Beautifully stated, my brother.
Please take five minutes to watch this wise man, Art Acevedo.
It’s good to see sane, compassionate people in positions of power and influence addressing real problems directly, in the midst of all the hyper-partisan irrationality.
In less than four minutes you can see the stark contrast between the two presidential hopefuls, framed by an ad by a conservative group and remarks by one of the candidates himself:
In fairness to Mr. Trump, he only knows how to do one thing: win. This has been his lifelong obsession since he was underdog child number four of five to a loveless gold-digging mother and a ruthless father, an unquenchable will to dominate, to be number one. So when protesters express rage over yet another killing, by police, of an unarmed black man, this time handcuffed and slowly suffocated by a cop who kneels on his neck for almost nine minutes, Trump has only one move: double down.
These protesters, says the president of the United States, are thugs, like those black sons of bitches who knelt during the national anthem to bring attention to this so-called systemic problem of unaccountable, often murderous, police violence against blacks, those ungrateful malcontents, like Colin Kaepernick, who the NFL paid millions to and then did very well to fire and blacklist, the black son of a bitch.
Note: I love that the mother of one of these black “sons of bitches” went on television to tell the president that she was a bitch who was very proud to have raised the son of a bitch the president had just criticized on national TV for taking a principled, respectful knee during the national anthem. If the cops took a knee before these protesting crowds, used techniques to de-escalate tensions instead of responding with violence, there would be far less violence at these protests — in spite of the incitement of a handful of organized, largely white nationalist extremist, agitators intent on sparking a second Civil War.
Instead militarized police forces confront crowds in city after city with tear gas, mace, pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades (actually flash-bangs, used to disorient with a blinding flash of light as well as a deafening sound), phalanxes of truncheon wielding, helmet and shield wearing shock troops, and the Attorney General threatens to treat those crowds like a hostile army of enemy combatants, while America’s Greatest Winner calls for more police violence, while he cowers and fumes in the White House. Then lashes out at “weak” governors who look like “jerks” during a long, deranged, Hitler-in-the-bunker-style conference call.
Here are a couple of random digressions and observations from the man tasked with leading a violently divided nation at this supremely difficult moment, during a plague, at a time when its most influential demagogue is channeling his inner George Wallace. And his spineless underlings, the ones still not humiliated and fired, the Trump Dead-Enders, continue to enable him, pretend his increasingly unhinged behavior is quite normal and nothing in the least bit odd:
“It’s a movement, if you don’t put it down it will get worse and worse,” Trump said. “The only time it’s successful is when you’re weak and most of you are weak.”
A source on the call, who shared it with The Daily Beast, called Trump’s talk “unhinged,” noting that it often veered off in various directions. At one point, the source said, the president brought up flag burning and encouraged states to pass laws banning it.
“Flag burning is a disgrace… We have a different court. And I think that It’s time to review that again,” he said. “They wanted to climb up flag polls in Washington in order to burn flags, but we stopped them… If you wanted to try and pass a very powerful flag burning statute, anti-flag burning, I hope you do it because we will back you 100 percent, all the way. I hope some of you do it.”
At another, he blurred legal lines when discussing the needs for prosecution. “When someone is throwing a rock, that’s like shooting a gun. What’s the difference?” Trump said. “You have to do retribution in my opinion.”
We note that this rock throwing equals shooting a gun equation was the justification used by Israel’s racist, extreme rightwing Minister of Defense, Avigdor Leiberman, to authorize the use of deadly force against any Palestinian protester who picked up a rock, a clod of dirt, raised a fist, screamed in anger, etc. This authorization, in practice, sometimes also applied to medics and journalists who insisted on being near any of these vicious terrorists.
The violent tactics of authoritarians, and the provocative lines they draw in the sand before using deadly force, are remarkably consistent wherever they are applied.
God save these United States. This deranged leader surely can’t.
So UNFAIR!
persistent terrible twos . VERY PAINFUL!
There may be a God up there, watching out for us. The evidence is unclear, it could really go either way. Children die by the thousands every day, terrible deaths we wouldn’t wish on the most vicious criminals, merely for being born at the wrong time, in the wrong place. The kind and righteous are regularly, nonchalantly, laughingly, tortured and killed by the wicked. We all know the drill.
