"Don't just confiscate yachts"

[yellowstone123]

"Shut kleptocracy down"

Links in my email directed me to two articles from Anne Applebaum. I'll try to share what I read:

"In this weekend’s Financial Times, I make the case for changing the rules, getting rid of anonymously owned companies and abolishing offshore tax havens: We don’t need them. This is one of the themes of Autocracy Inc but I wanted to repeat some of them for FT readers, since London has long been the home to so many lawyers, accountants, bankers and others who enable the kleptocratic world…"

[FT is the Financial Times where the whole article is but I don't subscribe to it.]

"Donald Trump opened Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in 1983 and occupied the penthouse himself. The building was intended to advertise its owner’s wealth, and also to attract other rich tenants — including, ironically, the very secretive rich. Trump would sell 43 condos in Manhattan’s flashiest building to shell companies based in jurisdictions such as Panama, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, which conceal corporate records. He sold another six condos, for cash, to corporations based in Delaware, which has historically had the least transparent company laws in the US.

Not that this was anything exceptional: in the four decades that followed, more than a fifth of the sales in Trump-owned and Trump-licensed buildings, more than 1,300 properties, were made to anonymously owned shell companies, for cash, without a mortgage, which meant the purchasers did not have to have any uncomfortable conversations with lenders. Some of those companies sold those condos again, very quickly, at much higher prices or at much lower prices — usually a sign that money laundering might have been the actual purpose of the purchase. A Trump-licensed building in Florida sold a two-bedroom condo to a shell company on August 12 2010, for example, for $956,768. That shell company sold the condo to another shell company, at a heavy loss, for $525,000 that same day.

All of these transactions were legal and there’s no evidence to suggest that Trump or his companies knew of or were complicit in money laundering schemes. They have been reported and described many times. The examples cited above come from a BuzzFeed investigation published six years ago, in 2018, but it wasn’t the only one. A Financial Times investigation in that same year also found that Russian, Kazakh and other post-Soviet oligarchs had probably been laundering money through Trump-licensed properties.

During Trump’s presidency, the scrutiny on his business dealings intensified, but that made no difference: the proportion of his company’s anonymous sales went up, not down. In 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, more than two-thirds of sales in Trump-owned or Trump-licensed buildings, tens of millions of dollars’ worth of property, went to anonymous purchasers. If any of the buyers were hoping thereby to influence the domestic or foreign policy decisions of the Trump administration, we will never know.

In the years since Trump’s 2016 election, a lot has been written about his autocratic instincts, about his scorn for ethical norms and about his attempt to retain power after losing the 2020 election. But as illustrated by the story of his real estate company’s reliance on dubious shell companies, Trump was already operating in an alternate ethical universe long before he became president, a world where the rules that most ordinary people live by are easily broken. Inside this domain, anonymously owned companies and funds based in offshore tax havens hide what could be as much as 10 per cent of the world’s GDP. This is money earned from organised crime or narcotics operations, stolen from legitimate institutions, or simply hidden, legally, with the aim of avoiding taxation, alimony or embarrassment. In this world, theft is rewarded. Taxes are not paid. Law enforcement is impotent and underfunded. Regulation is something to be dodged, not respected."

I was reading another similar story by Anne Applebaum and I'll try to find it.

[Morley]

Nice post, Yellowstone.

Here's the link for the article you reference.

https://www.ft.com/content/0876ef7a-bf8 ... 9b4a11665c

[yellowstone123]

Nice post, Yellowstone.

Here's the link for the article you reference.

https://www.ft.com/content/0876ef7a-bf8 ... 9b4a11665c

Thanks, Morley. I appreciate it.

[yellowstone123]

I found the other article I mentioned but it was written by another person. No wonder.

It's by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic magazine. He writes about the conservative establishment and how they saw Trump during the last decade. It was actually a link in Anne Applebaum's "notes" on her substack page so that's where I saw it.

https://anneapplebaum.substack.com/notes

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters ... aign=share

"The Conservatives Who Sold Their Souls for Trump"

"The rage and shame of the anti-anti-Trumpers is getting worse."

