NYT: Trump's Leaked 1995 Tax Records Could Have Allowed Him To Wipe Out Almost $1 Bn, i.e., Possibly ALL Trump's Federal Income Tax From Then To Today

Via Josh Marshall at TPM, we learn that a small portion of Trump's 1995 tax return was leaked to the New York Times. (You may scroll past the video window at the top of the NYT page.)

The Times then hired tax specialists to analyze the effects of the document on Trump's taxes.

Their conclusion was that Trump, if he wished, could have applied the entire $916 million loss to future income that would otherwise have been taxable. The total loss comprised his failed Atlantic City casinos holding company, an "ill-fated" venture into the airline business, and his "ill-timed" purchase of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. According to the NYT, the total $916 million could have covered an estimated 18 years of Mr. Trump's income taxes.

That's from 1995 to within a few years of today, depending on Trump's income, but Trump has refused either to confirm or deny the loss, or his income over the period starting in 1995. And besides, who's counting a few hundreds of millions more or a few hundreds of millions less. Small change, right? Er, right?

But the amount, while awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping and horrifying to poor blokes like us, is not the point. The point is this: How would you or I go about not paying federal income taxes for about two decades?

The Times points out it has no evidence that what Mr. Trump did was in any way illegal. It's just the usual way obscenely rich people shove off a billion or so of their taxes onto poor schmucks like us; no big deal, right? You'll dial or punch Mr. Trump's checkbox on your voting machine with no hesitation, right?

---

CORRECTED: replaced '$916 bn' with '$916 million'. They may look the same to Trump, but I should know better. - SB

Rolling Stone Does Koch

Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone gets "Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire."

Read And Watch: Influence On Yer Feral Gummint's Policies? You Ain't Got None!

Not yours... belongs
to the wealthiest 1%

jbade at FDL and Cenk Uygur and a couple other guys including one named George Carlin on YouTube tell us how it is: Influence by Economic elite? Check! Influence by lobbies and PACs? Check! Influence by people near median income? That's a big negatory, good buddy!

Uygur gives a good summary of the "oligarchy" business. How about that... we're a lot like Russia. And things have been getting steadily worse... more unequal wealth distribution... for at least the past 30 years or so. Are you surprised? Really?

‛What's Next? A Coup d'État?’

The question is from Robert Reich, and he's not joking. Reich, who knows from his own childhood experience just how bullies behave, believes that the wealthy bullies of American right-wing politics — the Koch brothers through "Americans for Prosperity" (their own, of course) and others Reich lists in considerable detail — aim not merely at a takeover of the Republican Party (they've already apparently accomplished that) but "to take over America."

(If this is true, it would not be the first time a cabal of wealthy Americans was alleged to intend a coup. See the wiki on Smedley Butler and the Business Plot, about a supposed plot to depose FDR and install a fascist dictator, a tale which you may choose to believe or not. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I see considerable evidence that Butler told the truth.)

Whether or not Reich is right about the Koch brothers' intent to perpetrate a coup, and I think he probably is, he is right about one thing: if bullies are not confronted face-on, they will take over. It is time for President Obama to hold fast... to face down the would-be ruling class of America, and tell them NO, with no ambiguity, hedging, fudging or compromise. A wealth-driven revolution may have worked in the 18^th century, but it would be an unacceptable disaster to those who follow the spirit of the American ideal today.

Sometimes...

Sometimes, recently approaching all the time, I want to FACE DOWN THE FINANCIAL POWERS‑THAT‑BE IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, SLAP THEM BACK‑AND‑FORTH ACROSS THE FACE A FEW TIMES, HARD, TO GET THEIR ATTENTION, AND DEMAND OF THEM, "HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING AT ALL FROM AMERICA'S HISTORY???"

Armando at Daily Kos, faced with the same frustration, wrote a well-reasoned position paper, "The Lessons of 1937"; his post is probably less damaging to our cause than all that face-slapping would be, though I don't know that it will have any more positive effect on Obama's Wall Street gang...

