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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
NB: This description contains material not included in the original broadcast
Introduction: In the second week of October, the Presidential campaign has been dominated by discussion of, and reaction to, Donald Trump’s vulgar comments about women, something he dismissed as “locker room banter.” This dynamic has eclipsed far more important issues about Trump, his associations, his heritage (past and future), his financial dealings, his economic policies (or lack thereof) and the future of the political forces he has conjured. This program attempts to deal with those considerations.
Among those considerations are:
- Trump’s belief in eugenics, something he apparently inherited from his father Fred: ” . . . . In an interview for US TV channel PBS, the Republican presidential nominee’s biographer Michael D’Antonio claimed the candidate’s father, Fred Trump, had taught him that the family’s success was genetic. He said: ‘The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development. ‘They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.’ The theory, known as eugenics, first emerged during the 19th century and was used as a pretext for the sterilization of disabled people until the practice was discredited after the Second World War. Adolf Hitler’s justification for the Holocaust – in which 11 million people were killed, 6 million of them Jewish – was based on a similar theory of racial hierarchy. . . .”
- Trump’s belief in eugenics and the importance of heredity may manifest in the future of the movement over which he presides. His son Donald, Jr. is a bird of the same fascist feather. ” . . . . Donald Trump Jr. drew widespread condemnation for comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned candy — but his analogy isn’t a new one, and it’s based on two separate white supremacist memes with roots in Nazi propaganda. Trump — the Republican presidential candidate’s eldest son and a top campaign surrogate — tweeted the image Monday evening in an apparent response to the dumpster bombing over the weekend in New York City, which his dad inaptly linked to the refugee crisis. ‘This image says it all,’ reads the text. ‘Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first. #trump2016,’ accompanied by the official Donald Trump/Mike Pence campaign logo and slogan. The analogy isn’t new, and has been used for years by white supremacists to overgeneralize about various minority groups. ‘It is often deployed as a way to prop up indefensible stereotypes by taking advantage of human ignorance about base rates, risk assessment and criminology,’ wrote Emil Karlsson on the blog Debunking Denialism. . . . . . The analogy, which has been used on message boards and shared as social media memes, originally used M&Ms as the candy in question — but that changed after George Zimmerman gunned down Trayvon Martin while the unarmed black teen was walking home from buying a drink and some Skittles. . . . . A Google image search of “skittles trayvon meme” reveals a horrible bounty of captioned images mocking the slain teenager, whose killer was acquitted after claiming self-defense under Florida’s “stand your ground” law. . . . But the poisoned candy analogy goes back even further, to an anti-Semitic children’s book published by Julius Streicher, the publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer who was executed in 1946 as a war criminal. . . .”
- Donald Jr.‘s operational familiarity with “Alt-Right” memes and the tweeting and re-tweeting of those memes is not occasional. ” . . . . Riffing off of Hillary Clinton’s remark that some of Trump’s supporters are racists, misogynists, and xenophobes who belong in a “basket of deplorables,” the meme shared by Donald Trump Jr. and Trump ally Roger Stone showed key Trump allies photoshopped onto a poster from the move ‘The Expendables.’ In the edited poster for ‘The Deplorables,’ those armed staffers and Trump boosters are shown alongside Pepe the Frog, a cartoon figure that first cropped up on the 4chan website and has since become associated with the white supremacist movement online. . . .”
- Donald, Jr. is indeed bred from the same line of racehorses as his father: “ . . . . When Donald Jr spoke to a white supremacist radio host in March it set off a few alarm bells simply because his father’s extreme immigration policies had been so ecstatically received by white nationalist groups. But most chalked it up to inexperience and let it go. Surely Junior wasn’t as crudely racist as the old man who was reported to keep a book of Hitler speeches next to the bed. But just a few days later he retweeted a racist science fiction writer named Theodore Beale who goes by the handle of ‘Vox Day’ claiming that a famous picture of a Trump supporter giving a Nazi salute was actually a follower of Bernie Sanders. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree after all. . . . Right after the convention, however, he let out a deafening dogwhistle that left no doubt as to his personal affiliation with the far right. He went to the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia Mississippi, best remembered as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. But it has special political significance as the site of Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘states’ rights’ speech in 1980 where he signaled his sympathy for white supremacy by delivering it at the scene of that horrendous racist crime. (The man who coined the term ‘welfare queen’ was always a champion dogwhistler.) Trump Jr went there to represent and represent he did. When asked what he thought about the confederate flag he said, ‘I believe in tradition. I don’t see a lot of the nonsense that’s been created about that.’ Since then it’s been revealed that he follows a number of white nationalists on twitter and he’s retweeted several including a a psychologist who believes Jews manipulate society. And in the last couple of weeks Junior has let his alt-right freak flag fly. . . .”
- Donald, Jr. is poised to run for office, perhaps to perpetuate what his father has engendered. The fundamental point to be understood here is this: As discussed in FTR #‘s 920, 921 and 922, the Trumpenkampfverbande is the manifestation of the Underground Reich metamorphosing into an above-ground, mass-based political movement. It will not go away. Whether it is led by Donald Trump, Jr. (who does not appear to share his father’s inclination to sexual vulgarity and aggression) or someone else, it will not go away. “ . . . . After his questionable speech to the RNC, Trump Jr. said he “would consider” running once his kids finish school. Calling it ‘one of the most thrilling moments of my life,’ Donald Trump Jr. brushed aside burgeoning controversy surrounding the second Trump family speech at the RNC in as many days while speaking with the Wall Street Journal Wednesday morning. The oldest son of the Republican presidential nominee said that while he still has ‘a lot to do in my own career,’ he would seriously consider following in his father’s footsteps out of real estate and into political life. The 38-year-old New Yorker said that ‘maybe when the kids get out of school I would consider it.’ The father of five explained that he’d ‘love to be able to do it, as a patriot.’ . . .”
- In past programs, we have noted that Donald Trump’s “go-to” lender of choice for his real estate projects has been Deutsche Bank, profoundly linked to the remarkable and deadly Bormann capital network. This places him in debt to a “too big to fail” institution that was deeply involved with the financial meltdown of 2008, has flouted U.S. regulators and has been implicated with criminal international operations. ” . . . . And this prompts a question that no other major American presidential candidate has had to face: What are the implications of the chief executive of the US government being in hock for $100 million (or more) to a foreign entity that has tried to evade laws aimed at curtailing risky financial shenanigans, that was recently caught manipulating markets around the world, and that attempts to influence the US government? . . . .”