People of faith have an answer: God is perfect and eternally merciful, it is we flawed humans, abusing the Free Will God generously, and in His infinite wisdom, bestowed on us, that are the problem. That kind of logic brings us every imaginable horror, through absolutely no fault of the Creator and all-powerful Master of the Universe (and let us also be clear, to reason this way is faith — not logic). Here is a marvelous short evocation of that moral/intellectual disconnect:
which leads inexorably to things like this:
The gift that, according to many American faith leaders, Jesus bestowed on the United States in November 2016, our Flawed Vessel Biblical Cuck President, a man of boundless humility and honor, is spending RNC campaign funds to ask Americans to sign a birthday card for him. Trump’s remaining daughter-in-law asks Americans to tell the president what we think of him (only love!) by adding a comment when we sign his birthday card, to show how much we appreciate him. Trump’s biggest fans even hired two black women, who saucily introduce themselves as Diamonds and Silk, to playfully ask viewers to log on to the website and send the eternal child a birthday greeting full of love. The end of irony?
Trying to watch a discussion on youTube (please don’t ask why I’d click on David Fucking Frum) I get this ad plastered across the lower third:
Who is paying for this unprecedented presidential love fest, during a plague (HOAX!) while fires rage all over America after a public execution of a handcuffed black man (outside agitators, funded by haters, taking advantage of irrationally angry NEGROES!!!)?
If you look at the image of Trump, hand to heart, falsely swearing to one thing or another, and zoom in on the fine print at the bottom of the frame, you will see that the website and the ad to wish the president a happy birthday in June (the angry man-child was born on Flag Day, 1946, less than a year after his side lost World War Two) was paid for by “The Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee authorized and composed of Donald J. Trump For President, Inc., and the Republican National Committee.”
Say it with me, brothers and sisters. Hallelujah!
And heaven help us all.
Apparently the services of this talented cartoonist, Michael de Adder, were deemed no longer necessary to his Canadian corporate employer once he hit the nerve a little too directly:
Too soon? The dead bodies were a migrant father and daughter found drowned after trying, unsuccessfully, to cross the Rio Grande river into Trump’s America. They’d gone into the water hoping for a better life — they didn’t find it.
How about this photo? The face of George Floyd, the man who was held down by three police officers, a knee on his neck for more than 8 minutes, the last 2:53 of which while he was “unresponsive,” until he died? Too soon?
I truly can’t imagine what it feels like to be black, brown or genetically tan today in this country, this exceptional democracy run by some very fine people, very fine people, the finest power-obsessed racists and grifters money can buy.
I can only compare it to how a Jew must have felt in the early days of the Third Reich, during the eight years or so before the actual death camps were up and humming, before the organized night of mass rioting against Jews almost five years in, before the special death squads went from town to town a couple of years after that. Assuming, of course, that the Third Reich had already gone on for centuries at that point.
I’m angry, I’m numb, I feel helpless, watching the same murderous shit that has been done to people who look like George Floyd since 1619 when the first boatload of African chattels were offloaded in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Done, as always, in the name of the greater good: law and order, preserving the peace, enjoying the freedoms of liberty. I can only imagine how many orders of magnitude worse it must be for people who look like George Floyd. In fact, I cannot imagine it, literally. Fuck. What do you actually do when you are up against injustice this brutal and violent?
A lynching in 2020, under cover of state authority, in broad daylight, on the public street of an American city, over the alleged passing of a counterfeit twenty. Four cops, working together to make sure this suspect was not resisting their authority, deliberately inflicting their will on him, heedlessly persisting until the man was dead. Only one of these motherfuckers has been charged with anything resembling intentional or recklessly depraved murder. And that only because the wrenching video evidence, from multiple eye witnesses, where the now dead man pleads for his life and the officers continue to kill him, is indisputable.
The fact that the Minneapolis Police Department immediately cut all four loose speaks volumes, as they say. Usually this kind of bad cop stays on the payroll pending the outcome of a series of administrative hearings, sometimes for years, enjoying the protection of all sorts of union procedures. The police are among the last American workers to still enjoy those very hard-won worker protections no longer available to most other American workers.
The predictable, smug, red meat response from the authorities comes next: seeking justice, a fair process for the accused, and not tolerating crowds that get enraged just because police may be forced to lob tear gas and mace them to get them to obey the curfew. Angrily blame those who are rightfully upset, you know the drill, every asshole in the world masters it their first day in asshole school.
Also, equally crucial: blame outside extremists for setting the night on fire — how long can it be until we hear George Soros mentioned in connection with these dangerous, cynical, enraged outside extremist groups that are supposedly planning and coordinating (a la Koch Brother funded, spontaneous nationwide anti-Obama uprisings) all this violent mayhem? Not to mention that government provocateurs have long been employed, since the days of the insane, racist J. Edgar Hoover, to incite violence and justify state violence in return.
Martin Luther King called rioting the voice of the unheard. MLK is often thought of as a saintly man of peace who was always gentle in resolutely trying to bend the moral arc of the universe. His name is immediately invoked by men like Bagpiper Bill Barr, as an example for how angry protesters must always act. That he was, for years, America’s number one most dangerous Negro, a controversial malcontent persecuted by the FBI for the threat he posed to the status quo, has been pretty much written out of the official history of our great nation.