Do you suppose there's any way, perhaps through the work of a stage hypnotist, to implant a suggestion in all of Obama's advisors that "austerity" is equivalent to, say, "obscenity," or perhaps "marijuana," or maybe "WikiLeaks"?

There Is No ‘Fiscal Cliff’!

As many have said, in politics, s/he who controls the choice of language controls the dialogue. Enter the "fiscal cliff": a mythical Jan 1. deadline by which all sorts of dire things are supposed to happen, unless Congress and the president act to... well, to what? Well, to hear Republicans tell it, to avert a major fiscal crisis that will push us back into recession immediately.

And what do those same congressional Republicans propose as a remedy to these dire predictions? Awwww, c'mon: what do Republicans ever propose? tax cuts for the wealthy... the very thing least likely to alleviate any fiscal problem, except the problem of anything resembling fair taxes on their obscenely wealthy base! This is just another GOP attempt like the one they perpetrated some months back, to hijack a government they don't legitimately control at the moment.

Fortunately, MoveOn has done my homework for me and compiled a concise list reflecting the state of things, which I am taking the liberty of reproducing here (MoveOn explicitly invites us to share it):

1. The “Fiscal Cliff” Is A Myth. As Paul Krugman put it, “The looming prospect of spending cuts and tax increases isn’t a fiscal crisis. It is, instead, a political crisis brought on by the G.O.P.’s attempt to take the economy hostage.”^[1] Republicans are manufacturing this crisis to pressure Democrats to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and accept painful cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

2. The Bush Tax Cuts Finally End December 31. If Congress does nothing, the ax will fall on all the Bush tax cuts on New Year’s Eve.^[2] Then, on January 1, the public pressure on John Boehner and House Republicans to extend the middle-class tax cuts (already passed by the Senate and waiting to be signed by President Obama) will become irresistible.^[3] So the middle-class tax cut will eventually get renewed, and we’ll have $823 billion more revenue from the top 2% to do great things with.^[4]

3. The Sequester. The sequester is another political creation, forced on Democrats by Republicans in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling last year to avoid crashing our economy.^[5] It’s a set of cuts (50% to a bloated military budget and 50% to important domestic programs) designed to make both Republicans and Democrats hate it so much that they’d never let it happen.^[6] And the cuts can be reversed weeks or months into 2013 without causing damage.^[7]

4. The Big Three. Nothing happens to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits on January 1—unless Republicans force painful cuts to beneficiaries in exchange for tax increases on the wealthy, which are going to happen anyway if Congress does NOTHING.^[8] So, there’s literally no reason benefits cuts should be part of the discussion right now.

5. We Should Be Talking About Jobs. The real crisis Americans want Congress to fix is getting people back to work. And with just a fraction of that $823 billion from the wealthiest 2%, we could create jobs for more than 20,000 veterans and pay for the 300,000 teachers and 52,000 first responders, which our communities so desperately need.^[9] That’s not to mention jobs from investing in clean energy and our national infrastructure.

---

Sources

[1] “Hawks and Hypocrites,” The New York Times, November 11, 2012

[2] “Bush-Era Tax Cuts,” The New York Times, November 9, 2012

[3] “Boehner Is Bluffing,” Slate, November 9, 2012

[4] “CBO: Ending High-Income Tax Cuts Would Save Almost $1 Trillion,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 24, 2012

[5] “The sequester, explained,” The Washington Post, September 14, 2012

[6] Ibid.

[7] “Let’s Not Make a Deal,” The New York Times, November 8, 2012

[8] “How the Across-the-Board Cuts in the Budget Control Act Will Work,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,” April 27, 2012

[9] “Veterans’ Jobs Bill Blocked in the Senate,” The New York Times, September 19, 2012

[10] “Jan Schakowsky Announces new Budget Plan With Focus On Jobs,” The Huffington Post, August 10, 2011

[11] “Fact Sheet: The American Jobs Act,” The White House, September 8, 2011

I understand this full well. You do, too, if you've been following the same sources I have. The only question is whether Obama both understands it and will act on it. There is some hope: he seems to be feeling his post-election Wheaties these days. It's time he shows us what he's really made of.