- While everyone is focusing on Donald Trump’s T & A comments, the world’s equities markets have experienced volatility, in part because of fears about Deutsche Bank’s financial health. “ . . . . Germany’s largest bank appears in danger, sending stock markets worldwide on a wild ride. Yet the biggest source of worry is less about its finances than a vast tangle of unknowns — not least, whether Europe can muster the will to mount a rescue in the event of an emergency. In short, fears that Europe lacks the cohesion to avoid a financial crisis may be enhancing the threat of one. The immediate source of alarm is the health of Deutsche Bank, whose vast and sprawling operations are entangled with the fates of investment houses from Tokyo to London to New York. Deutsche is staring at a multibillion-dollar fine from the Justice Department for its enthusiastic participation in Wall Street’s festival of toxic mortgage products in the years leading up to financial crisis of 2008. . . . . . . . The European Union has become a focus of populist anger, further constraining options. And Germany has opposed bailouts for lenders in other lands, making a Deutsche rescue politically radioactive. All of which adds to worries that Deutsche amounts to a fire burning, one that might yet become an inferno, while the fire department is consumed with existential arguments over its purpose. If the alarm sounds, no one can be sure what, if anything, will happen. . . . . . . . The biggest form of insurance against panic is confidence that larger players — in this case, European authorities — stand at the ready to mount a rescue, should one be required. But confidence is not something Europe has proved terribly skilled at instilling. Its abilities to marshal a bailout are dubious. New rules introduced to discourage reckless investments by large financial institutions bar taxpayer-financed bailouts. Germany has been adamant that these strictures be applied, rebuffing a recent attempt by the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, to secure an exemption allowing him to inject taxpayer money into the Italian banking system. The optics of Germany seeking a way around the rules for its largest lender would be especially problematic. . . .”
- The dimensions of Deutsche Bank’s exposure to the kinds of derivatives that brought down the global economy in 2008 is mind-boggling. “ . . . . It has €220 billion, or $247 billion, in ready liquidity, compared with $45 billion for Lehman in 2007, and the bank can also tap central banks in the United States and in Europe for a financial lifeline if need be. That does not mean, however, that traders and regulators will stop fretting about, among other things, the €42 trillion worth of derivatives that sit on its books, an amount about 11 times the size of the German economy. . . .”
- Investor confidence in Deutsche Bank cannot have been helped by news that the ECB had fudged the stress test on the German lender. “ . . . . Deutsche Bank was given special treatment in the summer EU stress tests that promised to restore faith in Europe’s banks by assessing all of their finances in the same way. Germany’s biggest lender, which has seen its share price fall as much as 22 per cent in recent weeks on fears that it could face a US fine of up to $14bn, has been using the results of the July stress tests as evidence of its healthy finances. But the Financial Times has learnt that Deutsche’s result was boosted by a special concession agreed by its supervisor, the European Central Bank. . . . . . . . ‘This [Deutsche’s treatment] is perplexing,’ said Chris Wheeler, an analyst at Atlantic Equities. ‘The circumstances mean that it is inevitable the market watchers will be suspicious and have some concern about the veracity of the results.’ . . . .’
- The enormous uncertainties about Deutsche Bank, the [im?]possibility of an EU bailout, the possibility of the Federal Reserve and other central banks helping to rescue Deutsche Bank are to be seen against the background of Donald Trump’s alarming flip-flops about Janet Yellen and the Fed and his advisors’ preoccupation with a return to the Gold Standard. After speaking gently about Yellen and low interest rates, he flip-flopped, attacking her, promising to replace her and advocating rate increases. Note that the “Alt-right” milieu embodied in the Trumpenkampfverbande is not concerned with economic prosperity, nor are they knowledgeable about how to bring it about. ” . . . . Trump’s economic advisers can for the most part be placed in one of three groups. In the first are Larry Kudlow and Judy Shelton, the intellectuals of the bunch, and both advocates of a return to the gold standard. While it has become popular among some Republicans in the past few years, returning to the gold standard is dismissed as a discredited, fringe idea by nearly all economists and market participants. And, for their part, gold-standard supporters typically reject the very idea of a Federal Reserve, so if Trump were to appoint Kudlow, Shelton, or another gold-standard supporter to the Fed, it would be the most radical and potentially damaging economic move since the dawn of our modern economic system, after the Great Depression. . . . Finally, there’s the group represented by Stephen Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs banker and Breitbart News chief now heading Trump’s campaign. Bannon has not talked much publicly about his views of the Fed. But his deep association with the alt-right is worth examining: some on the alt-right have expressed contempt for the very idea of a healthy economy. . . . In reading stories on Breitbart and other sites connected to the awful alt-right movement that Trump has embraced, I found it impossible to identify any overarching view of how the economy should work. There were sloppy and occasional potshots at Obama or Yellen, and a general contempt for the many institutions of modern liberal society. But there were no coherent economics. Which brings us back to Trump’s own views. He has no coherent plan, no view that can be mapped onto the common range of established discussion, whether left, right, or center. On Thursday, Trump’s campaign released his “economic policy.” Amid the assertions that a dramatic cut in taxes and regulation will lead to more economic growth and higher employment, there is no mention of the Federal Reserve. Instead, Trump has offered the public a general, instinctive contempt for the Fed and its policies. . . .”
We will explore key points highlighted in this program at greater length in programs to come.
Program and Description Highlights Include:
- The Trumpenkampfverbande’s discrediting in advance of the electoral process, setting the stage for Trump’s supporters to manifest violence, either at the polls and/or after election day: ” . . . Quite simply, everybody needs to be paying close attention to what happens on November 9th. [The German “Day of Destiny”–D.E.] It now seems quite likely that Hillary Clinton will win the November election and become the next President of the United States. But Donald Trump has been for months pushing the idea that the election may be stolen from him by some mix of voter fraud (by racial and ethnic minorities) or more systemic election rigging by persons unknown. Polls show that large numbers of his supporters believe this. Now, here at TPM we’ve been writing and reporting about the GOP’s ‘vote fraud’ scam going back almost 15 years. It’s a hugely important issue. But to date it has mainly been used to heat up Republican voters and drive state-based voter suppression measures. After a decade-plus pushing the idea, Republicans passed various voter suppression measures in numerous states after the 2010 midterm election. But to date, the ‘voter fraud’ scam has never been fully weaponized as a way to delegitimize and even resist a specific election, certainly not a national election. As Rick Hasen explains here, Donald Trump is doing that now. And he is succeeding in as much as he’s convinced substantial numbers of his supporters that if he loses it will be because the election was stolen. . . .”
- Review of Trump’s keeping of a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.
- Review of the distinct possibility that Trump’s father Fred may have been in the Ku Klux Klan. Trump’s father is credited with giving “The Donald” his belief in eugenics.
- Trump was the grand marshal for the 1999 German-American Steuben parade: “. . . . Trump has said that he is proud of his German heritage; he served as grand marshal of the 1999 German-American Steuben Parade in New York City.[12][nb 1]. . . . .”
1. No one should be surprised to learn that Trump is a believer in eugenics, apparently part of his heritage from his father Fred.
Republican nominee follows ‘racehorse theory’ of genetics
Donald Trump has been accused of believing in the “racehorse theory” of genetics, which claims some people are genetically superior to others.
In an interview for US TV channel PBS, the Republican presidential nominee’s biographer Michael D’Antonio claimed the candidate’s father, Fred Trump, had taught him that the family’s success was genetic.
He said: “The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development.
“They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
The theory, known as eugenics, first emerged during the 19th century and was used as a pretext for the sterilisation of disabled people until the practice was discredited after the Second World War.
Adolf Hitler’s justification for the Holocaust – in which 11 million people were killed, 6 million of them Jewish – was based on a similar theory of racial hierarchy.