What we forget today is that King was a radical with an incredibly strong spine, a genius sense of moral purpose, and personal fearlessness. The thing he warned against, from his Birmingham, Alabama jail cell, as the biggest enemy of equality for all Americans, were white moderates, those lovers of order, and peace, and gentle compromise, and patience changing the intolerable conditions of people they had great sympathy toward, but not really much empathy for.
It’s human nature — not one of these white moderates has ever had to bury a child killed by police who mistook him for a dangerous wild animal — and faced no consequences for their “justifiable mistake”. Or ever had to plan a funeral for a little girl blown to pieces by klansmen, in her Sunday best, while sitting in a church basement learning about the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Not one of these moderates was ever in danger of having a cop kneel on their neck until no pulse could be found, and then kneel there for three minutes, just for good measure, or having vicious dogs unleashed on them, or high pressure firehoses, or truncheons, or tear gas, or the full violence of the state. Not one of them even knows anyone personally who has to worry about any of those things happening to her.
What were these four now former Minneapolis police officers thinking as they were “unintentionally” killing a handcuffed prisoner? What could they have possibly been thinking? Probably nothing more than “fucking nigger.”
to paraphrase the old cliche about showing always being better than telling:
A friend sent me this cartoon today, along with another, that made a beautiful duet, with the perched shit bird pointing to the distraction that turns out to be him furiously distracting, as the death toll mounts and his chances for reelection now depend strictly on the votes of insane people (or successful mass suppression of the vote during an opportune plague):
Not only is this openly corrupt, supremely powerful man nasty, unpleasant, a fool, a liar and a thin-skinned, vindictive, churlish child, he’s also, essentially, a mass murderer in constant denial about his actual repellant nature and inclinations. He continues to incite hatred and violence (as any good president should, particularly during an international health emergency), and even open rebellion against sections of his own government who are not nice to him. He takes no responsibility for the predictable results of anything he says or does. Like millions of morally vacant, inchoately enraged Americans who love him for it.
Now, like his heedlessly murderous dictator colleague in the Philippines, he’s threatening to order the military to shoot frustrated protesters turned violent (sometimes in response to peaceful demonstrations met with police tear gas). The recent police killing in Minneapolis and protests brought out the poet in the president [1] who, after referring to the protesting “n-words” and their SJW sympathizers as “thugs”, tweeting provocatively “…these THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd and I will not let that happen” then waxing poetic with “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” [2]
Twitter responded by flagging Trump’s tweet, warning, “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”
This pugnacious glorification of violence from the CEO of a brutally divided country ruled by people blind and deaf to the endless, un-prosecuted police murders of civilians who pose no threat — even when the killing is cold-blooded, irrefutably depraved and well-documented as in the recent suffocation death of the handcuffed and unresisting George Floyd.
The dangerous crime Floyd was pulled out of his car and summarily executed for was an allegation he’d passed a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. Three cops stand by keeping order as a fourth brutally kneels on a prone, unresisting, handcuffed man’s neck, for long minutes, as the man begs for mercy, as members of the public take cellphone videos and try to intervene. [3] Actually, it turns out one stood guard, the other two held George Floyd’s legs as the fourth cop kneeled on his neck until he died.
The policeman who did the actual killing, an experienced nineteen year veteran, kept his knee on the man’s neck until after the handcuffed man was unresponsive, perhaps dead. He continued to apply his weight to the prone body and did not remove his knee until almost three full minutes after his colleague told him the man on the ground had no pulse, according to the criminal complaint (for third degree murder [4] and manslaughter) against former officer Derek Chauvin.
The complaint determined that Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds total. Two minutes and 53 seconds of that time was after Floyd became unresponsive.
Spin that one for your Flawed Vessel Christian master, moral giant and pious Christian Bill Barr. Oh, he’s already on it:
Attorney General William Barr issued a statement Friday afternoon, saying:
The video images of the incident that ended with death of Mr. Floyd, while in custody of Minneapolis police officers, were harrowing to watch and deeply disturbing. The state prosecutor has been in the process of determining whether any criminal charges are appropriate under state law. On a separate and parallel track, the Department of Justice, including the FBI, are conducting an independent investigation to determine whether any federal civil rights laws were violated. Both state and federal officers are working diligently and collaboratively to ensure that any available evidence relevant to these decisions is obtained as quickly as possible. Under our system, charging decisions must be, and will be, based on the law and facts. This process is proceeding quickly. As is the typical practice, the state’s charging decisions will be made first. I am confident justice will be served.
