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I tell him God is a massive turd sandwich, which is the verified TRUTH.
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Trust me!
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I was hoping for contrition edy but I wasn’t too optimistic we’d see it from a godless leftie. A godless foreign leftie even. The worst sort.
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This might be of interest.
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_this_God_Person_Anyway%3F . |
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https://twitter.com/timburtpoker/status/1306093007578583040
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So now 8/10 of the top ten states for virus infection rate are run by republican governors and even more telling is that only one of those eight are in the top ten for testing rate with most languishing in the bottom half of that ranking.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ . |
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But why didn't Biden implement a national mask mandate?
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A waiter told him not to bother.
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Trump virus has so far killed over 201,000 folks in USA and there are over 2,500,000 active cases and over a thousand new deaths per day.
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Remember when Dr Tony Fauci was dismissed out of hand by Trump when he suggested when the tally was at 30K that total deaths could be over 200K?
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Dirty Donnny up to his old tricks again
 wacwww.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/17/donald-trump-accused-of-sexual-assault-by-former-model-amy-dorris |
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I would advise you to look at deaths per million David.
Comparing 'cases' in New York in March to cases anywhere now shows you have a complete and utter lack of understanding as to what is going on. |
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I'd advise you to look at these GOP states who had every opportunity to control the spread and did nothing and shake your head.
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Going back to joe and his cringe dancing to `Despacito`, I`ve just been reminded that the lyrics include;
`I want to breathe your neck, slowly` and `Let me tell you things in your ears` Remembering joe`s life-long penchant for doing exactly such pervy stuff to children, these lyrics are just too exquisite! ` |
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dems, wanting to create as much fear, disorder and misery as possible before the election, pressured the `Big 10` football league into not playing this season. Knowing how much a part of Middle America their college football is, in stepped The Don, and now Big 10 will start their season next month, creating oodles of feelgood towards The Don, just before the election! And where is the Big 10 centred? Why, none other than the crucial, deciding states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Milwaukee!
Top vote-winning stuff from The Don, THIS IS ALL OVER!!! |
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Dear oh dear, Donald whines and moans then forgets where he is. Hilarious, he has to ask the crowd where he's speaking.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAFiYKiR_HM
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Is it just me or is Trumps speech slurred throughout that link?
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He's also wriggling around like he's got an itchy @rsehole and can't scratch it.
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That is a fake video - why do you keep desperately posting fake media and lies?
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/16/trump-nwa-despacito-biden-twitter/
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pp, just try listening to him on Fox. He's deffo on something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dwCK-N-HXI |
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Amazing how many times we’ve been told this is ALL OVER. It’s almost like tim is trying to persuade himself. Are the fake clips and far right blogs not quite doing it for you right now, tim?
Trump does seem a bit slurry and a bit slow. I don’t think it’s dramatically different to how he’s been for the last few years but he seems to have lost some of his bully boy edge, that carried him through the Rep nomination debates, at least, in 2016. I suppose we’ll see soon enough. I think Biden will land a few blows, despite not being a great debater either. He does seem to have got a solid recollection of a bunch of things Trump has said and done to attack him on though. Probably Trump will either not recall or affect not to recall any of them. |
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Seemed pretty good at a speech last night in Wisconsin, his speech starts at 2.54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NYbW9b3HCY
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He doesn’t sound like he’s had a recent significant stroke affecting his speech, if that’s what your bar for pretty good is. It’s plausibly coherent but hardly fluent.
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Would a TIA possibly explain the lack of fluency fats?
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` It’s plausibly coherent` what planet are you from there`s FA wrong with him, no different from his speeches back in 2016, he kicked ass then and he`s kicking ass now.
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He can't lift a glass of water up to his mouth with his right hand, he can't move his right arm when walking and his shuffling gait indicates medical issues.
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Apart from his slurred speech and inability to pronounce some words.
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In the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District, a few blocks from the Transamerica Pyramid Center that defines the city’s skyline, sits a 52-story tower, the kind you might find in any major city. Its name, 555 California Street, is as forgettable as its appearance, all brown and black and boring. Inside, a team of security guards watches over the elevator banks in the lobby, checking IDs.
