|
Disaster Capitalism Is Everywhere |
 |
|
Saturday, 03 October 2015 14:00 |
|
Loewenstein writes: "It's hard to find a better characterization of disaster capitalism than this - companies making money off catastrophe from the privileged few while ignoring the desperate pleas of the majority."
The aftermath of an April 2015 earthquake in Nepal. (photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
Disaster Capitalism Is Everywhere
By Antony Loewenstein, Al Jazeera America
03 October 15
A plethora of private companies are profiting from natural or man-made crises – abroad and at home
 hen an earthquake struck Nepal in April, thousands of locals died in the carnage. But many foreigners had far more luck as members of Global Rescue, a company committed to rescuing its clients from dangerous environments. “Why shouldn’t we be able to hire private armies to ensure our safe return home from vacation?” posed a recent article in Wired, headlined “The tricky ethics of the lucrative disaster rescue business.”
Global Rescue is booming, opening offices in Pakistan, Thailand and beyond. There’s nothing illegal about its operations, and its mandate makes a certain amount of sense: Anybody in the middle of a natural disaster would want to be helped immediately. But the corporation’s interests aren’t humanitarian — they’re profit-driven, with an annual membership costing approximately $700. In Nepal, limited numbers of helicopters were fought over to transport injured foreigners, while the vast majority of Nepalese had no choice but to wait for help from overwhelmed relief services. “It’s beyond our scope” to assist those locals trapped on snowy mountains, said Drew Pache, a Global Rescue employee and former U.S. special forces operative.
It’s hard to find a better characterization of disaster capitalism than this — companies making money off catastrophe from the privileged few while ignoring the desperate pleas of the majority. But it’s not just natural disaster that fuels such profiteering. From Greece and Papua New Guinea to Afghanistan and Haiti, countless industries are thriving by applying this rule to immigration, war, mining and aid. These businesses aren’t conducted secretively, in part because it’s nearly impossible to hold an American company to account if it breaches human rights in a faraway nation. Their success builds on an ideology, empowered by the existing political and media structures, that exploits the widespread anxiety or panic that follows a man-made or natural crisis. Companies such as Global Rescue thrive because of it. The process depends on powerful forces pushing through exploitative policies in the name of relief, progress or reform.
Further profits are being harvested from Europe’s refugee crisis. In Britain, the private outsourcing company Serco still runs the Yarl’s Wood immigration center, a facility with a shocking record of abuse against detainees. Despite this being known for years, David Cameron’s Conservative government reappointed the multinational firm in late 2014 with another eight-year contract. It makes no sense — I visited the center last year and found depression and bleakness — unless we view it through the grim lens of disaster capitalism. Companies such as Serco exploit the refugee crisis in Libya and Syria to bully and fund politicians and guarantee an increase in their bottom line. Serco is savvy enough to see dollar signs from the guaranteed exodus of people — and in turn, today’s political system, fueled by excessive money and donations, all but ensures this outcome.
The profit motive for firms isn’t a new phenomenon. Recall the East India Co., arguably one of the world’s first disaster capitalists, which oppressed Indian and Chinese locals to become leading corporate raiders. But the global reach of today’s companies and their extravagant takings place them in a unique and often unassailable position.
For example, British multinational security firm G4S, the largest of its kind in the world, continues to operate despite suffering innumerable scandals in the last decade. The firm is always willing to exploit a crisis for profit, including by offering protection to Western travelers or by building and staffing detention centers during the current refugee crisis. Its underpaid employees in South Sudan and South Africa are prone to abuse or accidents because the company simply won’t spend enough on training. Last year on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, an Iranian asylum seeker, Reza Barati, was murdered while in the supposed care of the company and the Australian government. Nobody has yet been brought to justice.
In Greece, years of harsh austerity have left the country economically broken. The collapsed health care system is keeping citizens sick and unable to access vital medicines. Instead of relieving this pain, the European Union has advocated mass privatization, including of water and airports, which will enrich the outsourcers but do nothing to help the Greek people. The governing party Syriza has struggled to fulfill its anti-austerity election commitments, and the far-right, neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn continues to draw support.
Disaster capitalism’s logic is clear as long as the system, according to Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, is “rigged.” This logic is on clear display in the U.S. as well. Since the global economic meltdown in 2008, financial firms such as Bank of America received tens of billions of dollars of government money to save them from collapse while committing vast fraud in the process. Virtually nobody was punished. Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, legally obligated to hold these companies to account, didn’t just squib his responsibility, he even returned to corporate law firm Covington & Burling after leaving office earlier this year to work again with corporations on its client list that he failed to prosecute when in office.