The PBS documentary featured clips of Mr Trump on the campaign trial claiming that he “believes in the gene thing” and saying he had a “very high aptitude”.
It also ran footage of previous interviews from the real estate magnate’s time as a reality TV star in which he shared his thoughts on the subject, including a 2010 interview with CNN..
He said: “Well I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene.
“I’m a gene believer… Hey, when you connect two race horses, you usually end up with a fast horse.
“I had a good gene pool from the standpoint of that, so I was pretty much driven.”
Mr Trump has become notorious for his bravado on the campaign trail and claimed he could solve problems that have plagued policymakers for decades with ease because he is a “smart guy”.
…
At a rally in Washington, D.C. in September 2015, Mr Trump claimed that, if he became president, “we’ll win so much, you’ll get bored with winning”.
2a. In FTR #‘s 918 and 919, we explored the Buerger Zeitung’s “Open Letter to Stalin,” a gambit that we feel corresponds well to Donald Trump’s relatively benign comments bout Putin/Ukraine/Crimea etc. In addition to the “all things Steuben” orientation of Trump advisor Joseph E. Schmitz, we note Donald Trump’s links to the Steuben Society milieu.
. . . . Trump has said that he is proud of his German heritage; he served as grand marshal of the 1999 German-American Steuben Parade in New York City.[12][nb 1]. . . . .
2b. Trump has, in fact, digested Hitler’s rhetorical style, having acquired and read a book of Hitler’s speeches.
“After the Gold Rush” by Marie Brenner; Vanity Fair; 9/1990.
. . . . Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.
. . . . Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. . . . Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist. . . .
2c. Earlier this year, a controversy emerged when old newspaper articles about arrests at a 1927 Klan rally in Queens (New York City) mentioned a “Fred Trump” as among the “berobed marchers” arrested at the event.Although the identification of Trump’s father as one of the Klan participants has not been definitively established, The Donald lied when confronted with the address of the arrested Fred Trump.
” . . . . asked if his father had lived at 175–24 Devonshire Road—the address listed for the Fred Trump arrested at the 1927 Klan rally—Donald dismissed the claim as “totally false.”
“We lived on Wareham,” he told Horowitz. “The Devonshire—I know there is a road ‘Devonshire,’ but I don’t think my father ever lived on Devonshire.” Trump went on to deny everything else in the Times’ account of the 1927 rally: “It shouldn’t be written because it never happened, number one. And number two, there was nobody charged.”
Biographical records confirm that the Trump family did live on Wareham Place in Queens in the 1940s, when Donald was a kid. But according to at least one archived newspaper clip, Fred Trump also lived at 175–24 Devonshire Road: A wedding announcement in the January 22, 1936 issue of the Long Island Daily Press, places Fred Trump at that address, and refers to his wife as “Mary MacLeod,” which is Donald Trump’s mother’s maiden name. . . .”
It seems altogether probable that The Donald’s father was the “Fred Trump” arrested at the rally for “failing to disperse,” but Fred Trump’s specific activities at the Klan Rally have not been established.
In the context of assessing the deep politics surrounding Trump, the possibility of Klan participation by his father is interesting and possibly relevant. In Under Cover (available for download for free on this website), the extensive networking between dominant elements of the KKK and various Fifth Column organizations in this country is covered at length.
One of those Fifth Column organizations was America First–again, Trump has appropriated that name.
Also of interest in the context of the “Fred Trump” arrested at the Klan Rally is the fact that David Duke has been an enthusiastic supporter of Trump, who was altogether hesitant about disavowing Duke’s support.
Late last month, in an interview with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, CNN host Jake Tapper asked the candidate whether he would disavow an endorsement from longtime Ku Klux Klan leader and white nationalist celebrity David Duke. Trump declined. “I don’t know anything about David Duke,” he said. Moments later, he added, “I know nothing about white supremacists.”
Trump has since walked back his comments, blaming his hesitance to condemn the Klan on a “bad earpiece.” The matter has now been filed away into the ever-growing archives of volatile statements Trump has made about race and ethnicity during the current election cycle—a list that includes kicking off his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, calling for the “‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and commenting that perhaps a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies “should have been roughed up.”
But the particulars of the David Duke incident call to mind yet another news story, one that suggests that Trump’s father, the late New York real estate titan Fred Trump, once wore the robe and hood of a Klansman.
Versions of this story emerged last September when Boing Boing dug up an old New York Times article from May of 1927 that listed a Fred Trump among those arrested at a Klan rally in Jamaica, Queens, when “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all,” in the streets. Donald Trump’s father would have been 21 in 1927 and had spent most of his life in Queens.
As Boing Boing pointed out, the Times account simply names Fred Trump as one of the seven individuals arrested at the rally, and it states that he was released without charges, leaving room for the possibility that he “may have been an innocent bystander, falsely named, or otherwise the victim of mistaken identity during or following a chaotic event.”
A few weeks after Boing Boing unearthed that 88-year-old scoop, the New York Times asked Donald Trump about the possibility that his father had been arrested at a Klan event. The younger Trump denied it all, telling interviewer Jason Horowitz that “it never happened” four times. When Horowitz asked if his father had lived at 175–24 Devonshire Road—the address listed for the Fred Trump arrested at the 1927 Klan rally—Donald dismissed the claim as “totally false.”
“We lived on Wareham,” he told Horowitz. “The Devonshire—I know there is a road ‘Devonshire,’ but I don’t think my father ever lived on Devonshire.” Trump went on to deny everything else in the Times’ account of the 1927 rally: “It shouldn’t be written because it never happened, number one. And number two, there was nobody charged.”
Biographical records confirm that the Trump family did live on Wareham Place in Queens in the 1940s, when Donald was a kid. But according to at least one archived newspaper clip, Fred Trump also lived at 175–24 Devonshire Road: A wedding announcement in the January 22, 1936 issue of the Long Island Daily Press, places Fred Trump at that address, and refers to his wife as “Mary MacLeod,” which is Donald Trump’s mother’s maiden name.
Moreover, three additional newspaper clips unearthed by VICE contain separate accounts of Fred Trump’s arrest at the May 1927 KKK rally in Queens, each of which seems to confirm the Times account of the events that day. While the clips don’t confirm whether Fred Trump was actually a member of the Klan, they do suggest that the rally—and the subsequent arrests—did happen, and did involve Donald Trump’s father, contrary to the candidate’s denials. A fifth article mentions the seven arrestees without giving names, and claims that all of the individuals arrested—presumably including Trump—were wearing Klan attire.
The June 1, 1927, account of the May 31 Klan rally printed in a defunct Brooklyn paper called the Daily Star specifies that a Fred Trump “was dismissed on a charge of refusing to disperse.” That article lists seven total arrests, and states that four of those arrested were expected to go to court, and two were paroled. Fred Trump was the only one not held on charges.
The Klan’s reaction to the alleged police brutality at the rally was the subject of another article, published in the Queens County Evening News on June 2, 1927, and titled “Klan Placards Assail Police, As War Vets Seek Parade Control.” The piece is mainly about the Klan distributing leaflets about being “assaulted” by the “Roman Catholic police of New York City” at that same rally. The article mentions Fred Trump as having been “discharged” and gives the Devonshire Road address, along with the names and addresses of the other six men who faced charges.