"By Tom Nichols"

"Today, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (the flagship conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr.), published an article claiming that Donald Trump could win the 2024 election “on character.”

"No, really. But bear with me; the headline wasn’t quite accurate."

"Trump could beat Kamala Harris, Lowry wrote, not by running on his character but by attacking hers. According to Lowry, you see, one of Trump’s “talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power.” Thus, he argued, Trump could hammer Harris into the ground if he called her “weak” enough times—50 times a day ought to do it, according to Lowry—and especially if he gave her a funny nickname, like the ones he managed to stick on “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and “Little Marco” Rubio."

"All of this was presented in the pages of America’s newspaper of record, The New York Times."

"What’s going on here?"

"Many journalists are reluctant to report on Trump’s obvious instability and disordered personality—the “bias toward coherence” that The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has cautioned about. But Lowry’s article was different. I cannot know the actual thinking at the Times, although I suspect the paper accepted the article to offer a pro-Trump contributor as a way of displaying a diversity of views. The plunge that Lowry and others have taken into the muck of Trumpism, however, is not new, and has origins that are important to consider in the coming months of the 2024 election."

"When Trump decided in 2015 to run for president as a Republican (after years of being, at various times, a Democrat, an independent, and a Republican), the GOP establishment reacted mostly with horror. At the time, it claimed to be appalled by Trump’s character—as decent people should be—and rejected him as a self-centered carpetbagger who would only get in the way of defeating Hillary Clinton. Lowry’s National Review even asked some two dozen well-known conservative figures to spend an entire issue making the case against Trump."

"The reality, however, is that much of the conservative opposition to Trump in 2016 was a sham—because it came from people who thought they were safe in assuming that Trump couldn’t possibly win. For many on the right, slagging Trump was easy and useful. They could assert their principled conservatism and their political wisdom as they tut-tutted Trump’s inevitable loss. Then they could strip the bark off of a President Hillary Clinton while deflecting charges of partisan motivation: After all, their opposition to Trump—their own candidate!—proved their bona fides as ideologically honest brokers."

"It was a win-win proposition—as long as Trump lost and then went away."

"But Trump won, and arrangements, so to speak, had to be made. The Republican base—and many of its heaviest donors—had spoken. Some of the conservatives who rejected Trump stayed the course and became the Never Trump movement. Others, apparently, decided that never didn’t mean “never.” Power is power, and if getting the right judges and cutting the right taxes has to include stomping on the rule of law and endangering American national security, well, that’s a price that the stoic right-wingers of the greater Washington, D.C., and New York City metropolitan areas were willing to pay."

"Lowry and others in that group never became full-fledged MAGA warriors. Many of them hated Trump, as Tucker Carlson, now a born-again Trump booster, admitted in 2021; they just hated Democrats more. But they also hated being reminded of the spirit-crushing bargain they’d made with a tacky outer-borough real-estate developer they wouldn’t have spoken with a year earlier. As Charlie Sykes wrote in 2017, they adopted a new fetish:"

'Loathing those who loathe the president. Rabid anti-anti-Trumpism.'

"None of this internecine conservative sniping would matter, except that the anti-anti-Trumpers, in order to justify the abandonment of their principles, are driven to poison the well of public debate for everyone else. They never expected having to deal with Trump for this long; they never foresaw themselves doubling and tripling and quadrupling down to the point where they now must politely look away from felonies, attacks on America’s alliances, and promises to pardon insurrectionists. Lowry and others are intelligent people who know better, but their decision to bend the knee to Trump—even if only with a very small curtsy—requires them to take to the pages of America’s national newspapers and say that Trump might be terrible but Democrats are worse."

"For example, a colleague of Lowry’s at National Review, Dan McLaughlin, has for years argued that he could never vote for Trump but that he could not vote for Clinton, Biden, or Harris, either. Harris’s sudden upending of the race might change that. McLaughlin posted yesterday on X that “Harris isn’t just as bad as can be on nearly every policy issue—even profound life-and-death questions of conscience—she’s a menace to the survival of the constitutional order.”