To get past them and into the heart of the building, I signed up for a desk in a coworking space on the 49th floor. Once there, I rode down to a different floor, the 43rd, and walked off the elevator. Before me stood a pristine office with shiny concrete floors, subdued gray couches, empty chairs, and a sign that read, “Qatar Investment Authority Advisory (USA) Inc.” and, in smaller type, “A subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority.” Nothing inside the place looked as if it had been touched. There was a marble welcome desk but no one to welcome visitors. On top of the counter sat a plant that looked like it had been dead for months. I rapped my knuckles on the glass doors. No one answered, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. The next day, in the morning, I returned. Again I knocked. And again no one answered. Why would anyone, much less an entity that serves as an arm of the Qatari government, bother outfitting an empty office space in an expensive San Francisco skyscraper? Consider who owns the building. The lobby features signs for Vornado Realty Trust, the publicly traded firm, with innumerable shareholders, that has a 70% stake in the tower. The other 30% belongs to a single man: Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States. His interest here is worth an estimated $442 million after debt—making it the most valuable holding in his entire portfolio. It’s worth more than twice as much as Trump Tower, more than seven times as much as Trump’s property in Vegas, 16 times as much as his Doral golf resort in Miami. The amount Qatar pays in rent remains a mystery. Odds are, it adds up to a sum most billionaires not named Trump would hardly notice. According to a Vornado document, the office is just 5,557 square feet. If the Qataris are paying the average rate in the building, that would amount to $450,000 a year, and Trump’s 30% would total $135,000. The money does not flow directly. Instead, it appears to go from the U.S. subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund, to HWA 555 Owners LLC. According to filings Trump sent to federal ethics officials, the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust owns 30% of HWA 555 Owners LLC. And that trust, according to documents the Trump Organization submitted to authorities in Washington, D.C., was set up “to hold assets for the exclusive benefit of Donald J. Trump.” Trump, in other words, personally holds 30% of the space the Qataris are leasing. Strip away the layers and it boils down to just the sort of arrangement the founding fathers feared. A foreign government, it seems, has been paying the president of the United States for more than a year. With so many other scandals brewing, this one has managed to go entirely undetected—until now. In order to understand why Qatar might want to funnel cash to the president, it’s important to first understand U.S.–Qatari relations. A peninsula hanging off Saudi Arabia, smaller than the state of Connecticut, Qatar has played an outsize role in global politics for one reason: money. There are 77% more natural gas reserves sitting under Qatar than under the entire United States, helping to make Qatar, on a per capita basis, the second-richest nation on earth. Although Qatar doesn’t share many American values—monarchs rule the country, and its labor abuses are legendary—it has long been an ally of the United States. Qatari troops fought alongside Americans in the Gulf War. Afterward, the tiny nation spent more than $8 billion on a military base hosting American troops near Doha, the Qatari capital, which has been a key center for operations in Afghanistan and Syria. America has other allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But for years, the allies have been sparring among themselves. In 2014, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain pulled their ambassadors from Qatar, accusing the country of backing terrorists. In May 2017, Trump took his first trip overseas as president, visiting Saudi Arabia, a nation that had recently pumped more than $270,000 into the Trump International Hotel. In early June, the Saudis and several other Middle Eastern nations collectively cut off diplomatic ties with Qatar. Saudi Arabia also shut down its border with its neighbor, turning Qatar into a virtual island. President Trump left little doubt about whose side he was on in the dispute. “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology,” he tweeted in June 2017. “Leaders pointed to Qatar—look!” Qatar denied the charges and worked to defend its reputation, shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobbyists to vouch for the embattled nation in Washington. The Qataris also struck deals with American companies like Boeing and Raytheon. And, in a move that managed to evade detection, they figured out how to rent space inside Trump’s most valuable property. The Qataris finished outfitting their new office space on the 43rd floor sometime after February 2018, when the Saudi dispute was still raging, according to someone who worked inside the skyscraper. In August 2018, Trump’s partner Vornado filed a document with San Francisco officials about work being done on the premises, describing the Qatar Investment Authority Advisory (USA) Inc. as a “lessee.” Construction crews built out an office, complete with intricate white latticework in the entryway. After the hammers stopped banging, however, the space went unusually quiet. “I never saw a single person enter the office other than construction,” the person who worked in the building explained in a text message. “I travel a lot so could have missed it but definitely saw people in other offices. Always thought it was strange,” the source added. Also strange: The lobby’s long list of tenants made no mention of the Qatar Investment Authority. The website for the Qatar Investment Authority listed an office in New York, but it didn’t say anything about one in San Francisco. When asked about this deal and others, a spokesperson for the White House replied in an email, “These are all questions for Trump Org. Not the White House.” The Trump Organization did not respond to a long list of questions. Spokespeople for Vornado and the Qatar Investment Authority declined to comment. It’s unclear what, if anything, goes on inside the space. Regardless, the arrangement may be a violation of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids presidents from accepting “emoluments”—compensation—from foreign governments. The president’s legal team has previously argued that when a foreign government pays the president at his Washington, D.C. hotel, it’s legal, because the trade constitutes a “value-for-value exchange”—Trump gets money, and the officials get a place to stay. In the San Francisco office tower, however, it’s harder to make that case. Trump apparently still receives the money, and the Qatar Investment Authority gets an empty office space that it does not seem to need. Close to the time that workers were renovating the 43rd floor, the president’s attitude toward the Gulf nation changed. In April 2018, Trump welcomed Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, the ruler of Qatar, to the Oval Office. On this visit, the U.S. president commended Qatar for fighting against terrorism funding. A year later, Al-Thani returned to Washington. This time, Trump was ready with a welcome party inside, of all places, the Treasury Department’s Cash Room, which once stored America’s gold, silver, and dollar bills. Steven Mnuchin, secretary of the Treasury, kicked off the dinner with a toast. “This room,” he said, “is a fitting tribute to the economic and security partnership between our two nations.” Encircling the tables, adorned with royal-blue cloths, sat 40-odd business leaders, about a third of whom held personal fortunes of over $1 billion. Some of the names on the guest list were the sort of people you might expect—corporate titans with cash-fueled relationships in Qatar. Dennis Muilenburg, then the CEO of Boeing, was selling five 777 Freighters to Qatar’s national airline. Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy was ready to ship off a couple of missile systems. Chevron Phillips Chemical CEO Mark Lashier was teaming up with the Qataris on a new petrochemicals complex. But there were other businessmen there with more unorthodox connections to Qatar. Their businesses helped link the Qatari government to the president’s own family. Billionaire Bruce Flatt of Brookfield Asset Management was there. Brookfield’s real estate arm, Brookfield Property Partners, invested in a fund that paid $1.3 billion to lease 666 Fifth Avenue, a troubled Manhattan skyscraper owned by the family of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The largest outside shareholder in Brookfield Property Partners is the Qatar Investment Authority. Also on the guest list: Vornado CEO Steven Roth, Trump’s partner in the San Francisco tower where the Qatar Investment Authority had leased office space. Given the business ties, Flatt and Roth had reason to recognize a few faces among the official Qatari delegation. The CEO of the Qatar Investment Authority, Mansoor bin Ebrahim Al-Mahmoud, was there. As was the chairman, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, and two other directors, Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi and Ali Shareef Al-Emadi. In all, about one third of the Qatar Investment Authority’s board of directors had assembled inside the Cash Room. President Trump stood up to give remarks. “I have to say that the investments that you make in the United States,” he told his guests, “are very much appreciated.” By law, the president has to disclose every company that pays him, but he does not have to reveal who, in turn, pays those companies. That means that Trump, who holds his commercial real estate portfolio through a web of entities, does not have to disclose who his tenants are. It’s a massive loophole in federal disclosure laws, one that allows the president to accept money from entities all over the world without ever having to tell federal ethics officials who is paying him. Anticipating concerns about conflicts of interest, the Trump Organization set up an ethics plan before the president took office. One of its key tenets: an adviser would review any new deals that came about while Trump served as president. The attorneys who helped put together this plan made it seem like an airtight arrangement. “Written approval of the ethics advisor is required for all actions, deals, and transactions that