Yet another account in another defunct local newspaper, the Richmond Hill Record, published on June 3, 1927, lists Fred Trump as one of the “Klan Arrests,” and also lists the Devonshire Road address.
Another article about the rally, published by the Long Island Daily Press on June 2, 1927, mentions that there were seven arrestees without listing names, and claims that all of the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire. The story, titled “Meeting on Parade Is Called Off,” focuses on the police actions at the rally, noting criticism of the cops for brutally lashing out at the Klan supporters, who had assembled during a Memorial Day parade.
While the Long Island Daily Press doesn’t mention Fred Trump specifically, the number of arrestees cited in the report is consistent with the other accounts of the rally. Significantly, the article refers to all of the arrestees as “berobed marchers.” If Fred Trump, or another one of the attendees, wasn’t dressed in a robe at the time, that may have been a reporting error worth correcting.
According to Rory McVeigh, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Notre Dame, the version of the Klan that would have been active in Queens during the 1920s may not have necessarily participated in stereotypical KKK activities like fiery crosses and lynch mobs.
“The Klan that became very popular in the early 1920s did advocate white supremacy like the original Klan,” McVeigh told VICE in an email. “But in that respect, [its views were] not too much different from a lot of other white Americans of that time period.” In New York, McVeigh added, “the organization’s opposition to immigration and Catholics probably held the biggest appeal for most of the people who joined.”
None of the articles prove that Fred Trump was a member of the Klan, and it’s possible that he was, as Boing Boing suggested, just a bystander at the rally. But while Donald Trump is absolutely right to say that his father was not charged in the 1927 incident, the candidate’s other claims—that Fred Trump never lived at 175–24 Devonshire Road, and more importantly, that his involvement in a Klan rally “never happened”—appear to be untrue.
The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. . . .
Donald Trump Jr. drew widespread condemnation for comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned candy — but his analogy isn’t a new one, and it’s based on two separate white supremacist memes with roots in Nazi propaganda.
Trump — the Republican presidential candidate’s eldest son and a top campaign surrogate — tweeted the image Monday evening in an apparent response to the dumpster bombing over the weekend in New York City, which his dad inaptly linked to the refugee crisis.
“This image says it all,” reads the text. “Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first. #trump2016,” accompanied by the official Donald Trump/Mike Pence campaign logo and slogan. The analogy isn’t new, and has been used for years by white supremacists to overgeneralize about various minority groups. “It is often deployed as a way to prop up indefensible stereotypes by taking advantage of human ignorance about base rates, risk assessment and criminology,” wrote Emil Karlsson on the blog Debunking Denialism. “In the end, it tries to divert attention from the inherent bigotry in making flawed generalizations.” A spokeswoman for Wrigley Americas, which makes Skittles, whacked Trump’s dehumanizing comparison. “Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy,” said Denise Young, vice president of corporate affairs. “We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing.”
Joe Walsh, a single-term congressman from Illinois and now a right-wing talk radio host who’s been booted from the airwaves for using racial slurs, bragged that Trump’s meme was nearly identical to one he had tweeted a month earlier.
The analogy, which has been used on message boards and shared as social media memes, originally used M&Ms as the candy in question — but that changed after George Zimmerman gunned down Trayvon Martin while the unarmed black teen was walking home from buying a drink and some Skittles.
A Google image search of “skittles trayvon meme”reveals a horrible bounty of captioned images mocking the slain teenager, whose killer was acquitted after claiming self-defense under Florida’s “stand your ground” law.
But the poisoned candy analogy goes back even further, to an anti-Semitic children’s book published by Julius Streicher, the publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer who was executed in 1946 as a war criminal.
The book tells the tale of “the poisonous mushroom,” and was used to indoctrinate children in hate.
“Just as poisonous mushrooms spring up everywhere, so the Jew is found in every country in the world,” the story’s mother explains to her son. “Just as poisonous mushrooms often lead to the most dreadful calamity, so the Jew is the cause of misery and distress, illness and death.”
So Trump’s appalling analogy isn’t just unoriginal and demeaning — it’s actually racist in four different ways.
…
4. Roger Stone and Trump, Jr. were portrayed in an Alt.right tweet endorsed by the Trumpenkampfverbande. Do not lose sight of the fact that Stone is now networking with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Two members of Donald Trump’s inner circle shared memes on social media over the weekend featuring a symbol popular with the white nationalist alt-right.
Riffing off of Hillary Clinton’s remark that some of Trump’s supporters are racists, misogynists, and xenophobes who belong in a “basket of deplorables,” the meme shared by Donald Trump Jr. and Trump ally Roger Stone showed key Trump allies photoshopped onto a poster from the move “The Expendables.” In the edited poster for “The Deplorables,” those armed staffers and Trump boosters are shown alongside Pepe the Frog, a cartoon figure that first cropped up on the 4chan website and has since become associated with the white supremacist movement online.
Trump, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence ®, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ®, Ben Carson, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos were among those in included in the image.
“Apparently I made the cut as one of the Deplorables,” Trump Jr. wrote on Instagram in a caption accompanying the meme, saying he was “honored” to be grouped among Trump’s supporters.
Informal Trump advisor Roger Stone shared the same image on Twitter, saying he was “so proud to be one of the Deplorables.”
Pepe the Frog has emerged as an unofficial mascotof the alt-right, a loosely defined group of white nationalists who congregate online to debate IQ differences between the races and joke about burning Jewish journalists in ovens.
Last fall, Trump himself shared a meme featuring himself as president Pepe. He has retweeted users with handles like @WhiteGenocideTM on multiple occasions.
“@codyave: @drudgereport@BreitbartNews@Writeintrump “You Can’t Stump the Trump“https://t.co/0xITB7XeJVpic.twitter.com/iF6S05se2w”— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2015
Trump has disavowed support from the alt-right and white supremacists like former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, though he hired Steve Bannon, chairman of the alt-right promoting Breitbart News, as his campaign CEO in August.
5. Trump, Jr. has political aspirations. The gravitas that Snowden and WikiLeaks have with young Americans may bear very bitter fruit, indeed.
“A Chip off the Old Block” by Digby; Hullabaloo; 9/21/2016.
I wrote about Trump Jr for Salon this morning:In the beginning of the 2016 campaign the only one of Donald Trump’s five children with a high public profile was his daughter Ivanka who has her own celebrity brand just like her father’s. The two older sons were unknown to the general public but they made quite a good first impression when the whole family appeared on a CNN family special. They are all so attractive and glamorous that many people came to believe they were Donald Trump’s best feature. Indeed, it was said that the fact he’d raised such an admirable family spoke so well of him that it smoothed some of the rough edges of his own personality. Unfortunately, as people have gotten to know them better, they’ve revealed themselves to be as rough edged as dear old Dad, particularly his namesake, Donald Jr.
For most of the primaries Trump proudly evoke his two older sons when he talked about the 2nd amendment, touting their NRA membership and love of guns. It was a little bit shocking to see the ghastly pictures of their African big game kills including a horrific shot of Trump Jr holding a severed elephant tail, but they seemed to otherwise be pretty ordinary hard-working businessmen devoted to their family. For the most part they kept a low profile, serving as the usual family props in a political campaign.
When Donald Jr spoke to a white supremacist radio host in March it set off a few alarm bells simply because his father’s extreme immigration policies had been so ecstatically received by white nationalist groups. But most chalked it up to inexperience and let it go. Surely Junior wasn’t as crudely racist as the old man who was reported to keep a book of Hitler speeches next to the bed. But just a few days later he retweeted a racist science fiction writer named Theodore Beale who goes by the handle of “Vox Day” claiming that a famous picture of a Trump supporter giving a Nazi salute was actually a follower of Bernie Sanders. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree after all.
At the GOP convention in July, all four of the grown kids gave heartfelt speeches about their Dad, even as they made clear through their childhood anecdotes that the only time they ever spent with him was at the office and it seemed that Junior in particular had taken a more active role and was seen in a more serious light. people were talking about him as a moderating voice in the campaign.
Right after the convention, however, he let out a deafening dogwhistle that left no doubt as to his personal affiliation with the far right. He went to the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia Mississippi, best remembered as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. But it has special political significance as the site of Ronald Reagan’s famous “states’ rights” speech in 1980 where he signaled his sympathy for white supremacy by delivering it at the scene of that horrendous racist crime. (The man who coined the term “welfare queen” was always a champion dogwhistler.) Trump Jr went there to represent and represent he did. When asked what he thought about the confederate flag he said, “I believe in tradition. I don’t see a lot of the nonsense that’s been created about that.”
Since then it’s been revealed that he follows a number of white nationalists on twitter and he’s retweeted several including a a psychologist who believes Jews manipulate society. And in the last couple of weeks Junior has let his alt-right freak flag fly. First he got excited about Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” comment and proudly retweeted a picture with the title “The Deplorables” that had been making the rounds featuring Trump, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Eric Trump and Donald Jr along with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, right wing hit man Roger Stone, alt-right leader Milo Yianopolis and white supremacist symbol Pepe the Frog. There’s no indication that any of them had a problem with that but a lot of other people found it to be revealing, to say the least.
A couple of days later Trump Jr stepped in it again, saying the media would be “warming up the gas chamber” for Republicans if they lied and cheated the way Hillary Clinton does. He claimed he was talking about capital punishment but his association with virulent anti-Semites makes that claim ring a little bit hollow.
And then there was the Skittles incident. Donald Jr tweeted out a deeply offensive image of a bowl of skittles with the words “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you three would kill you would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.” It’s a terrible metaphor, wrong in every way and Donald Jr took some heat for it. But it’s yet another window into his association with alt-right white nationalism. That bad metaphor has been around in various forms for a long time. In this country it was usually a bowl of M&Ms representing black people.. The people who traffic in this garbage fairly recently changed it to Skittles because that was the candy Trayvon Martin had bought on the night he was murdered by vigilante George Zimmerman. Yes, it’s that sick.
…
You hear pundits and commentators saying that Donald Trump is sui generis and his phenomenon won’t be recreated. They’re probably right. But perhaps they are not aware that his son also has political ambitions and he is simply a younger, better looking version of his father with much more hair. If alt-right white nationalism is going to be an ongoing feature of American political life, they have their leader. He is one of them.
6. More about Trump, Jr. and his political aspirations, is in the article below.
The fundamental point to be understood here is this: As discussed in FTR #‘s 920, 921 and 922, the Trumpenkampfverbande is the manifestation of the Underground Reich metamorphosing into an above-ground, mass-based political movement. It will not go away. Whether it is led by Donald Trump, Jr. (who does not appear to share his father’s inclination to sexual vulgarity and aggression) or someone else, it will not go away.
After his questionable speech to the RNC, Trump Jr. said he “would consider” running once his kids finish school
Calling it “one of the most thrilling moments of my life,” Donald Trump Jr. brushed aside burgeoning controversy surrounding the second Trump family speech at the RNC in as many days while speaking with the Wall Street Journal Wednesday morning.
The oldest son of the Republican presidential nominee said that while he still has “a lot to do in my own career,” he would seriously consider following in his father’s footsteps out of real estate and into political life.
The 38-year-old New Yorker said that “maybe when the kids get out of school I would consider it.” The father of five explained that he’d “love to be able to do it, as a patriot.”
His seemingly premature flirtation with political office comes hours after he delivered a major address to the RNC Tuesday evening — a speech that has already been flagged as a potential second case of Trump family plagiarism.
https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/755601024908300288
While Trump Jr. told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that “We [the Trump kids] all took a lot of pride. We all wrote the speeches ourselves,” American Conservative columnist told Vox News that the apparently lifted portions can’t be considered plagiarism because he wrote both the original column and the Trump’s speech.
…
So while he may not be a plagiarizer in the new conservative definition of the word (my college professors always warned against recycling my own work for new courses) it looks like we may have another Donald Trump popping up on the political landscape very soon.
7. Donald Trump’s bank of choice: Deutsche Bank! As the article below points out, it’s a long relationship going back to the early 90’s, with at least $2.5 billion lent. Even when the 2008 crash strained Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, the company’s private banking arm continued to back “The Donald.”
Despite some clashes, the Republican front-runner has been a regular client of the German lender
One of Donald Trump’s closest allies on Wall Street is a now-struggling German bank.
While many big banks have shunned him, Deutsche Bank AG has been a steadfast financial backer of the Republican presidential candidate’s business interests. Since 1998, the bank has led or participated in loans of at least $2.5 billion to companies affiliated with Mr. Trump, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of public records and people familiar with the matter.
That doesn’t include at least another $1 billion in loan commitments that Deutsche Bank made to Trump-affiliated entities.
The long-standing connection makes Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank, which has a large U.S. operation and has been grappling with reputational problems and an almost 50% stock-price decline, the financial institution with probably the strongest ties to the controversial New York businessman.
But the relations at times have been rocky. Deutsche Bank’s giant investment-banking unit stopped working with Mr. Trump after an acrimonious legal spat, even as another arm of the company continued to loan him money.
Other Wall Street banks, after doing extensive business with Mr. Trump in the 1980s and 1990s, pulled back in part due to frustration with his business practices but also because he moved away from real-estate projects that required financing, according to bank officials. Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley are among the banks that don’t currently work with him.
At Goldman Sachs Group Inc., bankers “know better than to pitch” a Trump-related deal, said a former Goldman executive. Goldman officials say there is little overlap between its core investment-banking group and Mr. Trump’s businesses.
…
Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Mr. Trump dates to the 1990s. The bank, eager to expand in the U.S. via commercial-real-estate lending, set out to woo big New York developers such as Mr. Trump and Harry Macklowe.
One of the bank’s first loans to Mr. Trump, in 1998, was $125 million to renovate the office building at 40 Wall Street. More deals soon followed, with the bank agreeing over the next few years to loan or help underwrite bonds worth a total of more than $1.3 billion for Trump entities.
By 2005, Deutsche Bank had emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s leading bankers. That year, the German bank and others lent a Trump entity $640 million to build the 92-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. Deutsche Bank officials badly wanted the deal because it came with a $12.5 million fee attached, said a person familiar with the matter.
Mr. Trump charmed the bankers, flying them on his private Boeing 727 jet, according to people who traveled with him.
But when the housing bubble burst, the relationship frayed.
In 2008, Mr. Trump failed to pay $334 million he owed on the Chicago loan because of lackluster sales of the building’s units. He then sued Deutsche Bank. His argument was that the economic crisis constituted a “force majeure”—an unforeseen event such as war or natural disaster—that should excuse the repayment until conditions improved.
His lawyers were inspired to invoke the clause after hearing former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan describe the crisis as a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami,” according to a person who worked on the case for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump also attacked Deutsche Bank’s lending practices and said that as a big bank, it was partially responsible for causing the financial crisis. He sought $3 billion in damages.
Deutsche Bank in turn sued Mr. Trump, saying it was owed $40 million that the businessman had personally guaranteed in case his company was unable to repay the loan.
Deutsche Bank argued that Mr. Trump had a cavalier history toward banks, quoting from his 2007 book, “Think Big And Kick Ass In Business And Life.”
“I figured it was the bank’s problem, not mine,” Mr. Trump wrote, according to the lawsuit. “What the hell did I care? I actually told one bank, ‘I told you you shouldn’t have loaned me that money. I told you that goddamn deal was no good.’”
The court rejected Mr. Trump’s arguments but the suit forced Deutsche Bank to the negotiating table. The two sides agreed to settle their suits out of court in 2009. The following year, they extended the original loan by five years. It was paid off in 2012—with the help of a loan from the German firm’s private bank.
While Deutsche Bank didn’t lose money on the deal, the fracas soured its investment bankers on working with Mr. Trump. “He was persona non grata after that,” said a banker who worked on the deal.
But not everyone within Deutsche Bank wanted to sever the relationship. The company’s private-banking arm, which caters to ultrarich families and individuals, picked up the slack, lending well over $300 million to Trump entities in the following years. . . .
8. The fact that Donald Trump recently borrowed a large sum a money to one of the financial world’s biggest serial regulatory violators should become an issue in the 2016. So far, it hasn’t.
He owes at least $100 million to a foreign bank that’s battled with US regulators.
In his most recent financial disclosure statement, Donald Trump notes he has billions of dollars in assets. But the presumptive GOP nominee also has a tremendous load of debt that includes five loans each over $50 million. (The disclosure form, which presidential candidates must submit, does not compel candidates to reveal the specific amount of any loans that exceed $50 million, and Trump has chosen not to provide details.) Two of those megaloans are held by Deutsche Bank, which is based in Germany but has US subsidiaries. And this prompts a question that no other major American presidential candidate has had to face: What are the implications of the chief executive of the US government being in hock for $100 million (or more) to a foreign entity that has tried to evade laws aimed at curtailing risky financial shenanigans, that was recently caught manipulating markets around the world, and that attempts to influence the US government?
9. Equities markets have been wavering lately, in part because of worries about Deutsche Bank. It is interesting and significant that campaign analysis and discussion (with the exception of the Mother Jones article above) have not factored the Trump/Deutsche relationship into their evaluation.
Germany’s largest bank appears in danger, sending stock markets worldwide on a wild ride. Yet the biggest source of worry is less about its finances than a vast tangle of unknowns — not least, whether Europe can muster the will to mount a rescue in the event of an emergency.
In short, fears that Europe lacks the cohesion to avoid a financial crisis may be enhancing the threat of one.
The immediate source of alarm is the health of Deutsche Bank, whose vast and sprawling operations are entangled with the fates of investment houses from Tokyo to London to New York.
Deutsche is staring at a multibillion-dollar fine from the Justice Department for its enthusiastic participation in Wall Street’s festival of toxic mortgage products in the years leading up to financial crisis of 2008. Given Deutsche’s myriad other troubles — a role in the manipulation of a financial benchmark, claims of trades that violated Russian sanctions and a generalized sense of confusion about its mission — the American pursuit of a stiff penalty comes at an inopportune time. . . .
. . . . The European Union has become a focus of populist anger, further constraining options. And Germany has opposed bailouts for lenders in other lands, making a Deutsche rescue politically radioactive.
All of which adds to worries that Deutsche amounts to a fire burning, one that might yet become an inferno, while the fire department is consumed with existential arguments over its purpose. If the alarm sounds, no one can be sure what, if anything, will happen.
In the worst case — now highly unlikely — the bank could collapse, inciting a scramble to pull money from markets around the globe. Institutions that trade with Deutsche would feel an urge to collect their cash immediately. Given the scale of the bank’s balance sheet — 1.8 trillion euros, or more than $2 trillion — that inclination is likely to spread to every crevice of finance. Economies would grind to a halt. Jobs and fortunes would disappear. . . .
. . . . The biggest form of insurance against panic is confidence that larger players — in this case, European authorities — stand at the ready to mount a rescue, should one be required.
But confidence is not something Europe has proved terribly skilled at instilling. Its abilities to marshal a bailout are dubious. New rules introduced to discourage reckless investments by large financial institutions bar taxpayer-financed bailouts.
Germany has been adamant that these strictures be applied, rebuffing a recent attempt by the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, to secure an exemption allowing him to inject taxpayer money into the Italian banking system. The optics of Germany seeking a way around the rules for its largest lender would be especially problematic.
The Deutsche chief and the German government both shot down a report that the bank had asked that a bailout be prepared.
More broadly, Germany has been the most fervent voice that reckless economic pursuits should be punished, no matter the human toll.
As Athens has negotiated with European authorities and the International Monetary Fund for a series of bailouts, Germany has demanded deep cuts to Greek public spending, sharply cutting pension payments to retirees. The Greek government used much of the bailout money to pay back debts to German banks.
Against this backdrop, a German bailout of its largest bank would reinvigorate accusations that it uses the European Union as a cover to pursue its own national interests.
10. Amid reassurances that Deutsche Bank will weather the storm, we note: ” . . . . the €42 trillion worth of derivatives that sit on its books, an amount about 11 times the size of the German economy. . . .”
The global banking giants — think of JPMorgan Chase or HSBC — make a nice return by capturing their share of the trillions of dollars that course through financial markets each day.
But few are as reliant on this business — be it swapping currencies, selling bonds or structuring derivatives — as Deutsche Bank, the giant lender that has made its name not as a home for German savers but as a place for hedge funds and other risk-loving investors to put on some of their boldest financial bets.
And that is why its swooning stock price last week set off alarm bells in finance ministries, central bank suites and trading floors from Hong Kong to New York.
More than eight years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers sent shock waves around the world, the fear is whether Deutsche Bank and its highly leveraged balance sheet of 1.6 trillion euros might teeter and set off another bout of financial contagion.
Those worries calmed down somewhat late last week as Deutsche Bank’s shares rose after reports that the bank may be close to cutting a deal with the United States Justice Department regarding the fine it must pay for selling toxic mortgages during the financial crisis.
There has also been a growing realization that Deutsche Bank, even with its thin cushion of cash, is in much better financial shape than Lehman Brothers was. In a letter to employees on Friday, Deutsche’s chief executive, John Cryan, highlighted the “strong fundamentals” of the bank.
It has €220 billion, or $247 billion, in ready liquidity, compared with $45 billion for Lehman in 2007, and the bank can also tap central banks in the United States and in Europe for a financial lifeline if need be.
That does not mean, however, that traders and regulators will stop fretting about, among other things, the €42 trillion worth of derivatives that sit on its books, an amount about 11 times the size of the German economy. . . .
11. It is also worth noting that precisely how healthy Deutsche Bank is or isn’t is, past a point, a matter of conjecture. The European Central Bank skewed Deutsche Bank’s stress test.
Deutsche Bank was given special treatment in the summer EU stress tests that promised to restore faith in Europe’s banks by assessing all of their finances in the same way.
Germany’s biggest lender, which has seen its share price fall as much as 22 per cent in recent weeks on fears that it could face a US fine of up to $14bn, has been using the results of the July stress tests as evidence of its healthy finances.
But the Financial Times has learnt that Deutsche’s result was boosted by a special concession agreed by its supervisor, the European Central Bank.
Deutsche’s results included the $4bn proceeds from selling its stake in Chinese lender Hua Xia even though the deal had not been done by the end of 2015, the official cut-off point for transactions to be included.
The Hua Xia sale was agreed in December 2015. It has still not been completed and now faces a delay after missing a regulatory deadline last month, though the bank is still confident of completion this year. . . .
. . . . “This [Deutsche’s treatment] is perplexing,” said Chris Wheeler, an analyst at Atlantic Equities. “The circumstances mean that it is inevitable the market watchers will be suspicious and have some concern about the veracity of the results.” . . . .
12. Donald Trump has flip-flopped about the Federal Reserve and Janet Yellen. After saying benign things about her, and appearing to endorse low interest rates, Trump has flip flopped, promising to replace her and exert pressure to raise interest rates. Note that Trump’s advisers advocate a return to the gold standard and are contemptuous of the Federal Reserve Bank, rather like Eddie the Friendly Spook (Snowden.) We will cover this at greater length next week.
” . . . . Trump’s economic advisers can for the most part be placed in one of three groups. In the first are Larry Kudlow and Judy Shelton, the intellectuals of the bunch, and both advocates of a return to the gold standard. While it has become popular among some Republicans in the past few years, returning to the gold standard is dismissed as a discredited, fringe idea by nearly all economists and market participants. And, for their part, gold-standard supporters typically reject the very idea of a Federal Reserve, so if Trump were to appoint Kudlow, Shelton, or another gold-standard supporter to the Fed, it would be the most radical and potentially damaging economic move since the dawn of our modern economic system, after the Great Depression. . . . Finally, there’s the group represented by Stephen Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs banker and Breitbart News chief now heading Trump’s campaign. Bannon has not talked much publicly about his views of the Fed. But his deep association with the alt-right is worth examining: some on the alt-right have expressed contempt for the very idea of a healthy economy. . . . In reading stories on Breitbart and other sites connected to the awful alt-right movement that Trump has embraced, I found it impossible to identify any overarching view of how the economy should work. There were sloppy and occasional potshots at Obama or Yellen, and a general contempt for the many institutions of modern liberal society. But there were no coherent economics. Which brings us back to Trump’s own views. He has no coherent plan, no view that can be mapped onto the common range of established discussion, whether left, right, or center. On Thursday, Trump’s campaign released his “economic policy.” Amid the assertions that a dramatic cut in taxes and regulation will lead to more economic growth and higher employment, there is no mention of the Federal Reserve. Instead, Trump has offered the public a general, instinctive contempt for the Fed and its policies. . . .”
“Trump and the Truth: The Interest-Rate Flip-Flop” by Adam Davidson; The New Yorker; 9/15/2016.
This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”
Over the past year, Donald Trump, who famously never backs down, has attacked, backed down, and then again attacked Janet Yellen, the chair of the Federal Reserve. He has done it in his way, never acknowledging when he says precisely the opposite of what he has previously said. (Yellen, for her part, has ignored the whole thing.)
Trump’s Yellen cycle began in October, when, in an interview with The Hill, he accused Yellen of keeping down the Fed’s key interest rate, known as the Fed funds rate, because President Obama “doesn’t want to have a recession-slash-depression during his administration.” (This raised the question, of course, Who expects a President to want a recession-slash-depression?) By the spring of this year, Trump had revised his thinking about Yellen. “I have nothing against Janet Yellen whatsoever,” he told CNBC, on May 5th. “She’s a very capable person. People that I know have a very high regard for her.” Trump explained his newly rosy view by endorsing the very policy he had mocked a few months earlier. “She’s a low-interest-rate person; she’s always been a low-interest-rate person. And I must be honest, I’m a low-interest-rate person.” A couple of weeks later, Trump reiterated his happy view of the Fed chair. In an interview with Reuters, he said, “I’m not a person that thinks Janet Yellen is doing a bad job.”
This week, Trump was back on the attack. On Monday, he told CNBC that Yellen should be “ashamed” of the low-interest-rate policy that Trump himself endorsed so fully in May. “She is obviously political, and she’s doing what Obama wants her to do,” he said. Once again, Trump made the claim that there was a secret Obama-Yellen pact to keep rates low, rooted in their nefarious desire to prevent an economic crisis. They both knew, he said, that “as soon as [rates] go up, the stock market is going to go way down.” On Thursday, after giving a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Trump again took aim at the Fed. “The Fed has become very political,” he said. “Beyond anything I would have ever thought possible.”
It’s impossible to reconcile Trump’s conflicting statements on Yellen and the Fed’s interest-rate level. Low interest rates can’t be both smart policy and evidence of corruption, just like Yellen can’t be both “very capable” and a shameful Obama stooge. But beyond the contradictions, Trump has betrayed a basic misunderstanding of how central banks work. Take his statement that he and Yellen are both “low-interest-rate” people. Yellen, he said, has “always been a low-interest-rate person.” Central bankers like to say that the entire point of the Federal Reserve is to “lean against the wind,” meaning that, when the economy is growing so fast that it risks inflation, the Fed raises its interest rate, and, when economic growth is sluggish, the Fed lowers it. In the context of central banking, Yellen is often identified as a “dove,” which means that she is generally a bit more concerned about lowering unemployment than about the risks of inflation. But calling Yellen a “low-interest-rate person” is like calling a doctor concerned about a patient’s high fever a “low-temperature person.” Yellen, like all central bankers, is not a low-interest or high-interest person. She’s a person for whatever interest rate is appropriate, given economic conditions. In her two decades of votes as a senior Fed official, she has voted for higher rates plenty of times.
Where Trump is most clearly and dangerously wrong is in his accusation of political interference by the White House. Yellen doesn’t make decisions about the interest rate on her own. As chair, she has one vote on the Federal Reserve’s twelve-member Open Market Committee, which is currently made up of five members appointed by President Obama and seven members who come from regional Federal Reserve banks and who are chosen by their own boards, made up of bankers, businesspeople, and, in some cases, community representatives. It’s a diverse lot—several members of the committee have shown no particular loyalty to the President. What’s more, the board’s decision-making process about the interest rate is public. We know how each of the twelve members vote at each meeting of the committee. The Fed even releases a “dot plot,” which shows how the different members expect to vote over the coming years.
This publicness has been designed for good reason. The Fed funds rate is the interest rate at which banks lend money to one another for overnight loans. In practice, this rate sets the tempo of the entire global economy, and changes to it ripple through every aspect of our economic lives. Sudden and unexplained moves would create panic. That the Fed hasn’t raised its rate since December cannot be explained as some nefarious plot jointly concocted by Obama and Yellen. It is fully explained by a board of technocrats studying the data and coming to pretty much the same conclusion that nearly everybody else who looks at the data reaches: our economy is still in a period of sluggish growth and, despite Tuesday’s cheery economic news, a Fed-induced tightening could send millions of Americans back into unemployment and generally wreak havoc on the economy—a point Trump himself endorsed in his brief pro-Yellen phase a few months back.
The Fed is far from perfect and has earned its share of fair criticism. But what makes Trump’s views on central-bank policy particularly troubling is that it is impossible to know where they are coming from. The next President will be able to select a Fed chair and several Federal Reserve governors. By this point in a Presidential election, the major-party candidates’ economic preferences are typically well established, and usually embodied by their economic advisers. Whether you embraced them or despised them as candidates, since the nineteen-seventies, the major-party candidates have made it relatively easy to know how they would approach the Fed if elected. Notably, candidates in recent decades have all shown enormous deference to the Fed as an independent, nonpartisan institution. Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama all reappointed the Fed chair of their cross-party predecessor. Trump has said he will not reappoint Yellen to a second term. So how would he pick her successor? What framework would he use?
Trump’s economic advisers can for the most part be placed in one of three groups. In the first are Larry Kudlow and Judy Shelton, the intellectuals of the bunch, and both advocates of a return to the gold standard. While it has become popular among some Republicans in the past few years, returning to the gold standard is dismissed as a discredited, fringe idea by nearly all economists and market participants. And, for their part, gold-standard supporters typically reject the very idea of a Federal Reserve, so if Trump were to appoint Kudlow, Shelton, or another gold-standard supporter to the Fed, it would be the most radical and potentially damaging economic move since the dawn of our modern economic system, after the Great Depression. (Just how awful an idea returning to the gold standard would be is difficult to convey in a short space, but it’s worth pointing out that, under the gold standard, recessions and deep depressions were frequent, and the central bank and government officials had no ability to respond.)
The second group of Trump advisers is, famously, made up of businesspeople: all those Steves—Feinberg, Mnuchin, Roth, Calk, and the others who come from real estate and finance. As a group, they, like Trump, have not expressed great knowledge of or interest in monetary policy.
Finally, there’s the group represented by Stephen Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs banker and Breitbart News chief now heading Trump’s campaign. Bannon has not talked much publicly about his views of the Fed. But his deep association with the alt-right is worth examining: some on the alt-right have expressed contempt for the very idea of a healthy economy. A guide to the alt-right, published by Breitbart in March, identified a subset of the movement, known as “natural conservatives.” For these people, the authors explained, a strong economy isn’t necessarily something to wish for. “Culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value,” the guide states. “More specifically, [natural conservatives] value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters.” This outlook was contrasted with the views of “an establishment Republican,” who has an “overriding belief in the glory of the free market, [who] might be moved to tear down a cathedral and replace it with a strip mall if it made economic sense.”
Reading these passages helped me understand something that I had found confusing. In reading stories on Breitbart and other sites connected to the awful alt-right movement that Trump has embraced, I found it impossible to identify any overarching view of how the economy should work. There were sloppy and occasional potshots at Obama or Yellen, and a general contempt for the many institutions of modern liberal society. But there were no coherent economics. Which brings us back to Trump’s own views. He has no coherent plan, no view that can be mapped onto the common range of established discussion, whether left, right, or center. On Thursday, Trump’s campaign released his “economic policy.” Amid the assertions that a dramatic cut in taxes and regulation will lead to more economic growth and higher employment, there is no mention of the Federal Reserve. Instead, Trump has offered the public a general, instinctive contempt for the Fed and its policies. . . .
13. The nature of Trump’s followers is to be gleaned from the following:
It seems Donald Trump has united one group of voters: Neo-Nazis.
“Trump had me at ‘build a wall,’” Andrew Anglin, editor of the white supremacist website Daily Stormer, told the Los Angeles Times. “Virtually every alt-right Nazi I know is volunteering for the Trump campaign.”
The comments confirm reports from throughout the campaign season that white supremacists were mobilizing for the Republican presidential candidate and excited by his platform. Trump has picked up endorsements from leaders and publications in the neo-Nazi movement since early in his candidacy. Some members of the movement have even made robocalls on his behalf. . . .
14. There has been a considerable amount of coverage of Donald Trump’s thinly veiled exhortation for his pro-12nd Amendment followers to shoot Hillary Clinton. Trump is also encouraging his followers to show up at polling places to guard against the [fraudulent] prospect of voter fraud. Many see this as an exhortation to violently intimidate minority voters. If Trump loses, it will be interesting to see how those followers who have been regaled that the election is “rigged,” will act.
The betting money, here, is that we will see a significant uptick in rightwing terror and murder, much of it the “lone-wolf/leaderless resistance” variety for which Glenn Greenwald ran legal interference.
Again, the point is that the Trumpenkampfverbande is not going away. Whether led by a Donald Trump, Jr., who eschews his father’s locker-room banter, or someone else, the Underground Reich is moving above ground.
“Danger on November 9th” by Josh Marshall; Talking Points Memo Editor’s Blog; 10/12/2016.
I’ve been wanting to discuss this. But so much has been happening it keeps getting pushed back to the next day or the next post. Quite simply, everybody needs to be paying close attention to what happens on November 9th.
It now seems quite likely that Hillary Clinton will win the November election and become the next President of the United States. But Donald Trump has been for months pushing the idea that the election may be stolen from him by some mix of voter fraud (by racial and ethnic minorities) or more systemic election rigging by persons unknown. Polls show that large numbers of his supporters believe this.
Now, here at TPM we’ve been writing and reporting about the GOP’s ‘vote fraud’ scam going back almost 15 years. It’s a hugely important issue. But to date it has mainly been used to heat up Republican voters and drive state-based voter suppression measures. After a decade-plus pushing the idea, Republicans passed various voter suppression measures in numerous states after the 2010 midterm election. But to date, the ‘voter fraud’ scam has never been fully weaponized as a way to delegitimize and even resist a specific election, certainly not a national election. As Rick Hasen explains here, Donald Trump is doing that now. And he is succeeding in as much as he’s convinced substantial numbers of his supporters that if he loses it will be because the election was stolen.
It is a very, very dangerous step when a presidential nominee openly threatens to jail his opponent if he wins. It’s no less dangerous when a candidate pushes the idea that an election will be stolen and lays the groundwork for resisting the result. That’s happening. It is difficult to overstate the societal benefit of being able to take it almost as an absolute given and assumption that no matter how intense and close-fought an election gets, virtually everyone will accept the result the day after. