is arguably the least flat organization there is; it has 63 layers of executives and managers.”
“He’s got nobody around him with a deep understanding of how to manage the bureaucracy to support his policies.”
Trump could surprise us; he’s done it before. His presidential campaign was underrated all along.
But a measure of chaos is the norm for any inexperienced president, and can quickly engulf his administration. President Clinton, for example, had a terrible first year – and he had been a governor for more than a decade.
White House aides like to quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, who ran a large organization — the U.S. Army in Europe — before he became president:
“Organization cannot make a genius out of an incompetent,” Eisenhower wrote. “On the other hand, disorganization … can easily lead to disaster.”
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la ... ml?ref=yfp
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 1:45 pm
Donald Trump's businesses owe $1.8bn to more than 150 different institutions, new study suggests
President-elect faces more questions about conflict of interest as financial reliance on big banks is revealed
Donald Trump’s companies are almost $1.8 billion in debt to more than 150 institutions, a new report has suggested – raising fresh questions about potential conflicts of interests when the Republican takes office in January.
The new evidence exposes the extent to which the businessman will soon be responsible for regulating many of the institutions he owes sizeable amounts of money to.
Mr Trump has previously declared $315 million (£254 million) of debt owed to ten different lenders.
However, a new study by the Wall Street Journal claims an additional $1.5 billion is owed by companies that are partly owned by the billionaire.
Experts said the high number of firms to which the Republican owes money, and the significant size of his debts, raised questions about potential conflicts of interest.
Trevor Potter, a former legal adviser to George H.W. Bush and John McCain, told the Journal: "The problem with any of this debt is if something goes wrong, and if there is a situation where the president is suddenly personally beholden or vulnerable to threats from the lenders.
Lawrence Noble, a former lawyer to Federal Election Commission (FEC), said: “The appearance of potential conflicts is dangerous and seriously exists in this situation”.
Candidates for US president have to disclose their financial situation to the FEC but this only includes debts that are owed by companies they full control, which in Mr Trump’s case amounts to $315 million.
But once businesses in which the President-elect has at least a 30 per cent stake are included, an additional, undeclared $1.5 billion (£1.3 billion) of debt emerges. Much of the debt has been repackaged and bought by investors.
One of the banks Mr Trump owes money to is Wells Fargo & Co., which is the trustee or administrator of $282 million of loans to the businessman and his companies. It is also involved in a further $950 million of debt paid to a property that one of Mr Trump’s companies partly owns.
Wells Fargo is currently under investigation by US regulators for fraudulent practices that allegedly included staff opening up to two million accounts without customers’ knowledge.
From later this month, Mr Trump will be responsible for appointing the heads of many of the bodies that regulate Wells Fargo and the other institutions he owes money to, including JP Morgan, BlackRock, Deutsche Bank and Prudential.
Another company the President-elect owes money to, MetLife Inc., is currently engaged in a court battle with the US government over attempts to regulate it more strictly. Mr Trump would have the power to drop the court case when he takes office on January 20.
Documents also reveal that companies partly owned by Mr Trump have borrowed significant sums from the state-owned Bank of China, despite the President-elect’s repeated verbal attacks on China.
The Republican faced significant pressure during the election campaign to publish his tax returns but refused to do so.
The President-elect has promised to remove himself completely from his business operations during his time in office but has not yet announced how this will work in practice.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 12586.html
by Luther Blissett » Mon Jan 09, 2017 2:20 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 2:27 pm
by Luther Blissett » Mon Jan 09, 2017 2:37 pm
by NeonLX » Mon Jan 09, 2017 3:13 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 5:37 pm
Trump Just Dismissed the People in Charge of Maintaining Our Nuclear Arsenal
Ashley Feinberg
Today 11:57amFiled to: NNSA
Between the Trump transition team’s infighting, incompetence, and high-profile resignations, any decisions that signaled even a modicum of stability for the country would come as a relief at this point. Unfortunately, the nascent Trump Administration isn’t inclined to calm anyone’s nerves. According to an official within the Department of Energy, this past Friday, the President-elect’s team instructed the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration and his deputy to clean out their desks when Trump takes office on January 20th.
The NNSA is the $12 billion-a-year agency that “maintains and enhances the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.” It’s unclear when the two officials will be replaced.