Billionaires Buy... Bupkis

... and the incomparable Jim Hightower summarizes.

Given the way the GOP has approached literally everything lately, I suspect the message these masters of the universe will take from the drubbing they experienced is "next time, twice as much money."

I'm sure that will help. I'm just not sure if it will help them... or us!

Robert Reich On Taxing The Rich

Robert Reich offers two articles, each in its own way an argument for why we must tax the wealthy their fair share of the burden:

• On Facebook, via ellroon, on how to cut the deficit by the apparent consensus figure of $4 trillion, "without raising taxes on the middle class, without cutting Social Security or Medicare and Medicaid, without cutting education or infrastructure, without reducing programs for the poor."
• On Reich's own site, about the next game of economic "chicken": the notion of competing legitimate national needs and the role of timing in meeting them;

Sounds good to me. America's wealthy have never been richer, or taken away a larger share of total income, or paid less in taxes, than today. It's time they carried their load.

So THAT's Why Rmoney Was Concealing His Taxes

Bloomberg via Raw Story:

Bloomberg News: Romney ‘rented’ Mormon church’s exemption to defer taxes for 15 years

By David Edwards
Monday, October 29, 2012 15:08 EDT


Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney used a loophole to “rent” the Mormon church’s tax exemption status and defer paying taxes for 15 years, according to a new report.

Tax returns obtained by Bloomberg News through a Freedom of Information Act request indicated that Romney set up a charitable remainder unitrust (CRUT) in June 1996 just before Congress cracked down on the loophole in 1997.

“In this instance, Romney used the tax-exempt status of a charity — the Mormon Church, according to a 2007 filing — to defer taxes for more than 15 years,” Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker explained. “At the same time he is benefitting, the trust will probably leave the church with less than what current law requires.”

Estates lawyer Jonathan Blattmachr told Bloomberg that Romney’s trust benefits from the Mormon church’s exempt status because charities don’t pay capital gains taxes when they make a profit from the sale of assets.

“The main benefit from a charitable remainder trust is the renting from your favorite charity of its exemption from taxation,” Blattmachr said, adding that the charitable contribution “is just a throwaway” and the church would receive little if any financial benefit from the trust.

...

I don't know about you, but this infuriates me well beyond Rmoney's raw wealth, which is after all not that unusual among the 0.01% in America today. It's his sense of privilege. I can just imagine Rmoney saying: "I, wealthy scion of a high-ranking Mormon family, can shelter much of my income from taxes for fifteen years, while you, stupid schmuck, have to pay your full amount yearly. And you deserve it, slave, for being who you are. I've got mine because of who I am, and fuck you if you don't like it!"

American presidents have been on the whole relatively wealthy more often than not. Some, like both Roosevelts, were very wealthy... and did not for the most part exercise their privileges to the egregious disadvantage of ordinary Americans. They seemed to have some ability to comprehend what it is like to be ordinary, or poor, or flat broke and on the street, even as they never were themselves.

Then there's Myth Rmoney.

The class schism has grown almost without bounds in America in my lifetime. The 99% are struggling down here and the 1%, especially the 0.001%, live in the economic stratosphere. And they have absolutely no since of noblesse oblige... none whatsoever. Does this mean they are "bad people"? IMHO, yes. And Myth Rmoney is one of those bad people.

If you want to support the Myth Rmoneys of the world on your tired backs for the rest of your life, go ahead and install this one in the presidency, or allow him to steal it.

If not... fight like bloody hell for the next few days. Your grandchildren's lives may depend on it.

(H/T ellroon.)

Avedon Carol And Stuart Zechman: Vote To Make A Statement, Knowing The New Deal Is Going Down No Matter How You Vote

Please read. Ms. Carol (interleaving quite a bit of Mr. Zechman's prose) has contemplated the same bone-chilling possibilities I foresee, whoever is elected. She comes to a different conclusion on whom to vote for, but only by a hair. You'd better start thinking about what life will be like without the crux of the New Deal to civilize the jungle that is America today, because neither major party candidate will keep it safe, and no minor party candidate has a chance in Hell. Go vote, and Dog preserve you all from the worst possible results.