could potentially raise ethics or conflict-of-interest concerns,” they wrote in a white paper. But that wasn’t what happened. According to Trump Organization chief legal officer Alan Garten, Trump’s business did not review potential tenants in buildings where Trump held a minority stake. That opened up a massive breach in the ethics pledge, because Trump’s two most valuable assets are minority stakes in office buildings: his 30% ownership of 1290 Avenue of the Americas and 555 California Street. “We have no involvement or approval rights over the selection of any of the tenants in those buildings and play no role in the negotiation of any of their leases,” Garten explained in an email. Trump’s 30% share of the rent in the two office towers amounts to an estimated $99 million annually, or roughly 52% of the commercial rent flowing into the Trump Organization. In other words, despite preinauguration promises, half of the money flowing through the president’s commercial real estate portfolio does not appear to have gone through any internal vetting process. It didn’t go through an external one, either, since neither the Trump Organization nor the White House would release a list of the president’s tenants. In early 2018, my former Forbes colleague Matt Drange and I started gathering data on who paid the president rent. Some companies were easy to find, like the ones renting space in storefronts at street level. Offices posed more of a challenge, since law firms and investment shops don’t typically plaster their names on the sides of their buildings. At 40 Wall Street, another colleague, Deniz Çam, found a directory of tenants, which was later removed. Eventually we tracked about 75% of the money flowing into the president’s coffers from tenants across the country. While writing this book, I dug in again, returning to the properties, speaking with tenants, and hunting for additional documents. The biggest breakthrough came in October 2019, when I happened upon a digital book revealing virtually all of the tenants inside Trump’s two hardest-to-access towers, which also happen to be the most important properties, 1290 Avenue of the Americas and 555 California Street. The book had been published on a website called FlipHTML5, which helps companies create digital books, by a user named VNO—the three-letter ticker for Vornado, Trump’s partner in both buildings. I sent the book to Vornado representatives to verify its authenticity; they declined to comment. But after corroborating much of its information with calls to tenants and visits to the properties, I used it to help construct a new list of Trump’s tenants—the most complete look at who pays rent to the president ever published. The Trump Organization did not respond to an offer to review the data. The rent estimates are intentionally conservative, which helps explain why the total adds up to 93% of the roughly $191 million that the president generates in annual rent. By the time Trump finishes his first term in office, he will have collected about $750 million from more than 150 different tenants. It’s hard to fault the companies for the conflicts of interest this creates. Most are just trying to find places to do business. Many rented the locations before their landlord became president. Two said they did not even realize they were renting from the president until Forbes informed them that they were. Instead, the blame lies squarely with the president. By hanging on to his portfolio, he put dozens of companies in the awkward position of asking the federal government for favors while paying the president huge sums of money. It’s an ethical nightmare. Four foreign government entities—from China, Qatar, India, and the United Arab Emirates—have rented space in Trump’s buildings while he’s served as president. At least 35 tenants lobbied the federal government on policy issues. Twenty of those pitched the White House or the president personally. Thirty or more tenants collected over $8 billion in federal government contracts from 2018 to 2019 alone. At least 17 faced federal investigations on matters including fraud, money laundering, and corruption. Add it all up and Trump’s tenant relationships create one of the most significant potential conflicts of interest in American history. For additional evidence that the president is violating the American constitution, all you need to do is walk onto the 20th floor of Trump Tower. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which is majority-owned by the Chinese government, has an office there, in a deal that has been reported on periodically. Of all the foreign government payments that spark allegations that Trump is flouting the emoluments clause, none involve more money than this one. According to a 2012 debt prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Chinese bank paid $1.9 million of rent a year, as part of a lease that was set to run out on October 31, 2019. The expiration date landed in the middle of Trump’s first term in office. Which apparently means that the president’s two eldest sons, Eric and Don Jr., who took over day-to-day management of the president’s business when their father ascended to the presidency, were in a position to negotiate with the Chinese over how much money they would pay President Trump—while