While the financial elite plays with each other’s toys, the American population has rarely been so reliant on state handouts. More than 1 in 5 children need food stamps. The middle class often struggles to pay rent, students are burdened with debt, and Americans, according to studies, have little hope for the future.
To defeat the current stasis requires challenging business as usual. Imagine a political system in which doing business with such outlaw outfits was either banned outright or reduced to a tiny trickle. Corporations such as Chemonics and Dyncorp, with dubious records both in the West and in developing nations, should not receive further governmental contracts unless they implement drastic internal changes to ensure accountability. That would be a massive first step in reducing the ability of disaster capitalists to get what they want from the political system.
 |
|
FOCUS: One Day After Warning Russia of Civilian Casualties, the US Bombs a Hospital in Afghanistan |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 03 October 2015 12:40 |
|
Greenwald writes: "Early this morning, in the Afghan city of Kunduz, the U.S. dropped bombs on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)). The airstrike killed at least 9 of the hospital's medical staff, and seriously injured dozens of patients. 'Among the dead was the Afghan head of the hospital, Abdul Sattar,' reported The New York Times."
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Occupy.com)
One Day After Warning Russia of Civilian Casualties, the US Bombs a Hospital in Afghanistan
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
03 October 15
 esterday afternoon, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power marched to Twitter to proclaim: “we call on Russia to immediately cease attacks on Syrian oppo[sition and] civilians.” Along with that decree, she posted a statement from the U.S. and several of its closest authoritarian allies – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UK – warning Russia that civilian casualties “will only fuel more extremism and radicalization.”
Early this morning, in the Afghan city of Kunduz, the U.S. dropped bombs on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)). The airstrike killed at least 9 of the hospital’s medical staff, and seriously injured dozens of patients. “Among the dead was the Afghan head of the hospital, Abdul Sattar,” reported The New York Times.
Jason Cone, MSF’s Executive Director, said the medical charity “condemns in the strongest possible terms the horrific bombing of its hospital in Kunduz full of staff and patients.” He added that “all parties [to the] conflict, including in Kabul & Washington, were clearly informed of precise GPS Coordinates of MSF facilities in Kunduz,” and that the “precise location of MSF Kunduz hospital [was] communicated to all parties on multiple occasions over past months, including on 9/29.” Worst of all, from MSF itself:
For its part, the U.S. military in Afghanistan issued a statement acknowledging that it carried out airstrikes, claimed they were conducted “against individuals threatening the force,” and conceded that “the strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” But the NYT reported: “From early on, the Taliban had respected the hospital’s request not to bring weapons inside, according to staff members, and the hospital had been a refuge in the shattered city of Kunduz. It was a place where the wounded from all sides were treated.”
The medical organization noted that “our hospital in Kunduz was the only one of its kind in NorthEastern Afghanistan.” It referenced a now-poignant tweet it posted earlier in the week:
Now, however, the Twitter accounts of various MSF branches are filled with horrific photographs of their staff traumatized and their hospital burning as a result of U.S. bombs:
MSF’s full, frequently updated, hard-to-read account of all of this is here.
This strike on a hospital in Afghanistan comes days after the Saudi-led coalition bombed a wedding in Yemen that killed more than 130 people. After days of silence from the U.S. Government – which has actively participated from the start in the heinous bombing of Yemen – Ambassador Power finally acknowledged the wedding massacre, but treated it like some natural disaster that has nothing to do with the U.S.: “Terrible news from Yemen of killing of innocent civilians & aid workers. Urgently need pol solution to crisis,” she tweeted.
Her accompanying statement claimed that “the United States has no role in the targeting decisions made by the Coalition in Yemen,” but yesterday, the Saudi Foreign Minister told CBS News that “We work with our allies including the United States on these targets.” There’s no dispute that the U.S. has lavished the Saudis with all sorts of weapons and intelligence as it carries out its civilian-massacring attacks on Yemen.
This last week has been a particularly gruesome illustration of continuous U.S. conduct under the War on Terror banner, including under the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president who celebrates himself for “ending two wars” (in the same two countries where the U.S. continues to drop bombs). The formula by now is clear: bombing whatever countries it wants, justifying it all by reflexively labeling their targets as “terrorists,” and then dishonestly denying or casually dismissing the civilians they slaughter as “collateral damage.” If one were to construct a list of all the countries in the world based on their credibility to condemn Russia for using this exact rhetorical template in Syria, the U.S. would literally be last on that list.
UPDATE: U.S. officials went to TIME Magazine yesterday to announce that Russia will be creating more terrorists than they kill as a result of misguided airstrikes in Syria. “We believe if you inadvertently kill innocent men, women and children, then there’s a backlash from that,” Lieut. General Bob Otto, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance said. “We might kill three and create 10 terrorists. It really goes back to the question of are we killing more than were making?”