Are We (Bleep!)ed?

Please read FDL's masaccio's A Glimpse of the Oligarchy’s View of the Future for US Workers. Better read the comments as well. Please tell me what you think of the content.

Are we as fucked as masaccio believes we are? Will voting do any good? Are hard times about to befall us again? Are manufacturing jobs about to reappear in the US, but with salaries reduced to $13 — $18 an hour to compete with Chinese wages? If any or all of this is the case, what can we do about it?

And... will there be violence in the streets in America, violence which the oligarchs are said to fear above all else? If there is, will the oligarchs persuade their tame "elected" public officials to act to use the US Army to impose indefinite detention on citizens within the US, as implied in the National Defense Authorization Act? (See comment on above post by 1der, quoting Chris Hedges. Please follow all links regarding Hedges's suit against the Obama administration, resulting, for now, in a ruling that the NDAA is unconstitutional... Obama is of course appealing.)

If masaccio is right, let me add that we are not the first nation in history to suffer a vanishing middle class through the deliberate efforts of the very wealthy. Solutions have not always been tidy. Please feel free to offer your favorite comparisons.

Robert Reich: Rmoney Is 'Living Embodiment' Of Upward Redistribution Threat To Democracy

Robert Reich offers his observations on Rmoney's very circumscribed release of his tax information (those who remember Richard Nixon may call it his "modified limited hangout"), and what it implies:

...

"Job Creator's" Reward

American has had hugely wealthy presidents before — think of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt; or John F. Kennedy, beneficiary of father Joe’s fortune.

But here’s the difference. These men were champions of the working class and the poor, and were considered traitors to their own class. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the “malefactors of great wealth,” and he busted up the oil and railroad trusts.

FDR thundered against the “economic royalists,” raised taxes on the wealthy, and gave average working people the right to form unions — along with Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour workweek.

But Mitt Romney is not a traitor to his class. He is a sponsor of his class. He wants to cut their taxes by $3.7 trillion over the next decade, and hasn’t even specified what “loopholes” he’d close to make up for this gigantic giveaway.

And he wants to cut benefits that almost everyone else relies on — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and housing assistance.

...

In other words, everything America is learning about Mitt Romney — his tax returns, his years at Bain Capital, the video of his speech to high-end donors in which he belittles half of America, his gaffes, the budget policies he promotes — repeat and reenforce the same underlying reality.

So much wealth and power have accumulated at the top of America that our economy and our democracy are seriously threatened. Romney not only represents this problem. He is the living embodiment of it.

As I shut down my tiny business in the face of an overwhelming recession that kicked the bottom out of demand for the once highly sought product I produced, in my last year of that tiny business, as things were clearly going to ground for me and for millions of other small business owners, in that last year, I paid federal taxes at a far higher rate than Mitt Rmoney. In fact I'd say that because my income was earned income (not capital gains), and because self-employed Americans pay both halves (employee's and employer's) of their payroll tax, my tax rate was dramatically higher than that of Mitt Rmoney, Rich Boy Wonder.

And what does Rmoney do to "earn" all this money? That's simple: he uses other people's money to buy companies, squeezes them hard (firing people, selling assets) to make them appear more profitable, sells their lifeless carcasses to someone else, who finds out the hard way that you can't run a company without employees and equipment... and finally takes home his tidy profit. "Job creator," my fucking ass!

I'm sorry, but that's just not right. Mitt Rmoney is a freeloader. He takes from the little guy and gal. He doesn't worry about us; he said so right out in front of Dog and everybody. He forces the rest of us to compensate for his low, low tax rate; he leaves thousands of people jobless. And he does it because he can, and for him, that makes it "right." May the good Dog preserve me from people engaged in that sort of "rightness"!