Of course, that confident, unprincipled, fat bastard wouldn’t know justice if it came up, called him by name and gently blew him (as if Justice would ever do such a thing!).
As for the Flawed Vessel itself, to paraphrase the great George Lopez, on the same subject: “fuck that klansman puto.”
[1] We might assume it was the president’s own prose, though it could have been the creation of fellow poets Stephen Miller or Jared Kushner– but actually it turns out to be an unattributed quote from a racist Miami Police Chief of the late 1960s who coined it in response to “hoodlums in the slums” during the era of widespread civil rights protests.
[2] Thug, or “son of a bitch” are Trump’s preferred workarounds for the more popular “nigger”– a hateful term which, frankly, he’d use if he had any balls.
[3] During the long minutes of the handcuffed man’s agonizing death, witnesses tried unsuccessfully to intervene:
EYEWITNESS 1: You have your knee on his neck.
EYEWITNESS 2: You’ve got your knee right on his neck, officer.
EYEWITNESS 1: He ain’t even resisting arrest.
GEORGE FLOYD: I cannot breathe.
EYEWITNESS 3: Are you having fun?
GEORGE FLOYD: I cannot breathe.
EYEWITNESS 1: You’re just a grown — you’re a tough guy. You’re a tough guy, huh?
OFFICER TOU THAO: What’s that?
EYEWITNESS 1: I said he’s a tough guy. He’s not even resisting arrest, bro.
OFFICER TOU THAO: Did you get the whole part when we fought with him?
EYEWITNESS 1: But, bro, why are you just sitting there? He ain’t doing nothing now. Put him in the car.
GEORGE FLOYD: Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me.
[4] “Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree,” Minnesota statue says.
In a demented nutshell:
Everyone knows that wealthy, successful American job creators and their supporters are constantly under vicious attack by unprincipled losers, the politically correct “class warriors” who pretend to be concerned with things like social justice, human rights, fairness, mitigating climate disaster, equality for women and smokescreens like that. What is actually under attack are Christian values, heterosexuality, the rights of white people, the sanctity of the life of every fetus and the basic liberties we all cherish.
Corporations, including media and social media companies, take pains not to alienate the rich, influential holders of these views. They are a huge and powerful demographic. Facebook, for example, says it will allow citizens to make up their own minds about what’s real and what’s fake in political ads — it will not put its multi-billion dollar ad revenue finger on the scale. Every major news outlet makes every effort to give even the most incoherent, clearly false, statements by our president and his fans some veneer of coherence by noting, for example, that others also believe this baseless conspiracy, or what have you. My favorite media fairness qualifier “the president denies this.”
The other day Twitter refused to take down two tweets Trump sent out accusing media pundit and former Congressman Joe Scarborough of murdering a staffer years ago, although the woman died of an undiagnosed heart ailment while Scarborough was hundreds of miles away. Twitter promised to look into how to police such outrageous lies by America’s demented CEO. They apparently came up with a fix, and the Artist of the Deal is spitting mad– but, as always, he has a great new talking point!
President Trump is threatening to shut down social media platforms after Twitter labeled two of his tweets as potentially misleading. On Tuesday, Trump sent out two tweets attacking mail-in voting, claiming it would lead to a rigged election. Twitter responded by adding fact-check labels to the tweets with information about how there is no established link between voting by mail and voter fraud. Trump responded by accusing the company of interfering in the 2020 election and of stifling his free speech.
Earlier this morning, Trump wrote on Twitter:
“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”
We can all agree that conservative voices have been, like, totally silenced in liberal America. You never hear the conservative voice anywhere.
In April the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted 4-2, along party lines, (as the federal Supreme Court did 5-4 in Bush v. Gore, stopping vote recounts and appointing G.W. Bush president) that the governor of Wisconsin could not postpone the election, that citizens of Wisconsin had to go to the polls during a pandemic, at a time when authorities in the state were requiring citizens to remain sheltered at home (at a time when the vast majority of polling places in cities could not be opened). The conservative majority was trying to ensure the election of a Scott Walker appointee, the 5th conservative vote. Low voter turnout seems to favor the Republican, the health and safety of citizens be damned — liberty is more important than life. Naturally, all of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court judges voted absentee this year, after blocking postponement of the election during the coronavirus. The conservative judge on the ballot was voted out anyway.