It’s impossible to fathom what the U.S. media would be saying and doing if Russia did something like this in Syria. By contrast, the reaction to this airstrike by their own government will be muted and filled with apologia, ironically quite similar to the widely vilified caricature of Jeb Bush’s comments about the Oregon shooting spree: “stuff happens.”
UPDATE II: Al Jazeera reports that the hospital bombed by the U.S. “is the only medical facility in the region that can deal with major injuries.” Nonetheless, “officials of MSF … told Reuters that they ‘frantically phoned’ NATO and Washington DC, as bombs rained on the hospital for ‘nearly an hour.'”
UPDATE III: The latest casualty figures from MSF:
Speaking to the nation just three days ago about the Oregon shooting spree, Barack Obama said: “This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months…” That applies to a lot more than that incident.
UPDATE IV: Several reports suggest that this hospital has been viewed with hostility because it treats all injured human beings, regardless of which side they’re on. “The hospital treated the wounded from all sides of the conflict, a policy that has long irked the Afghan security forces,” reports the NYT. Al Jazeera notes that “a caretaker at the hospital, who was severely injured in the air strike, told Al Jazeera that clinic’s medical staff did not favour any side the conflict. ‘We are here to help and treat civilians,’ Abdul Manar said.” That same caretaker added: “Several women and children are also killed in the strike. I could hear them screaming for help inside the hospital while it was set ablaze by the bombing. We are terrified and speechless.”
UPDATE V: The U.N. human rights chief has denounced the U.S. airstrike as “tragic, inexcusable, and possibly even criminal.”
This is not the first time this has happened. In 2004, U.S. airstrikes in Falluja, Iraq hit a hospital and “razed it to the ground.”
|
|
|
FOCUS: The Donald Is a Fraud |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35461"><span class="small">Nomi Prins, TomDispatch</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 03 October 2015 12:02 |
|
Prins writes: "The 2016 election campaign is certainly a billionaire's playground when it comes to 'establishment candidates' like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush who cater to mega-donors and use their money to try to rally party bases."
Donald Trump. (photo: Bill Clark/Roll Call)
The Donald Is a Fraud
By Nomi Prins, TomDispatch
03 October 15
 he 2016 election campaign is certainly a billionaire’s playground when it comes to “establishment candidates” like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush who cater to mega-donors and use their money to try to rally party bases. The only genuine exception to the rule this time around has been Bernie Sanders, who has built a solid grassroots following and funding machine, while shunning what he calls “the billionaire class” that fuels the super PACs.
Donald Trump, like Ross Perot back in the 1992 and 1996 elections, has played quite a different trick on the money-saturated American political system. He has removed the billionaire as middleman between citizen plebeians and political elites, and created a true .00001% candidate, because he’s... well, a financial elite unto himself, however conveniently posed as the country’s straight-talking “everyman.”
Despite his I-can-buy-but-can’t-be-bought swagger, Trump’s persona has been carefully constructed to deflect even the most obvious questions of conflict of interest that his wealth and deal-making history should bring up. He claims that he would govern (or dictate) as he is, no apologies or bullshit. But would he?
The billionaire-as-president is a new prospect for America. The only faintly comparable situation in our history came before the Crash of 1929, when President Calvin Coolidge, who famously declared that “the business of America is business,” reappointed mogul Andrew Mellon as his treasury secretary, just as President Warren Harding had done before him. A walking conflict of interest, Mellon left Washington during Herbert Hoover’s administration to avoid Congressional scrutiny of his personal business endeavors. He was later investigated by the Department of Justice for falsifying tax information in his own business empire.
Trump is, by his own admission, a dealmaker who has, since the 1970s, utilized self-promotion and his own growing celebrity to make money. Nonetheless, he denies the importance of money itself. His quasi-autobiography, The Art of the Deal, opens with this now-familiar tall tale: “I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.”
Today, he asserts that he is worth a cool $10 billion, having long been cagey about just how much he has. That figure, too, may be more scam than reality. Forbes pegs Trump's fortune at $4 billion in its 2015 top billionaires list, where he places 405th in the world and 133rd in the U.S. In his 92-page Federal Election Committee financial filing, which doesn’t require the disclosure of his total wealth, the value of his global enterprises, assets, debts, and income sources are listed in ranges, rather than exact figures. More than 20 items are characterized as worth “over $50 million.”
He has at least $1.4 billion in assets and $285 million in debt, if we use just $50 million as a guesstimate on those items; $2.8 billion in assets and $570 million in debt, if we pick the figure of $100 million instead. In other words, we still don’t know what he’s worth. As with so much else, we just have to take his word for it.