Traditionally, all political appointees of an outgoing presidential administration turn in resignation letters effective on noon of inauguration day, January 20. But appointees in key positions—like the people who make sure our nukes work—are often asked to stay on in their roles until a replacement can be found and confirmed by the Senate, helping ensure a smooth transition and allowing our government to continue functioning. In fact, for the entirety of Obama’s first term and into part of his second, the NNSA Administrator remained a Bush appointee.
Trump, however, appears determined to immediately push out everyone who was appointed by Obama, regardless of whether or not he has anyone in line for the job. Or, as our source put it: “It’s a shocking disregard for process and continuity of government.”
Just as with Obama’s soon-to-be-removed international envoys, Trump has ordered Under Secretary for Nuclear Security Frank Klotz and his deputy, Madelyn Creedon—both Obama appointees—to leave their posts, even if it means no one is in charge of maintaining the country’s nuclear weapons. According to our Energy Department source, Trump’s team has yet to nominate anyone to succeed them. Since both positions require Senate confirmation, if could be months before their chairs are filled. And the vacancies may extend beyond the leadership roles.
“There are scores more appointees within the department,” our source told us. “Secretarial and administration appointments that don’t require Senate confirmation, mostly performing policy, liaison, and strategic advisory capacities in support of the agency they’re at. They serve at the will of the head of their agency. Those people are, theoretically, also out on inauguration day unless otherwise directed, which hasn’t happened yet to my knowledge.”
The source later added, “I’m more and more coming around to the idea that we’re so very very fucked.”
As far as I can tell, this is unprecedented—January 20 will mark the first time in the NNSA’s 17-year history that it will exist wholly without its appointed leadership. According to Bob Rosner, the Co-Chair of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the former director of Argonne National Laboratory, the leadership vacuum won’t prevent the agency from fulfilling its essential duties. But it will leave it without an advocate as it tries to secure a budget from Congress, and unable to tackle any new initiatives whatsoever.
“To some extent, what we’re talking about is the political leadership, the leadership appointed by each administration,” Rosner told Gizmodo. “The department is really run by its civil servants.”
Still, while those career civil servants will continue on with their current directives, they’re effectively barred from embarking on anything new. That’s because the legislation authorizing the NNSA specifically prohibits non-NNSA officials from managing NNSA employees—agency staffers are only allowed to take orders from Klotz and Creedon or their (nonexistent) replacements.
Usually, in the first few months of a new presidential administration, the NNSA defends its new budget to Congress. But without any leadership in place, that’s next to impossible, even as Trump has made big, vague promises of nuclear expansion.
“When it comes to the budget negotiations, the fact is that without political leadership they will be struggling for money,” Rosner told Gizmodo. “If [Trump] says he wants to invest heavily in the nuclear weapons program, and they don’t have anyone to defend the program, that’s going to be a pretty big problem for him.”
That’s just the first layer to Trump’s self-created nuclear problem. Even if he had prepared appointments to fill the soon-to-be vacant roles, how exactly they would go about fulfilling Trump’s repeated promises to “expand [U.S.] nuclear capacity” is another issue altogether.
Rosner noted that the Obama Administration has already essentially begun rebuilding the nuclear program, making Trump’s promised expansion “a perfect example of Trump basically being clueless.”
“He didn’t understand that we have a refurbishment program,” Rosner said. “He didn’t understand that, under Obama, that we’d rebuilt the entire production complex. So exactly what he would mean by ‘strengthening the nuclear program,’ it’s a bit of a mystery. I don’t know what he’s talking about. We’ve done it already.”
So did Trump simply not realize that a considerable portion of the Department of Energy is dedicated to building and protecting our nuclear arsenal? That would certainly explain his appointment of Rick Perry as secretary, and why he just left the agency responsible for safeguarding our nuclear infrastructure without any leadership for the foreseeable future. Neither Trump nor the NNSA have returned our requests for comment.
In the meantime, if you know anything at all about Trump’s transition efforts (or anything else that you think the world should be aware of), please do let us know.
https://gizmodo.com/trump-just-dismisse ... 1790908093
by Nordic » Mon Jan 09, 2017 5:56 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 6:42 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 6:47 pm
Donald Trump was bailed out of bankruptcy by Russia crime bosses
By Mark Sumner
Monday Jan 09, 2017 · 12:58 PM CST
Trump speaks at Trump Soho, built in partnership with Bayrock
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. attended a real estate conference, where he stated that
Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.
As it turns out, that may have been an understatement. Human rights lawyer Scott Horton, whose work in the region goes back to defending Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents, has gone through a series of studies by the Financial Times to show how funds from Russian crime lords bailed Trump out after yet anther bankruptcy. The conclusions are stark.
Among the powerful facts that DNI missed were a series of very deep studies published in the [Financial Times] that examined the structure and history of several major Trump real estate projects from the last decade—the period after his seventh bankruptcy and the cancellation of all his bank lines of credit. ...
The money to build these projects flowed almost entirely from Russian sources. In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources.
He was their man.
Yes, even that much seems fantastic, and the details include business agencies acting as a front for the GRU, billionaire mobsters, a vast network of propaganda sources, and an American candidate completely under the thumb of the Kremlin.
It reads like the a B-grade spy novel, a plot both too convoluted—and too bluntly obvious—for John le Carré. The problem is it may not be a conspiracy theory. It may be a conspiracy.
Horton’s analysis comes from piecing together information in three Financial Times “deep reports.” One of these focused on Sergei Millian, the head of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the US at the time of Trump Jr.’s “money pouring in from Russia” claim.
Mr Millian insists his Russian American Chamber of Commerce (RACC) has nothing to do with the Russian government. He says it is funded by payments from its commercial members alone.
Most of the board members are obscure entities and nearly half of their telephone numbers went unanswered when called by the Financial Times. An FT reporter found no trace of the Chamber of Commerce at the Wall Street address listed on its website.
Why was RACC’s background filled with so many holes? The Financial Times quotes former Russian MP Konstantin Borovoi in tagging the chamber as a front for intelligence operations that dates back to Soviet times.
“The chamber of commerce institutions are the visible part of the agent network . . . Russia has spent huge amounts of money on this.”
Millian helped arrange for Trump to visit Moscow in 2007, and had other outings with Trump in the states, including a visit to horse races in Miami. Millian claims that he had the right to market Trump properties in Russia.
“You could say I was their exclusive broker,” he told Ria. “Then, in 2007-2008, dozens of Russians bought apartments in Trump properties in the US.” He later told ABC television that the Trump Organisation had received “hundreds of millions of dollars” through deals with Russian businessmen.
Despite documents and photos showing Trump with Millian, Trump denied their association during the campaign.
Hope Hicks, Mr Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, said Mr Trump had “met and spoke” with Mr Millian only “on one occasion almost a decade ago at a hotel opening”.
The second Financial Times article puts Trump at the middle of a money laundering scheme, in which his real estate deals were used to hide not just an infusion of capital from Russia and former Soviet states, but to launder hundreds of millions looted by oligarchs. All Trump had to do was close his eyes to the source of the money, and suddenly empty apartments were going for top dollar.
Among the dozens of companies the Almaty lawyers say the Khrapunov laundering network used were three called Soho 3310, Soho 3311 and Soho 3203. Each was a limited liability company, meaning their ownership could easily be concealed.
The companies were created in April 2013 in New York. A week later, property records show, they paid a total of $3.1m to buy the apartments that corresponded with their names in the Trump Soho, a 46-storey luxury hotel-condominium completed in 2010 in a chic corner of Manhattan.
Why would Trump’s organization make such a good means of laundering funds? Because real estate has an arbitrary value. Is that apartment worth $1 million? Two million? Why not $3 million for a buyer who really wants it? When the whole transaction is just one LLC with undisclosed ownership paying another LLC with undisclosed ownership, it’s even neater than hiding the money in an offshore account. And while some businesses require due diligence in looking at the source of funds, real estate is a bit more … flexible.
The laws regulating US real estate deals are scant, experts say. Provisions against terrorism financing in the Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 attacks, obliged mortgage lenders to conduct “know your customer” research. But money launderers pay in cash. Sales such as those of the Trump Soho apartments have passed through this loophole, which was partially closed only this year.
Converting funds stolen overseas into property in the US and cash in the account of an LLC represented a win for both the oligarchs and Trump. Best of all, Trump’s sole requirement was that he pay scant attention to the deal—something at which he was already a proven master. For example, the actual owners of the Trump Soho were another limited liability company, Bayrock. Trump was a partner in the LLC and Bayrock cut the checks Trump received when those apartments were sold. And yet ...
In a 2011 deposition, given in a dispute over the Fort Lauderdale project, Mr Trump said he had “never really understood who owned Bayrock”. Jody Kriss, a former Bayrock finance director, has claimed in racketeering lawsuits against his former employer that Bayrock’s backers included “hidden interests in Russia and Kazakhstan”. Bayrock has denied Mr Kriss’s allegations but declined to answer questions about the source of its funds and its relationship with the Khrapunovs.
The third article digs more deeply into the origins of Bayrock and its connection with Trump. That connection … was very close.
The Republican presidential nominee and Bayrock were both based in Trump Tower and they joined forces to pursue deals around the world — from New York, Florida, Arizona and Colorado in the US to Turkey, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Their best-known collaboration — Trump SoHo, a 46-storey hotel-condominium completed in 2010 — was featured in Mr Trump’s NBC television show The Apprentice.
This is the same group about which Trump said he “never really understood” the ownership.
“I don’t know who owns Bayrock,” Mr Trump said. “I never really understood who owned Bayrock. I know they’re a developer that’s done quite a bit of work. But I don’t know how they have their ownership broken down.”
At the very least, Trump confessed to partnering with, taking money from, and acting as a representative for a corporation whose ownership he didn’t know, in deals that totaled hundreds of millions in countries around the world. However, it seems far more likely that Trump knowingly worked with oligarchs, groups associated with the Russian government, and plain old mobsters. Why? Because he was desperate.
By the 2000s, the property developer and casino owner with ready access to the capital markets and the biggest New York banks was no more. A series of corporate bankruptcies had limited his financing options. Mr Trump had become an entertainer who portrayed a tycoon on television and licensed his name to businesses looking for a brand, leading to fee-making opportunities as disparate as Trump University and Trump Vodka.
The Trump Organization was a hollow shell and Trump was bankrupt, but Donald Trump the public figure was a “successful businessman,” a screen behind which criminal activity could be carried out on a massive scale. Throwing his name at every scheme in existence wasn’t a strategy, it was a fire sale on Trump’s respectability. Steaks? Water? Vodka? Fake real estate school? You pony up the cash, and Trump will slap his name on it. Because by the early 2000s, Trump wasn’t just broke, he had nothing left to pawn. He wasn’t a successful businessman, but he still played one on TV. His image had more value than his real estate portfolio.
But the apartments and buildings where Trump held some degree of ownership could be turned into value again. All it took was partnering with foreign crime bosses looking for a place to stash their cash. To inflate the value of his portfolio, Trump had to do nothing other than look away as the dirty money poured in from one LLC to the next. Citizens in Russia, Kazakhstan, and other former Soviet states lost hundreds of millions, but Trump got a cut as looted funds flowed through offices and apartments in buildings that carried those critical gold letters.
Horton’s evaluation of this material in coordination with the declassified DNI report is that Trump actively worked with and for Russian interests.
What these exposes showed, is that Trump pursued the projects hand in glove with Russian mobsters who worked closely with Putin’s Kremlin ...
But based on the information in the Financial Times report, it appears that there are actually two possible answers. Trump may have been actively involved with and working for Russian sources. He might also have simply played the role of useful idiot, displaying his readiness to feign ignorance about any deal … so long as it generated some funds to float his sinking boat.
In the end, there’s not a lot of difference in the outcome. Trump got money. Oligarchs cleaned their cash. Russia got their man.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/1/9/ ... ime-bosses
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 8:56 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 12, 2017 7:35 am
THURSDAY, JAN 12, 2017 04:00 AM CST
Donald Trump’s spectacular collapse: Full political meltdown, a week before taking office
Trump looks and acts guilty, compares America to Nazi Germany — and clings to Putin's leg like a drowning retriever
BOB CESCA
Donald Trump's spectacular collapse: Full political meltdown, a week before taking office
President-elect Donald Trump takes questions during a news conference, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2017, in New York (Credit: AP/Seth Wenig)
We haven’t performed a full search of the transcripts, but this week could very well mark the first time that an incoming president has successfully trampled Godwin’s Law. The informal rule, invented by author Mike Godwin, suggests: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches one.” Tweeting once again in the early morning hours, President-elect Donald Trump observed that leaks from the intelligence community, reported by CNN and alleging that Russia has been collecting salacious blackmail material on the incoming chief executive, are reminiscent of the Third Reich.Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?