The US Supreme Court heard an emergency Republican National Committee appeal of the federal case over the extending of voting rights during a pandemic. Ignoring pertinent facts and citing shaky precedents, a few voting rights cases that did not include any from the last pandemic, in 1918, Justice Boof Kavanaugh wrote for the 5-4 majority, overturning, the day before the election, on maniacally narrow grounds, the district court and the federal appeals court decisions allowing a few additional days for return of mail in ballots that had not been distributed in time. Extending (by six days) the deadline for absentee voting, concluded Kavanaugh, would violate our sacred laws (and disadvantage Republicans on the ballot). Justice Ginsburg’s crystal clear, short dissent explains exactly why this partisan ruling is wrong, what crucial facts Kavanaugh ignored and how badly off point the precedents he cited were. Read about it here, RGB’s argument is certainly worth reading– the last couple of pages. Nothing you or anyone else can do about it anyway, loser. Another reminder, for me, if one was needed, of what a slimy piece of corporate excrement the Chief Justice is.
This last minute party line 5-4 vote to block a sensible precaution during an actual plague, imposing the will of a narrow, partisan majority of unappealable, conservative political appointees on the governor of a state, not only endangered the lives of thousands forced to choose between casting a ballot in person, not having a mail in ballot not yet received counted or protecting themselves from an incurable virus, but is an ugly omen of things to come.
It will not be the only oppressive narrow party-line Supreme Court ruling coming down in support of extreme “conservative values”, the values that are so regularly, and so unfairly, attacked by angry, misguided fools like me.
Determination can be a great thing, as when someone is not deterred by fear, cold water, darkness, the tremendous odds against success, in diving into a raging sewage drain to save the life of a drowning child. Determination can just as easily go the other way, as when someone like billionaire oil-baron Charles Koch is unalterably determined to leave the world a much worse place than it was when he came into it. In the second case, determination seems grim and maniacal.
We have a man of grim and maniacal determination at the head of our nation at the moment. Here are some notes he made on Air Force One, notes he clutched in his hand as he forcefully defended his innocence, arguing strongly to the American public that abuse of power is no crime, no vice, nothing to see. The notes of his key talking points were photographed, no doubt, by a vicious traitor.
What he wanted, of course, as he said more than once in his famously “perfect” call (as shown clearly even in his “transcript”), was a public announcement from new Ukrainian President Zelensky that the Ukrainians were launching a criminal investigation of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s apparently corrupt job for Ukrainian oligarchs. This in exchange for that, the announcement for the arms Congress had already earmarked for Ukraine, or in the Latin, quid pro quo.
Our CEO, who employs his own unqualified children as senior government advisers, corruptly held up a shipment of arms to our besieged ally for months, as leverage, in an attempt to shake the young president down. He reminded himself, in his ALL CAPS NOTE, to tell America “THIS (strong denial) IS THE FINAL WORD FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
As it turned out to be when the Republican Senate refused to allow witnesses, documents or testimony introduced at the president’s impeachment trial. (After Nancy Pelosi bullheadedly refused to connect the dots with an indictment for Obstruction of Justice, which our CEO has done, and continues to do, seamlessly, tirelessly since at least May 2017.)
He is supremely determined to exert his will, and as he rules by fear of swift, ugly, public reprisal, taking his Bully Pulpit quite literally, he has the shameful, obedient support of his staunch loyalists in government. This man comes by his grim determination naturally, the fourth of five children [1], not the smartest, not the most promising, not his parents’ favorite by any means. He needed to establish his dominance by any means necessary — he did so by sheer determination to dominate.
He waves red meat in front of his enthusiastic base constantly. Having many zealously religious Christian supporters, though he himself is as openly irreligious a man as has ever strode the earth (a “flawed vessel” in the words of his Christian apologists), he makes sure to throw them a nice bloody flank from time to time. On Friday, this:
President Donald Trump: “Some governors have deemed liquor stores and abortion clinics as essential but have left out churches and other houses of worship. It’s not right. So I’m correcting this injustice and calling houses of worship essential.” source
This strong move was in the context of needing an assurance from the treasonous governor of North Carolina, where the Republican National Convention is scheduled to be held, that he could have a huge arena filled with screaming supporters. As Amy Goodman reported today:
Trump is threatening to move August’s Republican convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, if the state’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper doesn’t guarantee he can have a packed arena. On Monday, Trump accused Cooper of being “still in Shutdown mood.” The Twitter attack came just two days after North Carolina registered its largest daily increase in coronavirus cases.
On Friday, Trump said all houses of worship are essential, and threatened to override governors who refused to lift restrictions on them if restrictions weren’t lifted by the weekend.
Of course, if we allow ourselves the indulgence of a moment of logic: a liquor store can require masks, and allow one or two customers in at a time, same with an abortion clinic. Medical offices and most food stores all have procedures in place to minimize the spread of this deadly virus. By maintaining space between people, requiring masks and taking other precautions, services can be provided without increasing the risk of infection.
Obviously, a church is a completely different story, the whole point of a congregation is to congregate. Same with an arena full of cheering partisans who refuse to wear masks, as their hero refuses, even while touring a mask factory the other day. If they’d stay in the church, or the packed arena, I’d say God bless ’em, let their savior look after them. They don’t stay in their churches or arenas, they demand freedom to be free of all restrictions, to infect whoever they damned well please, if this virus is even a real thing!
Look, it’s clear that this grimly determined man is nuts. He is determined to do whatever is necessary to keep his solid 39% base believing that he is looking out for them, has their backs, always speaks truthfully for their justifiable rage and fear. Look at the delicious carcasses he is continually tossing to them! Obamagate! Traitorgate! Spaceforcegate! Sessionsgate! Comeygate! Schiffgate! Muellergate! Anti-Trump talking head Joe Scarboroughgate!!!
That traitorous so-called Republican (Scarborough, keep up here, America) who is constantly badmouthing me, murdered a staffer years ago, killed her in cold blood, yet he has the temerity to criticize me? A murderer! THE DOJ WILL INVESTIGATE ALL OF THESE SICK AND DANGEROUS INDIVIDUALS, SUCH SERIOUS CRIMES WILL NOT GO UNPUNISHED!!! If Twitter tries to delete my truthful tweets I WILL DELETE TWITTER!! (Twitter quickly backed down, as corporate entities will always do, given the right profit incentive).
As for so-called Joe Biden’s so-called female “running mate”? Get me Mike Flynn! Mike! Mike! Here he is, let’s hear it for this great American hero, completely and totally exonerated by our great Attorney General! Ready, Mike? “LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP!!!!”
The people have spoken!
[1] The Fuhrer himself was the fifth of six children, also of a ruthless and abusive father, and was, if you can picture it, an even more determined man than our current CEO.
Funny, although I love to draw, and have always had a certain compulsion to make marks on paper (a compulsion I often think of as graphomania), I’ve made almost no marks on paper during these two months in quarantine. A lot of guitar playing, a lot of writing, few drawings or other marks with my drawing pens. Hmmmm.
The team at Trump, Inc. a group of investigative reporters from ProPublica and WNYC, has put together a fascinating series of reports about Trump’s frequently fishy-smelling money-making operations. The shows are extremely well put together narratives. A recent show was called “The Accountants” and it is from this highly recommended show that these notes of mine are taken. The episode transcript is the source of all block quotes.
When the New York Times reported that, for tax purposes, Donald Trump had lost over a billion dollars during a single decade, and avoided paying federal income tax for eight years between 1985 and 1994, Trump’s lawyer:
said the tax information in the Times’ story was “demonstrably false,” but cited no specific errors.
In a prior NY Times story, reporting in great detail about the intricate tax avoidance schemes Trump’s father employed to pass on a billion dollars to his children with minimal taxes paid, one of Trump’s lawyers, (likely a famed legal hard-on named Harden) in an act of bravura puffery, called the Times reporting “100% false, and highly defamatory” (of course it was, which was why Trump successfully sued the now defunct Grey Lady). Trump, Inc. explains:
We know now that, as Donald Trump’s businesses were struggling, the Trump family accountants helped funnel millions of dollars from Fred Trump to his children.
[BEAT, THEN MUSIC SLOWLY COMES IN]
CRAMER: In 1992, the Trump Family set up a company called “All County Building Supply & Maintenance.” It was owned by Donald Trump, his siblings, and a cousin. The New York Times uncovered a number of suspect tax strategies that the Trump family used, and All County was one of them. Out of all of the schemes, The Times said All County was the “most overt fraud.” A lawyer for Trump called the Times’ reporting “100% false, and highly defamatory.”
Again, recall, history speaks for itself. The Times published a 100% false and highly defamatory article that claimed the Trump family had committed financial crimes, including tax fraud. Trump sued, the case was a slam dunk, the Times is no longer in business.
On the eve of the Supreme Court arguments over whether Trump has the unprecedented privilege of complete immunity from investigations of any kind while president, Trump, Inc., dug into the story of his accountants. His accounting firm is one of the parties, along with Deutsche Bank and everybody else, that the secretive Trump is insisting cannot be legally compelled to turn over subpoenaed records, even to criminal investigators in New York State.
The dogged team from Trump, Inc. eventually located one of the Trump family’s longtime accountants, Mitchell Zachary (who was amazed that anyone in the media had found him and happy to speak to them, at length). Trump Inc. continues:
I asked Mitchell Zachary about All County during our first interview.
ZACHARY: Yep. Know all about it.
CRAMER: Whose idea was that?
ZACHARY: Speci— Well, uh, it wasn’t mine. I — I’ll tell you that. I wish I could take credit for it — it was brilliant — but it wasn’t mine.
CRAMER: Here’s how it worked. Fred Trump bought supplies for his buildings — like refrigerators, stoves, and boilers — from this company, All County Building Supply & Maintenance. All County sold Fred those supplies at hugely marked up prices.
But remember, All County was owned by Fred Trump’s children, and they profited off those huge markups. The Times found that, over time, Fred was able to funnel millions of dollars to his children through All County, and could have avoided paying millions of dollars in taxes.
ZACHARY: I knew what that whole thing was about, you know. It was part of the estate planning strategy.
CRAMER: In the mid-‘90s, Mitchell Zachary left the Trump tax team, and began working on estate planning for Fred Trump.
Zachary told me that All County was implemented by the Spahr accountants, but that he wasn’t part of the team that developed the strategy, and he didn’t work on it directly.
ZACHARY: I wish I could take credit for it, but I only learned from it.
CRAMER: What did you learn from it?
ZACHARY: Uh, that if you plan properly [PAUSE] on a very, very large estate, then — if you have time — you could take steps to reduce the value of the properties. That was the main purpose of All County — to reduce the value of the properties for estate tax purposes.
CRAMER: A former Chief of Investigations for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, Adam Kauffmann, told the New York Times that the Trumps’ use of All County would have warranted investigation for “defrauding tenants, tax fraud, and filing false documents.” The statute of limitations for criminal prosecution has expired.
The Times reported on another tactic used to reduce the Trumps’ tax bill: Dividing up legal ownership of Fred Trump’s properties so that he lacked complete control. That helped an appraiser justify lower values, which meant lower taxes.
ZACHARY: So, at that time, uh, we brought in this appraiser and he took anywhere between 35% and 40% discount. This was a common technique we used, okay? Well, the IRS hated that.
CRAMER: After Trump’s parents died, the IRS audited their estates and found they were worth 23% more than the Trump family had claimed.
All told, the Times found that Fred and Mary Trump transferred over a billion dollars of their wealth to their children — which could have meant paying over $500 million in taxes. The Trumps paid a fraction of that.
Mitchell Zachary defends the firm’s work for the Trump family, saying it was aggressive but within the law. He said Donald Trump’s taxes were frequently audited, and pointed out that the IRS reviewed their work on the estate taxes.
The ever-secretive Trump, with nothing whatsoever to hide, made his accountants lock up all of his financials every night when they were done with a day’s work massaging them. The Artist of the Deal, a man famously reluctant to pay his bills, also demanded special, discounted fees, that his accountants were glad to provide.
CRAMER: Confidentiality was more important with Trump than with most clients. At Spahr, the policy was: You couldn’t leave Trump’s documents out overnight. You had to lock them away in a cabinet.
ZACHARY: More than any other individual [BEAT] that I’ve ever seen, he was very big on promoting that he’s this super-rich billionaire. That’s not what you see when you look at his personal tax returns.
CRAMER: Donald Trump basked in the perception that he was money. In interviews with journalists, he sometimes produced papers, compiled by his accountants, which he said proved his wealth. Trump sued the journalist Tim O’Brien after O’Brien published a book claiming Trump was not a billionaire. Trump lost.
In the end, Donald Trump cared a lot about one other thing: his fees. The firm promised Trump his fees wouldn’t go up after the merger, and he gave the okay. The merger went forward.
Summarizing the first sections of their report on his accountants, on returning from a musical interlude, Ilya Marritz said:
MARRITZ: And we’re back. Let’s just recap where we are.
One of Donald Trump’s former accountants, Mitchell Zachary, has confirmed that Trump was not the super rich guy he presented himself as in The Art of the Deal. To protect that image, Trump’s accountants applied a high level of secrecy and security around his finances.
Despite its big-name client, the accounting firm was still small. And the partner in charge of Trump’s taxes was accused of malpractice, and was found to have committed fraud. The firm lost its malpractice insurance.
Meg picks up the story now, with Mitchell Zachary out of the picture, and Donald Trump branching out from real estate to branding and entertainment.
And on they go, invading this most private of public citizen’s well-guarded privacy. And I keep listening. Oh, my goodness. I can’t believe how petty I am to keep taking in 100% false and HIGHLY defamatory information dredged up (or simply made up) by obvious liars. How I often think so badly of this very fine person, our excellent and unaccountably constantly attacked totally innocent and serially exonerated president. It’s almost like I have Trump Derangement Syndrome! I need help — any ideas greatly appreciated.
Meantime, check out this excellent episode, a very listenable narrative. Here’s a bit more, from the transcript, from their discussion with Trump’s talkative, longtime accountant Mitchell Zachary:
CRAMER: He says you can see from the Times reporting that Trump appears to have lost more money than anybody during that period of time.
ZACHARY: So naturally, it was very unusual.
CRAMER: He does not think Trump was pushing the envelope.
ZACHARY: Yeah, we were a little aggressive, but not, uh, pushing the envelope too far. The man lost a lot of money. We didn’t need to push the envelope.
CRAMER: At one point, he put it like this: Trump had lost so much money, “he was a built-in tax shelter.”
Trump was a difficult client. Zachary told me that collecting fees from Trump was awful. Eventually, Spahr negotiated a deal: Lower fees if Trump paid on time.
ZACHARY: Donald always made it clear. You get the privilege of saying you’re Donald Trump’s accountants, and you have to pay the price.
CRAMER: Mitchell Zachary worked under a partner at the firm, a man named Jack Mitnick. For decades, Mitnick was the accountant behind the Trump family’s tax strategy. Zachary said Mitnick was known around the firm as a ‘Tax God’ — an accountant so gifted, you had to sit up and pay attention.
[HI-HAT MUSIC PLAYS]
ZACHARY: And what I learned from Jack Mitnick was keep researching until you find a way to do what you want to do. Don’t give up. Just keep digging.
CRAMER: Zachary told me that Mitnick had an especially close relationship with the Trumps, that Mitnick was constantly on the phone with either Donald or Fred. He had tax ideas for them, they had questions for him — and that they wouldn’t make a move without discussing it with Mitnick first.
[MUSIC OUT]
CRAMER: My conversations with Mitchell Zachary began in January, on the phone. At the very beginning of March, Peter Elkind and I flew to Florida to meet him. This was back before social distancing. Some of the tape is from our in-person interview.
[MUSIC COMES BACK]
ZACHARY: Okay. You have to understand, Jack … The — the aura around Jack Mitnick was that he was infallible. I mean, when I first came there — you might find this interesting or not — I couldn’t call him Jack. I always called him Mr. Mitnick. That’s part of his — his aura. You know, that he’s the biggest tax expert in the world, and he’s always right. And if he blesses something, you can do it. That was the feeling that everybody thought about Jack.
[MUSIC OUT]
CRAMER: He seemed to screw up again and again and again, though.
ZACHARY: Yeah. He didn’t always win. His opinion wasn’t always a winning position.
CRAMER: Do you think he really, like, took a lot of extreme positions?
ZACHARY: Probably. I think the court cases bear that out.
[DRIVING MUSIC COMES BACK]
PETER ELKIND: Well the first case is called Fresci vs. Grand Coal Venture.
CRAMER: This is Peter Elkind. Peter came across a federal appeals court opinion from 1985, involving Jack Mitnick and a group of investors. Mitnick was working for them, managing their investment in coal mining in North Dakota.
ELKIND: He was accused of deceiving the investors. That basically, even though he was the administrator of this operation, he told them that if this one coal mine that they were pouring their money into didn’t pay off, if it wasn’t productive, that he had another coal mine that would be productive and he’d guarantee that they’d turn out fine — that they’d make money.
CRAMER: Mitnick knew that was not the case. The investors accused him of fraud.
ELKIND: And after reviewing the record, both a district court — a trial court — and an appeals court concluded that that was justified. In fact, the appeals court, in a written opinion, said that the record amply demonstrates that he committed fraud, and even in the opinion said that the matter should be referred to the appropriate Professional Conduct Review Committees.
[MUSIC PLAYS FOR A MOMENT]
CRAMER: Mitnick continued working at the firm as a Senior Partner, and he continued to work closely with Fred and Donald Trump.
[BEAT]
CRAMER: The office building where Jack Mitnick and the Spahr accountants did Donald Trump’s taxes for many years was this place. It’s a blocky concrete structure with a sort of shabby, mid-century appeal. It’s out on Long Island — a short drive from Fred Trump’s home in Queens. Peter and I went there in January.
CRAMER: In the space, there’s kind of an atrium in the middle, with a central staircase going downstairs.
CRAMER: Inside, the offices have low ceilings and windowless hallways. We just went to have a look.
[ELEVATOR BEEPS]
CRAMER: It’s a squeeze to get more than two people in the elevator.
It makes sense that Fred Trump’s accountants worked here. Fred himself worked out of a renovated dentist’s office on Avenue Z in Brooklyn. But it’s a long way from the marble and gold of Trump Tower.
Ultimately, by staying close to his father’s accountants, Trump also stayed close to his father’s wealth. Kind of, like, the rich-person version of staying on your family’s cell phone plan.
We know now that, as Donald Trump’s businesses were struggling, the Trump family accountants helped funnel millions of dollars from Fred Trump to his children.
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