President Trump simultaneously negotiated with China as part of his massive trade war. Like a lot of what goes on inside the Trump family business, the details of those lease negotiations remain murky. They may not have happened at all. Donald Trump claimed, during a 2015 interview with Forbes, that the Chinese had “just extended their lease for another 10 years.” But Trump was on a lying spree that day—seconds later, he declared that Trump Tower’s profits were five times higher than they actually were—so it’s hard to know whether he was telling the truth about the rental agreement. There’s plenty of evidence suggesting he was not. For starters, Eric Trump later said the lease included an option for two five-year extensions, without mentioning the possibility of a 10-year one. Besides, why would a tenant sign a 10-year renewal in 2015 if its agreement did not expire until 2019? In 2018, the bank inked a new deal to rent 99,000 square feet of space in a different skyscraper a handful of blocks away. Since the bank’s new space was about five times larger than its old office, it seemed likely that the Chinese would be moving out of Trump Tower. Instead, they stayed, for some reason electing to maintain two offices in Midtown Manhattan. Representatives of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China did not respond to a half dozen requests for comment. In January 2019, Bloomberg News reported that the bank was merely downsizing its space in Trump Tower, citing “people with knowledge of the matter.” If they did downsize, it doesn’t seem to have been by much. “They are keeping a couple of floors,” Eric Trump conceded onstage at a business conference weeks before the original lease was scheduled to expire. According to the Trump Organization’s own marking materials, the floors inside Trump Tower contain roughly 15,000 square feet. So by keeping “a couple of floors,” the Chinese bank was apparently staying in most—if not all—of its previously occupied 20,000 square feet. These days, it’s unclear exactly how much the China-owned bank is paying the president. If the rent is the same as it was before, then Trump will collect $7.8 million from the bank by the end of his first term in office. That appears to be enough money to disprove the Trumps’ claim that they are handing over all their profits from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury. In 2017 and 2018, the Trump Organization donated a reported $343,000 in profits from foreign governments. Over those same two years, however, the Trump Organization collected roughly $3.9 million in rent from the Chinese bank. The rent comes with some expenses—profit margins at Trump Tower are an estimated 42%. That suggests profits from the deal with the Chinese would add up to about $1.64 million in 2017 and 2018. The Chinese government owns at least 70% of the bank, but even if you count only 70% of those profits as coming from a foreign government, you still end up with $1.2 million. In other words, more than three times as much as the Trump Organization’s donations to the Treasury. And that $1.2 million figure is before accounting for any of the foreign money flowing through Trump hotels in D.C. and elsewhere. Then there were law firms who served as tenants while lobbying on behalf of various foreign clients, including some with disastrous reputations. Jones Day helped Huawei, the Chinese technology company that Trump labeled a national security risk, with issues before the White House while also paying the president an estimated $1.5 million a year. Venable LLP, a firm renting space inside 1290 Avenue of the Americas for an estimated $12.2 million a year, lobbied the Treasury Department and Congress on behalf of Russian state-controlled bank Sberbank, weighing in on bills designed to expose corruption around the Kremlin and combat Russian interference in elections. A spokesperson for Venable suggested that connecting its rent payments to its lobbying efforts requires “an incredible leap of logic.” Fair enough. But it’s still remarkable that a Trump tenant was apparently pushing Vladimir Putin’s agenda in Washington. And because of lax disclosure laws that leave the details of these transactions secret, it took more than three years into Donald Trump’s presidency for anyone to notice. Trump’s agreements with American companies proved just as problematic. One month after taking office, the president hosted a group of retail CEOs at the White House. He took a seat at a long table, flanked by administration officials and leaders of eight businesses from around the country. To Trump’s right sat billionaire Stefano Pessina of Walgreens Boots Alliance, a pharmacy giant that served as the largest tenant inside 40 Wall Street, Trump’s tower in the Financial District of New York City. The company paid about $3.2 million a year for retail and office space. Pessina had come a long way to get to this point. Born in Milan, he became a nuclear engineer before getting involved in his family’s struggling pharmaceutical business. He proceeded to go on a shopping spree, buying up a reported 1,500 competitors throughout Europe to create a giant called Alliance UniChem. In 2006, Alliance UniChem merged with Boots Group of Great Britain in a blockbuster deal, termed the largest leveraged