6:48 AM - 11 Jan 2017
29,039 29,039 Retweets 93,844 93,844 likes
He’s the incoming president with autocratic tendencies. Why’s he asking us?
The Nazi tweet, among many others, illustrates an embattled president-elect — a president-elect with historically dismal approval ratings and a president-elect who’s a political novice, bungling and botching his way through what could be the most devastating political-meets-constitutional crisis in modern American history, perhaps fully eclipsing Watergate, Iran-Contra and the Lewinsky affair combined. In this case, Team Trump, possibly acting as a consequence of the aforementioned blackmail material, is vocally flacking for Putin and the Russian intelligence services in opposition to the flawed but patriotic U.S. intelligence community — not to mention the American press.
Trump followed this up with another tweet.Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump
Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is "A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE." Very unfair!
6:13 AM - 11 Jan 2017
16,383 16,383 Retweets 57,222 57,222 likes
This response is, naturally, a fantastic way to goad other leakers into dropping further evidence to the contrary. Smart! Additionally, by blurting crap like this, Trump is directly questioning the veracity of the intelligence community tasked with protecting American interests here and abroad. It’s entirely possible that the 35-page document published by BuzzFeed and other outlets, which features all sorts of sloppy allegations about the president-elect’s personal behavior, was deliberately leaked in direct response to Trump’s ongoing social media tirades about the (his quotes) “intelligence” community. Anyone with even a basic understanding of the intelligence community operates knows that its first mandate is to defend the nation, not its president. Therefore, any indictment coming from a high-profile figure like Trump will never be met with complacency.
Grade-school level politics — systems with proven track records of efficacy — dictate that the best response to a scandal of this magnitude is to do the following: 1) Express outrage at the attack on American sovereignty, 2) demand an independent investigation into the charges and 3) vow to punish those responsible. It’s as simple as the rules to Candyland. Do these three things, then move on. Political problems solved. Trump and his people appear totally unaware of the correct reaction, or they’re cognizant yet foolish enough to ignore it.
But, of course, 62 million Americans nihilistically voted for an erratic, undisciplined, rank amateur with zero expertise in how to cope with a major political crisis, among other things. Sixty-two million misled citizens voted for a man who thinks the most appropriate response to the growing roster of Russia hacking charges — many of which, by the way, he’s known about for months and to which he could have formulated a better response — is to make matters far worse for himself and his administration. By vocally denying the charges, Trump sounds horrendously guilty, even if the most damning charges turn out to be nothing but hot air.
Perception and optics are everything in politics, and crap like that Trump tweet above about how it’s all a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE” just reeks of guilt. Dost thou protest too much, Mr. Trump? Literally the first words to drop on Trump’s Twitter feed Wednesday morning were “Russia just said…” Russia. The first statement from the incoming president was to desperately wrap his orange limbs around Vladimir Putin’s lower leg. Russia’s denial became Trump’s denial, and yet we’re supposed to believe that Trump isn’t acting under pressure from Moscow? That’s rich.
The broader problem here is, of course, one we’ve been discussing for many months: Trump continues to prove himself to be totally incapable of behaving in a way befitting a president. Not only does his ascendency mark the death of being presidential, but his political incompetence makes us all vulnerable to unforced errors that could exponentially augment the roster of Trump-era disasters, with millions of lives hanging in the balance. If Trump is this incapable of conducting remedial damage control, how will he handle a much more complicated crisis — one that could include nuclear weapons, a terrorist attack or an economic calamity not unlike the Great Recession? Worse, if the reports are true and Russia possesses reams of incriminating blackmail material on Trump, how do we know that he and his party are acting in our best interest and not Putin’s?
Americans of both parties have a responsibility to watch this unfolding story very carefully, if for no other reason than to double-check Trump’s actions as his flails, blurts and whines his way through this atmosphere of deepening crisis.
It’s also worth noting, by the way, that the corollary to Godwin’s Law is this: Whoever first invokes Nazi Germany in an online dispute automatically loses.
http://www.salon.com/2017/01/12/donald- ... ng-office/
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