This is a panicky and massive case of projection. McLaughlin might hate Harris’s views on abortion (among other things), but Trump is a demonstrated 'menace to the survival of the constitutional order,' and McLaughlin surely knows it.

"The anti-anti-Trumpers must now define Harris—and all Democrats—as evil beyond words. Otherwise, how would they explain the ghastly compromises they’ve made? How would they argue against voting to stop Trump? When other conservatives, such as noted retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, are enthusiastically endorsing Harris, some pretty fancy dancing is required to explain why your principles are more consistent than theirs. Unfortunately, when Trump is out there raising the bar on idiocy, cruelty, and anti-Americanism every day, that dancing looks more like Raygun than Fred Astaire."

"For the MAGA media soldiers—the prime-time lineup on Fox News, the talk-radio hosts, the podcasters, and others—wacky (and hideous) accusations against Harris and other Democrats about “Marxism” and “communism” and “after-birth abortions” come easily because they are aimed at people who are already addled by a steady diet of rage and weirdness. But the conservative intellectuals who once opposed Trump have been reduced to dressing up such bizarre arguments as reasonable criticisms. They often seem to be sighing heavily and regretting having to be on the same side as Trump—but that doesn’t stop them from making the risible claim that Trump and Harris are equally terrifying possibilities."

"Stepping outside of years of partisan tribal affiliations comes with professional and social costs (and for politicians, electoral consequences). But principles are sometimes burdensome things; that’s part of what makes them principles. The behavior of the anti-anti-Trumpers continues to be an inexcusable betrayal of the values they once claimed to hold. Many of them spoke, even passionately, against Trump—and then they shuffled into line. And for what? One more federal judge? A few billion more dollars in the account of a donor?"

"It’s one thing to sell your soul cheaply. It’s another to keep taking out second and third mortgages on it until all that’s left is debt and shame."

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Just to drive home the Russian thing, RT (Russia Today) has been using Tenet media, which promotes right wing youtubers like Tim Pool, to spam America with their propaganda. And the youtubers knew this:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... ia-russia/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Pool

- Doc

[Physics Guy]

One hypothesis is that the moral and intellectual defensibility of modern conservatism has always been an illusion, whether of self-deceiving doublethink or of deliberate false marketing. On this hypothesis, there just isn't really a conservative case to be made, and all those principled and educated conservative advocates have been solemnly twirling their wineglasses and sniffing and sipping a 90-proof cocktail of greed, rage, and fear, mixed with stupidity. Those who drink the stuff have only ever really done so for the kick.

For most consumers, listening to those pompous guys in suits yammer about bouquet and terroir was only tolerable because eventually they'd pour out some shots. Trump just rolls out the barrel, so there's no more need for stemware. That's the collapse of principled conservatism, on this hypothesis.

[yellowstone123]

Just to drive home the Russian thing, RT (Russia Today) has been using Tenet media, which promotes right wing youtubers like Tim Pool, to spam America with their propaganda. And the youtubers knew this:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... ia-russia/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Pool

- Doc

Thanks, Doc.

One part of the Mother Jones article read:

The indictment alleges that Tenet’s coverage “contain[ed] commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics…consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.

My response: so why is this an issue? People in the USA are free to express thoughts as long as it is consistent with what the courts rule as freedom of expression.

And all this stuff with Hillary’s emails and what Russia did or did not do baffles me. This is American politics which has always been dirty, filthy and nasty.

I throw up my hands when people yell about Russia meddling in our elections. I say why? We have been doing the exact same thing - so why is it right for us to do it in another country but wrong for them to do the same thing to us?

The USA employs spies who sabotage elections in foreign countries because we have an interest on who makes the rules there, and we want rules that favor us.

And spies do what they do and as a result - Democracy is thwarted, people die and families are destroyed so we can have access to the land, minerals, and what ever is discovered.

Not to get preachy but the USA needs to remove the beam first...