buyout in European history. Eight years later, Pessina began combining Alliance Boots with Walgreens, putting himself in position to become a drugstore giant on both sides of the Atlantic. But that wasn’t enough. In October 2015, Deerfield, Illinois–based Walgreens Boots Alliance unveiled plans to acquire Rite Aid for $9.4 billion. In order to prevent buyout barons from creating monopolies, the Federal Trade Commission analyzes mergers and determines whether they will limit competition. Regulators in the Obama administration had studied the Walgreens–Rite Aid merger for more than a year, but they had not reached a conclusion by the time President Trump took over. That left the decision up to an administration whose president was collecting millions of dollars a year from one of the parties asking for clearance. “Good morning retailers,” Trump said. “One of my favorite subjects—retailing.” The president launched into a brief speech touting how his administration planned to help the business community by cutting both taxes and regulations. It seemed as if Trump was particularly aware of the issues Walgreens Boots Alliance was having with federal regulators, which made sense, since the pharmacy chain was lobbying the White House on “competition policy issues,” according to disclosures its representatives filed with the government. The president gestured in the direction of Pessina. “You have a very, very big regulatory problem,” he said. “And we’re going to take care of that.” Seven months later, the Federal Trade Commission cleared the way for a trimmed-down $4.4 billion version of the Rite Aid takeover. The approval process was unusual. The FTC typically has five commissioners who weigh in on such things. But at the time, there were only two, in part because Trump had been slow to nominate commissioners. One of the two commissioners argued against the move, saying it could limit competition and increase drug prices. The other, who served as acting chairman, disagreed, which was enough to let the deal move forward. A few months later, the president announced his plan to nominate the commissioner who’d sided with Walgreens Boots Alliance, Maureen Ohlhausen, to serve as a federal judge. It’s difficult to know whether Trump’s business ties to Walgreens Boots Alliance affected any of this. A spokesperson for the pharmacy chain claims that the lobbying on “competition policy issues” did not have to do with the Rite Aid merger. Ohlhausen says Trump’s relationship with Walgreens Boots Alliance had no impact on her analysis. “No one at the White House, including the president, ever made his or her opinion on this or any other pending merger known to me.” But President Trump has offered his opinion on mergers before other parts of the government. He lamented the FCC’s refusal to approve a Sinclair Broadcast-Tribune Media merger, calling the move “disgraceful.” And he said that he was “not going to get involved in litigation” related to a potential AT&T-Time Warner combination but then declared it “a deal that’s not good for the country.” At the very least, those sorts of comments raise questions about the independence of the federal bureaucracy. They create additional concerns in cases where Trump has a business connection, leaving the American public to wonder whether companies paying the president get special treatment. Also questionable: the president’s interactions with Wall Street. Two weeks after his inauguration, Trump welcomed to the White House CEO Jamie Dimon, whose company, JPMorgan Chase, pays the president an estimated $2.5 million a year. Trump expressed his excitement at hearing Dimon’s thoughts on Dodd-Frank, the landmark legislation intended to rein in the excesses that led to the Great Recession. “There’s nobody better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie, so you’re going to tell me about it,” Trump said to Dimon at the time. “We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank because, frankly, I have so many people, friends of mine that have nice businesses that can’t borrow money. They just can’t get any money because the banks just won’t let them borrow because of the rules and regulations in Dodd-Frank.” The regulations that govern Wall Street go beyond Dodd-Frank. For example, in 2015 Barack Obama suggested a rule requiring retirement advisers to prioritize their clients’ financial interests over their own. Sounds simple. For financial firms, however, it posed a challenge, since many of their businesses generate revenue by steering clients toward products with big fees, which may not be best for clients. One of Trump’s tenants, Morgan Stanley, lobbied on the rule, taking its case straight to the Executive Office of the President—the official name for Trump and the team that surrounds him. The Trump administration issued a review of the rule and postponed its implementation. Ultimately, the intervention proved unnecessary. The rule fell apart in the courts, allowing financial planners to continue giving questionable advice. The Trump administration did, ultimately, end up implementing a different rule to try to protect investors from bad advice. A different tenant, JPMorgan Chase, weighed in on that regulation. The administration also went easy on Trump tenants convicted of committing