Consider the presidency as Donald Trump’s ultimate deal. And don’t think for a second that if he entered the Oval Office his money and deal-making lust and every conflict of interest that went with them wouldn’t follow him there.
He claims to be an open book -- “the definition of the American success story,” as his campaign website puts it. He wants people to believe (as his acolytes do) that he’s just like us -- except for the hair -- only richer, more successful, and (not to mince words) better. That narrative has, of course, been carefully constructed for our consumption, which means, if he succeeds, we are part of his chosen art form, his deal.
Though you might not know it from the incessant media coverage of his candidacy or his P.T. Barnum-ish self-glorification, there are plenty of pieces missing from his financial story that call into question both his skill as a dealmaker and his business acumen. Though there’s been much discussion of how money from the Koch Brothers and other billionaire donors might influence 2016’s candidates, there’s been little discussion of how Trump might be influenced by the billionaire backing him: himself.
Celebrity Apprentice
The Trump phenomenon has delivered ratings to networks and, arguably, the apolitical to their TV sets. It’s probably sold a lot of cars, judging from the commercials that went with the recent Republican debates. A record 24 million people watched the first one on Fox News. That event was, in fact, such an obvious triumph for Fox that CNN upped the ante, expanding the second debate to a full (some would say endless) three hours. As Trump noted, “I guess it was to sell commercials.” CNN similarly shattered its prior election debate records, averaging 23 million viewers.
All of this has been a boon for The Donald, who clearly has a remarkable ability to glue cameras to him and use the media to his advantage, a skill he honed starting with his first Manhattan deal in 1973. When Trump went on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on August 23rd, he dispatched Jeb Bush this way: “We need a person with a lot of smarts, a lot of cunning, and a lot of energy. And Jeb doesn't have that,” while dissing Scott Walker as a governor whose “state is really in trouble.” Walker just left the race. Jeb continues to falter. Call it Trump magic.
The Donald has long perfected two proven strategies for winning: attack and deflect. On both counts, he is a TV veteran. Appearing on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman in 1987 to promote The Art of the Deal, his skill in deflecting attention from aspects of his life that might otherwise diminish his aura was already on full display. When Letterman probed the particulars of Trump’s personal wealth multiple times, he dodged effectively, insisting, “You’ll never get it out of me.” He also deflected his host’s question about the degree to which his father’s money contributed to his success. “He was a solid guy and a bright guy, I learned a lot” was about all Letterman could dig out of him on Fred Trump.
And here’s an irony: for all his edginess, Trump’s savvy in avoiding what might embarrass or confine him makes him much more of a politician that he’d like us to believe. His father, however, provided Trump with far more guidance and help than that “self-made man” would care for us to realize. So let’s start with a little tour of his celebrity apprenticeship.
Fred Trump was born in Queens, New York, in 1905. According to The Donald, Fred's father had emigrated to the United States from Sweden in 1885. Fred himself would convert a business in low-income housing into a $300 million fortune.
A year after leaving high school, Fred built his first home in Woodhaven, Queens. “It cost a little less than $5,000 and he sold it for $7,500,” his son proudly wrote years later.
By 1929, Fred was building larger homes. When the Depression hit, he bought a bankruptcy mortgage-service company, which he sold for a profit a year later. In 1934, he returned to building lower-priced homes in the depressed Flatbush area of Brooklyn. During the next dozen years, he would build 2,500 of them in Brooklyn and Queens.
Trump and his father had an "a relationship that was almost businesslike,” The Donald would later write and from Fred he would, he’s testified, learn toughness, though “I also realized that if I ever wanted to be known as more than Fred Trump’s son, I was eventually going to have to go out and make my own mark.”
Think, for instance, of George W. Bush’s urge to surpass his father’s record of political power -- and war making. But don’t imagine for a moment that Trump struck out on his own any more than the young Bush did. Trump recounts his first major deal as Swifton Village, a foreclosed apartment complex in Cincinnati that he said he bought with his father in 1969, while still in college. (Cincinnati Magazine claims the purchase was Fred’s exclusively.) The price was $6 million and in 1972, they resold it for $12 million, according to Trump (and a far more modest $6.75 million according to other estimates).
But Cincinnati was never The Donald’s dream. He wanted Manhattan from the beginning. His first deal there started in 1973 with a desire to purchase the old Penn Central rail yards at 34th Street on the West side of the island.
At that time, New York was a complete financial mess. That summer, Trump came across a newspaper story about the Penn Central Railroad bankruptcy filing. Penn Central trustees had hired a small LA-based investment management company led by Victor Palmieri to sell its assets, including its long abandoned yards in the West thirties and sixties. Ever the con artist, Trump recalled, “I couldn’t sell him on my experience or my accomplishments, so instead I sold him on my energy and my enthusiasm.”