Mr. Rmoney: you're no Teddy, and you're no FDR!

On History Repeating Itself With Scarcely A Mumble

Japanese Internees

I have been reading the late lamented Studs Terkel's "The Good War", his book about (as he spells it) World War Two. The quote marks, says Terkel, are part of the book's title, because that's what some people called it, but the phrase, of itself and without quote marks, is an oxymoron. Have I mentioned how much I miss the lively, vibrant Terkel in his long and well-lived life? Few people elicited my unreserved admiration as he did.

Horse Stables as Internee Residences

In an early chapter, Terkel interviews Japanese-Americans who in various ways and degrees experienced the internment. Japanese-Americans' businesses were seized; some were surveilled individually by FBI agents (not all willing agents, as it turns out) and many... far too many... American citizens were arrested and interned in camps of various sorts; one described in the book was a stables, complete with all the smells and utter lack of personal privacy. Families were broken up, men and older boys confined in one place and their wives and daughters in another. The resemblance to slavery, another historical practice of our "home of the free and the brave," was all too graphic and obvious. Some 110,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese legal residents on the American Pacific coast were interned; a much smaller number of those in the Hawaiian Islands, where a large fraction of the total population were of Japanese ancestry, were also interned. Internment took place in other states as well, applied "unequally" as described by the wiki. Military rule was instituted; civil liberties were largely squelched... both with the blessing of the Supreme Court. No American apology was forthcoming until October 1993, when President Bill Clinton at long last issued one.

Fast-forward to September 2001, and refocus on Houston, TX, on an apartment complex housing an odd blogger/musician/etc. and his mate. A family living near me were Muslim, scarcely a surprise in a city boasting one of the best and largest medical centers in the nation... we have all kinds of nationalities and religious affiliations among our residents, many of them students in advanced fields, and most Houstonians like it that way.

Guantánamo Detainees

I will call the couple "Mary and Joseph," mainly to annoy any jeebus-botherers who may be lurking about. They had two lovely, very young children. Both had good jobs in Houston. Within a few weeks of 9/11/2001, it became apparent to them that things were not going to return to normal in America for our Muslim residents. Fortunately for them, unfortunately for us, Joseph was Canadian by birth. When the handwriting was on the wall and John Ashcroft & Co. were at their most strident, even before Guantánamo was known for what it is today, the couple decided that life in America was about to become very difficult for Muslims, be they citizens or (especially) not, even basically apolitical Muslims like themselves. Rumors of possible internment, ultimately never realized in mass quantities, were all too plausible at the time. Nasty remarks were occasionally leveled at the children, who were probably just old enough to understand what was going on. So Joseph contacted his family in Canada, and the whole family packed up and moved home, rather than face what America had in store for Muslims. I don't blame them one bit. The whole incident was America's loss.

How many more times will America alienate... word chosen very deliberately... members of its population who do not suit the current majority's opinion? If, say, Rmoney were to become president, what would he order done to the 47% he spoke so ill of, and how far would his exclusionary policies reach, among Americans and generally desirable noncitizen aliens?

Our nation's ancestors surely turn in their graves every time an American government undertakes to divide, suppress and exclude some of us from the body politic. I believe we owe those ancestors a debt, payment of which means putting a stop to all the exclusion so popular in certain political circles. Either it stops, or America goes to ground, at least the America descended from those founders. Rmoney and crew may be prepared for that. I most emphatically am not.

Mother Jones Publishes Secret Video Allegedly Of Rmoney At High‑Dollar Fundraiser - UPDATED 2x

Via Paul Krugman, we have David Corn at Mother Jones providing videos, text transcripts and of course Corn's commentary on Rmoney's remarks at what appears to be a secret fundraiser for "a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires" (Paul Simon). Paul Krugman expresses some minor doubt that that really is Rmoney speaking (as whoever it is, is off‑camera), but I have watched (heard) all the videos all the way through, and I am persuaded that no actor could imitate Rmoney's speech that well, nor could anyone else write a script with the unconscionable depth of mean‑spiritedness on display in the segments of the speech.

If this is indeed Rmoney, he holds at least half of Americans in raw, unmitigated, unjustifiable contempt. He maligns the poor in almost every way possible; I kept expecting him to say that they... we... don't wash under our arms. Yes, it was that vile.

Rmoney correctly assesses that the election turns on as-yet-undecided independents, many of whom voted for Obama in 2008. But two things are clear: those indy voters are not stupid and are unlikely to be played as a group, and many of those same voters now find themselves in dire economic circumstances more like Rmoney's much-maligned lower-income and zero-income people. Perhaps some of the independents will indeed blame Obama (who, for all his faults in matters of human rights and civil liberties, is by and large not to blame for our nation's economic failures). But many of us can see through the smokescreen, and will at a minimum not vote for Rmoney. (I will in fact vote for Obama, with regret even as I push the button, but I will do it.)

And now that some of us have seen (heard) those videos, I suspect a few soft Rmoney supporters will be driven by outrage to vote for Obama. Maybe I am overestimating the common sense of the American people, or underestimating the effect of the next month and a half of false and vituperative Rmoney campaign ads, or failing to credit the effectiveness of the GOP's voter suppression program. But the revelation of these videos can only have a positive effect from our viewpoint.

We have a nation to save from vile plutocracy. It has nothing to do with whether Obama is your favorite president, or person, or anything else. Rmoney and Ryan are worse human beings than GeeDubya and Cheney ever dreamed of being in their most villainous fantasies. We have a job to do, and these videos, once authenticated, will help us to do it.

UPDATE early Tuesday 9/18: video confirmed by Rmoney at a 10:00pm presser as indeed being him, confirming his point but (paraphrasing his own words) admitting it was not "elegantly" stated. Then he doubled down on the content, once again calling approximately half of Americans lazy bums who don't work and don't pay taxes. What a motherfucking jerk.

UPDATE 2  early Tuesday 9/18:  Jeebus! David Brooks... yes, that DAVID BROOKS... agrees that Rmoney fucked up bigtime! Brooks even makes some rare sensible, even sensitive observations. Read him quickly, before he changes his mind!

Medicare Under Siege: Mitt Rmoney Will Cut Benefits For Current Seniors

... and fuck the "contract across generations" that has bound our society in one form or another for almost a century. Brian Beutler explains:

...

But the ticket also contends that a key difference between Obama and Romney is that Romney won’t change Medicare at all for existing beneficiaries — only future ones. Recent statements from his advisers and surrogates, suggest the claim is false.

As outlined in a memo the campaign released Saturday, Romney plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, and thus to spend over $700 billion more on the program in the coming decade than the government would spend if the health care law stands.

That commitment would leave Medicare poised for insolvency in 2016, years before he proposes to phase in the voucher system. Which means Romney would have two options: find new Medicare cuts or taxes to extend the life of the program, or preside over its demise.

On Fox News Sunday, Romney adviser Ed Gillespie tried to address the conundrum. “There are other reforms as well. As you know Governor Romney supports increasing over time bringing the Medicare eligibility age in line with the Social Security retirement age.”

...

There is a third option Beutler didn't mention: Rmoney could go jump in a lake. It would save the American people considerable grief.

When I paid my taxes for my parents' generation to receive Medicare, I did so in the then-scarcely-questionable assumption that a younger generation would pay my way when my time came. Now Rmoney wants, not merely to whack Medicare, but to funnel that money straight into the greedy hands of the wealthy bastards he thinks he represents. What a deal! It's a lot like what he intends to do to Social Security (see recent post): take all the money we paid into these programs all our working lives, and hand it out to his rich cronies.

Rmoney is threatening to change the rules in the middle of the game, rules on which everyone but the wealthiest 0.001% of Americans depend to stay alive. If Rmoney denies me my well-earned retirement, I will have nothing to lose, through no negligence on my part. We all know what people who are left with nothing to lose do, don't we? Good... I don't have to explain it to you.