crimes. Before Trump took office, three of his tenants, JPMorgan, UBS, and Barclays, pleaded guilty to manipulating interest and foreign exchange rates. The Trump administration issued waiver extensions to all three banks, as well as Trump’s lender, Deutsche Bank, allowing them to avoid part of their punishments. The potential conflicts reached into other industries as well, with tenants of all types pushing the president on issues big and small, in directions Trump favored and opposed. Columbia University lobbied on fetal tissue research—a controversial topic for pro-life advocates—while handing an estimated $2.1 million to the president every year. Nike lobbied the White House on international trade while paying Trump an estimated $13 million annually. Blockchain business Ripple Labs weighed in on financial regulations while handing Trump roughly $1.2 million a year. Even the Girl Scouts, whose New York Council leases space inside 40 Wall Street for $600,000 a year, lobbied the White House on designating June 2017 “Great Outdoors Month,” which President Trump ultimately did. It would be easy to brush all this aside if Trump’s tenants had never been accused of using money to buy influence. But that’s not the case. More than a dozen Trump tenants faced known federal investigations while their landlord was in office. Inside 40 Wall Street alone, at least six tenants faced federal scrutiny. Among them: an engineering firm listed on a debt prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as the third-highest-paying tenant inside the office building, responsible for $2.2 million in annual rent. In 2018, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office indicted the firm and its CEO as part of a corruption scheme related to New York City contracts. The CEO ended up pleading guilty to first-degree bribery. Today, a rebranded version of the firm, dubbed Atane, is still afloat with a slightly smaller lease, paying $1.3 million a year to rent in the president’s building. Even Trump’s blue-chip tenants have had issues. Walgreens Boots Alliance, JPMorgan Chase, Santander Bank, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs all paid the president rent while the federal government investigated their businesses. Capital One, which leased the corner space in Trump Park Avenue, faced an anti-money laundering investigation. So did UBS, which leases space in 555 California Street. Barclays, which once paid an estimated $2.4 million annually to rent space in 555 California Street, handed over $6 million in 2019 to settle charges that it had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by giving jobs to relatives of government officials in Asia in order to curry favor. In July 2019, at the same time that Microsoft was vying for a giant cloud computing contract with the Defense Department, the software firm paid $25 million to settle allegations that its subsidiaries in Hungary, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, funneling money and gifts to government officials. Twenty-first Century Fox, the former parent company of Fox News, paid Trump a small sum for engineering space that appears to be connected to an antenna on top of Trump International Hotel & Tower, in New York City. Despite all the attention paid to Trump’s cozy relationship with Fox, the deal has flown almost entirely under the radar. Before CNN watchers get too enraged, however, it’s worth noting that the Trump Organization has a similar agreement with that channel for use of an antenna atop the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. If it’s hard to keep up with all of this, that’s the point. There is simply too much money flowing between the federal government, President Trump, and private entities to investigate every deal—or the motivations behind it. Federal ethics officials do not even know who the president’s tenants are, much less what they pay or why they pay it. So the money keeps flowing. |
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dave1357 18 Sep 20 10:17
That is a fake video - why do you keep desperately posting fake media and lies? Don`t know what you`re referring to? |
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Long post PoP. I think the only people who care much about emoluments aren’t Trump voters anyway.
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One of the most important factors in The Don`s victory was the importance of a SCOTUS pick; tonight`s news, giving him another seat to fill, erases any lingering dreams lefties had of a joe win. The prospect of overturning Roe v Wade is here at last!
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Knowing THIS IS ALL OVER, lemon`s SEEEEEEETHING!!!
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CHORTLE as, everywhere you look, lefties are on the SEEEEEETHE!!! They KNOW how important tonight is, they KNOW this means FOUR MORE YEARS and, more importantly, they KNOW this means a 6-3 SCOTUS for a generation! Bye bye, evil leftie globalist`s plans, bye bye abortion, bye bye the end of the second amendment, America is saved from such demonic horrors, The Don and his SCOTUS picks cementing his place as The Greatest President We`ve Ever Known!!!!
Sculptor, you can start work immediately on the fifth eternal resident of Mount Rushmore! |