Trump initially proposed building middle-income housing on the site with government financing. When the city became mired in financial problems and money for public housing dried up, he switched to Plan B and “began promoting the site as ideal for a convention center.”
Trump still did nothing without his father’s involvement. As their development firm had no official name, they decided to call it the Trump Organization, which covered them both and, they hoped, had a certain gravitas. Over the next several years, Trump solicited support from New York Mayor Abe Beame, who belonged to the same club as his father and to whom his father and he gave money, as he later wrote, “like all developers.” Palmieri would give Trump his virgin credibility with the press as his choice for developer, swearing to Barron’s that “he’s larger than life.”
On July 29, 1974, the New York Times featured a front-page story on how the Trump Organization secured options to buy the two waterfront sites from Penn Central for $62 million. However, it was Mayor Ed Koch who, in 1978, gave Trump’s pet project for a future convention center at West 34th Street his official stamp of approval by agreeing to buy the site. That site would eventually become the Javits Convention Center.
It was the symbolic, if not financial break The Donald had been waiting for. As for the West 60th street site, due to numerous problems, he let the option expire in 1979. In a sense, Donald Trump would never look back, but he would have to look down often enough.
Trump’s Bankruptcies
As Carly Fiorina made crystal clear to almost 23 million Americans in the second Republican debate (the topic had been broached in the first one), Trump’s companies have officially gone bankrupt four times since 1991, or as Trump spun it, “I used the law four times and made a tremendous thing. I’m in business. I did a very good job.”
While that’s a small number of bankruptcies relative to the hundreds of companies that comprise his empire, they represented a fair amount of debt. There was the Trump Taj Mahal (with $1 billion in debt) in Atlantic City in 1991 and the Trump Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City in 1992 (with $550 million in debt). Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, the company created from the post-bankruptcy ashes of the Taj Mahal, the Trump Plaza, and also Trump Marina in Atlantic City filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (with $1.8 billion of debt) in 2004. Bankruptcy number four, Trump Entertainment Resorts (the post-bankruptcy company created to take over the remains of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (with $1.74 billion of debt) in February 2009.
While Trump owned 28% of its stock, as he told Bloomberg News upon resigning from the board four days before the $53 million bond payment that forced it into bankruptcy was due, “I have nothing to do with it. I’m not in it. I’m not on the board.”
He continues to argue that the Atlantic City bankruptcies weren’t his fault, but attributable to the casino environment of that moment. Though there is some truth to that, he glosses over his method of creating new companies to purchase the bankrupt ones, after shedding their debts, and his convenient exit timing from management posts to shed blame.
While four of his companies officially went down for the count, he had many companies that didn’t and, as he has repeatedly said, he himself never declared personal bankruptcy (so his credit score likely remains in fine shape). Keep in mind, though, that, hard as it is to find consistent basic information about Trump’s various disasters, the count of his unofficial bankruptcies would undoubtedly run significantly higher. After all, a number of his companies effectively went bankrupt by closing down or being bought out at bargain basement prices.
In 1989, for instance, Trump purchased the Eastern Air Shuttle, connecting New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. with hourly flights, for roughly $365 million. But the Trump name didn’t carry the day and passengers didn’t pony up for the line’s fancier seats and gold lavatory fixtures. Instead, in 1990 Trump defaulted on the loans he had taken out to finance the company, and its ownership reverted to its creditors, led by Citibank. The Trump Shuttle was then merged into a new corporation, Shuttle Inc., and in April 1992, its routes were assumed by USAir Shuttle, which is one way the rich make problems disappear.
In April 2006, at a Trump Tower gala, Trump’s son Donald, Jr. promised that Trump Mortgage would become the nation's number one home-loan lender. In a CNBC interview shortly afterwards, Trump said, “Who knows about financing better than I do?” Eight months later, the company closed down amid the crashing housing market and negative publicity over an unfortunate hiring choice. Trump’s CEO, E.J. Ridings, had lied on his résumé. His previously advertised “top” spot at one of Wall Street’s “most prestigious banks” turned out to have been as a lowly broker -- for one week. As Trump continually reminds us, he only has the best people work for him.
Then there was “Trump University,” active from 2005 to 2010, where, for $25,000-$35,000, students could assumedly learn how to become real-estate gods like Trump. According to related lawsuits, they were then enticed to take out credit cards under phony business names to help pay for the privilege, and to inflate their income by projecting profits from non-existing businesses.
Earlier this month, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman told the New York Daily News that approximately 600 former students have filed suit against the “university” in Manhattan Supreme Court. Similar suits are pending in California. Schneiderman claimed Trump banked $5 million personally from the scam. Trump had also ignored 2005 warnings not to use the word “university” in the name.
Of course, if ordinary Americans declare bankruptcy due to unforeseen or difficult circumstances, they are regularly stigmatized as lazy deadbeats. The Trumps of our world, however, being rich enough to launch corporate bankruptcy protection filings, are seen as savvy dealers. In this sense, Trump couldn’t have been savvier, since he’s survived one potential financial catastrophe after another. Unfortunately, his experiences have absolutely no applicability to ordinary Americans, even though, as David Dayen wrote at the Intercept, “Everyone would have benefited from relieving primary mortgage debt, the absence of which led to at least six million foreclosures.“
Trump International
It’s evident from Trump’s recent comments that his foreign policy ideas haven’t evolved much since he last seriously thought about running for president in 2011 when he wrote the first version of a campaign book, Time to Get Tough (updated for his 2016 bid).
Then, too, he talked about “getting China to stop playing currency charades,” while declaring his “great respect for the people of China” and blaming “our leaders and representatives” for making terrible deals with their leaders that have cost American jobs. What Trump didn’t discuss then, and doesn’t discuss now, is how U.S. companies, his own included, produce and sell in China because they make more money doing that. Though he regularly complains that we don't manufacture anything here anymore, neither does he bother to explain his own patriotism shortfall, since he and his daughter, Ivanka, have clothing lines made in China (and Mexico, that land of “rapists,” and Bangladesh, a country continuously in violation of human rights for garment workers).
Absent any sense of irony, he has blamed Chinese currency manipulation for making him set up shop in China and claims China is “killing us.” This, though the Chinese stock markets have recently been hammered, the Yuan is weakening, and the country’s growth is slowing, hardly signs of an imminent threat. It’s a great Trumpian combo, though: anti-China anger plays well with the xenophobic crowd, while a weaker Yuan keeps costs down on Trump’s clothing business. A deal, after all, is a deal.
According to the Trump Organization website and his Federal Election Commission financial disclosures, he has operations practically worldwide, but notably not in Russia. Yet Trump has had his eye on doing business there for a long time. As far back as 1987, when it was still the Soviet Union, he wanted to erect a Trump Tower in Moscow’s Red Square. In 2013, he was still talking about the possibility in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Perhaps because of his ongoing business interests (or their mutual maverick styles), Trump, unlike his Republican presidential opponents for whom the Russian president is little short of the devil incarnate, regularly claims that he will have a “great relationship” with Putin.
As for Trump’s Mexican border wall and the fantasy of getting the Mexican government to pay for it, Trump has made hay with the immigration issue. You wouldn’t know, listening to him, that the number of illegal immigrants has dropped significantly since the financial crisis. On the Late Show recently, Trump doubled down on his wall, comparing it to the Great Wall of China and suggesting that “we can have a great and beautiful wall, we'll have our border, and guess what, nobody comes in unless they have their papers." This from the man who has a borderless record of outsourcing jobs and tax revenues to Mexico and elsewhere.
All of this adds up to a vast set of potential conflicts of interest and downright deception should Donald Trump ever set foot in the White House, a subject that is at the heart of what might be called Trumpocrisy in the present campaign, but seldom part of the debate by or about The Donald himself.
The Polls
For now, Trump remains the clear GOP frontrunner in terms of composite polling results. His polling success has been predicated since announcing his candidacy on a cocktail of bravado, media exposure, tactical hits on opponents as if they were competitors for one of his casino deals, and the wholesale avoidance of any serious discussion of the financial baggage he brings with him into the election season. Can there be any question that, for the man who wanted to leave his father’s helping hand behind, bagging the Oval Office would be the ultimate step in outshining Fred Trump’s legacy? It’s less clear what the rest of us get out of it.
Trump assures us that he wouldn’t let his business dealings interfere with his politics, but is he really prepared to step away from all Trump Organization matters globally? Does anyone believe that his deal-making instincts will die in the Oval Office? Or would building Trump Tower in Moscow be the touchstone for any future conversation with Putin about Ukraine and Syria? Would his acts be indicative of what happens -- consider Bill Clinton netting high speaking fees from countries in which then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was conducting foreign policy -- when you fuse public office and private power? In historical terms, it would be as if a Morgan or a Rockefeller were running the country and his private business affairs at the same time, creating the quintessential conflict of public and private interest.
Unfortunately, we are used to politicians saying whatever they think they need to say to be elected president, and falling way short of their campaign promises on the job. Even scarier would be the notion of selling America to the craftiest bidder. The election may be more than a year away, but isn’t it time to dig beneath the carefully crafted persona that is Trump and unearth the person and the full spectrum of his business dealings? To see the real Donald Trump is to plunge into all the conflicts of interest he denies, the financial tricks he dispenses, the crucial details he obfuscates, and the flimflam he offers up day in, day out.
|
|
Wells Fargo's Master Spin Job |
|
|
Saturday, 03 October 2015 09:02 |
|
Taibbi writes: "Reporters and politicians are lining up to congratulate Wells Fargo for its multimillion-dollar neighborhood grant program - but they're leaving out one small detail. Wells Fargo was forced to launch HomeLIFT under the terms of a robo-signing settlement."
Matt Taibbi attending an Occupy Wall Street demonstration at Bryant Park in New York. (photo: Griffin Lotz/Rolling Stone)
Wells Fargo's Master Spin Job
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
03 October 15
Reporters and politicians are lining up to congratulate Wells Fargo for its multimillion-dollar neighborhood grant program – but they're leaving out one small detail
 f you still don't believe our brethren on Wall Street have planet-sized cojones, check out this story.
All over the country, Wells Fargo is making headlines for launching a multimillion-dollar homeowner assistance program called HomeLIFT, which among other things offers $15,000 down payment grants to prospective home-buyers.
Local mayors in big cities from one end of the country to the other are showing up at ribbon-cuttings and throwing rose petals at the bank for its generosity. Newspapers in turn are running breathless profiles of the low-income homeowners who will now get to buy dream homes thanks to the bank's beneficence.
Some knew, some didn't, but all are leaving out one key detail: Wells Fargo was forced to launch HomeLIFT.
To understand the background, we have to go back to July 25th of last year, when a federal judge in the Northern District of California approved a settlement in a case called City of Westland Police and Fire Retirement System v. Stumpf. The suit was brought on behalf of shareholders by Robbins Geller, the same firm featured in a story I wrote two years ago about the ratings agencies.
For those who are fortunate enough to have forgotten, robo-signing was a common practice that devastated families during the foreclosure crisis. People all over the country found themselves booted out of their homes thanks to bogus affidavits signed by "vice presidents" and "regional managers," who were often scraggly kids just out of college blindly signing hundreds of documents a day, if not more.
It was a kind of systematic perjury, and most of the major banks eventually copped to doing it.
Wells Fargo was one of those banks, joining JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Ally Financial, Citigroup and others in a sweeping $25 billion settlement with state and federal regulators finalized in 2012.
However, the road to that settlement was not smooth. According to some stockholders, the company's board of directors failed to cooperate with investigators throughout the process. A court later found that the Wells board "opposed discovery requests, filed motions to quash, and refused to provide details concerning the Company's policies," which made it hard for investors and shareholders to know what to do about the scandal.
So those shareholders sued Wells, essentially for failing to cooperate with the government over its robosigning practices. After a long battle, the bank finally agreed to settle last year.
The terms mandated that the bank spend $67 million on a series of measures to repair its reputation in communities hit the hardest by foreclosures and robosigning. Enter HomeLIFT.
Under the settlement, Wells had to dedicate $36 million in homeowner assistance to cities like Fresno, Bakersfield, Detroit, Albuquerque, Virginia Beach and New Haven. It also mandated $6 million in spending for credit counseling.
The settlement made the news last year. It may not have been on the front page, but it was out there. "Wells Fargo settles remaining 'robo-signing' litigation," reported the LA Times, in one example.
Fast forward to this month. Wells Fargo, fulfilling the terms of the settlement it fought against bitterly in the lawsuit, launched down payment assistance programs in cities all over America.
In city after city, Wells executives announced their plans, then patted themselves on the back for their generosity, always neglecting to mention the Westland suit.
In the Detroit area, for instance, a Wells spokesman spoke proudly of the $5.25 million it will be spending on HomeLIFT:
"While the Wayne County economy is showing signs of improvement, many families have yet to re-enter the housing market because they struggle with making a down payment," said a seemingly empathetic Russ Cross, a Wells senior vice president.
"Combined with financial education," Cross went on, "these down payment assistance grants can make a tremendous difference for people who want to own a home in one of these five Wayne County cities."
Cross never mentioned that Wells launched HomeLIFT because it had to. The $5.25 million it spent on HomeLIFT in Detroit was exactly the number mandated by the Westland settlement.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan slobbered all over Wells in a statement about the program.
"This innovative public-private partnership will make a significant difference for eligible homebuyers," said Duggan.
It was bad enough that Wells bragged about its court-mandated penance, and maybe a little worse that local pols helped out with the verbal ribbon-cutting. But how about the local reporters who chimed in with positive stories about these altruistic programs?
"Wells Fargo Offers $15K down payment to help home buyers," wrote the Detroit Free Press. "Potential home buyers in Detroit and other communities will soon have a new source of down payment assistance…"
"Wells Fargo Program Aims to Boost Home Ownership in Wayne County Cities," piped in Crain's Detroit Business.
This same pattern repeated itself in virtually every one of the communities where Wells was forced to make an investment.
"Local Companies Join Forces For Home Ownership," wrote KMOX.com in St. Louis. The CBS affiliate's story featured a pic of St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay proudly announcing the $4.75 million HomeLIFT grant. Again, this was exactly the amount specified in the court settlement.
"New Haven Neighborhood Gets Boost from Wells Fargo Program that Helps Homebuyers," announced the New Haven Register. The formula was the same as in St. Louis: Wells Fargo in the headline, plus a photo of the opportunistic local pol handing out the goodies.
"We know home owners are more inclined to protect their investment and take care of their property, and they take pride in the result," said Mayor Toni Harp.
"Wells Fargo to help Fresno homebuyers with $15,000 down payment grant," was the headline in the Fresno Bee. Same format as all the other cities: Wells in the headline, and a photo featuring proud Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin. The $7.5 million Fresno program was, again, exactly the amount mandated by the Westland settlement.
A very few news outlets in some of the cities got it right. The Riverfront Times in St. Louis, for instance, nailed it. "Wells Fargo is not simply trying to look good; it is required to try to look good," the paper reported.
But in most of the cities, the program was presented like a charitable endeavor, and the local pols seemed to have no problem basking in the ink.
When I contacted Wells about this story, the bank initially seemed offended at the suggestion it had not been forthright about the impetus behind HomeLIFT. The new program, its spokesperson Tom Goyda explained, was "part of several Wells Fargo LIFT programs developed to create positive outcomes for people and communities recovering from the financial crisis."
A similar program called NeighborhoodLIFT, which Goyda described as a philanthropic endeavor, had been created years before the Westland suit. HomeLIFT, he said, was just an extension of that program.
Goyda added that the fact that HomeLIFT and other programs were part of settlement agreements had "already been covered in the news media" and was "mentioned in press releases."
That was a surprise to me, since I hadn't seen anything like that in press releases. When I pressed Goyda for an example of a Wells Fargo press release admitting that HomeLIFT was part of a court settlement, he replied:
"Our CityLIFT program within the LIFT family was part of a 2012 settlement with the DOJ and that fact has been included in all CityLIFT releases and background is provided on the program Website and, as we discussed, HomeLIFT's ties to the Westland settlement is discussed with city officials and has been covered by several media outlets previously."
This is confusing, but funny. To deflect attention from one lawsuit, Wells directed me to a different and worse one.
Back in 2012, Wells Fargo was forced to cough up mega-millions in yet another settlement, this time with the U.S. Department of Justice.
In that settlement, the department's Civil Rights Division accused the bank of systematically discriminating against tens of thousands of Hispanic and African-American homeowners.
Among other things, the Justice Department said Wells charged minority applicants more – "hundreds of dollars more," on average – for loans than white borrowers paid.
The DOJ suit was one of many reasons Wells became a poster child for discriminatory lending. Infamously, one of its loan officers told the New York Times in 2009 that employees at the company referred to black borrowers as "mud people" and called subprime lending "ghetto loans."
Anyway, to resolve the government's discrimination charges, Wells in 2012 agreed to $184 million in compensation to borrowers, plus another $50 million in down payment assistance.
The bank's CityLIFT program was created to satisfy the terms of this settlement. To its credit, Wells Fargo did, at least, publicly admit this when the program was launched.
But this year, the bank never mentioned anything about this new HomeLIFT program being part of a court settlement when it sent out releases. The bank says it did tell all of the mayors who praised the program, but nobody else was informed that HomeLIFT was penance for robosigning.
And when I called them to ask about this, they pointed to press releases from their CityLIFT programs years ago – which, if you're keeping score, was the tab they paid for the other wrong thing they did, the systematic racial discrimination.
The offices of several of the mayors who participated in this program declined to comment. But the office of New Haven Mayor Toni Harp was surprised to learn that the HomeLIFT event to which the city was invited by Wells Fargo to participate had anything to do with a court settlement.
"Wells Fargo did not make any of that information available to us," said Laurence Grotheer, a spokesman for Harp.
Grotheer said the mayor was only too happy to participate in the program, since homeownership, owner occupancy and neighborhood stabilization are objectives of her administration. "But I had no awareness that its program was the result of a court order."
"So the city was a full and willing participant," he said. "But I had no awareness that its program was the result of a court order."
It's hard to get offended, exactly, when a bloodless too-big-to-fail corporation tries to take credit for something it was forced to do. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't call them on it.
|
|
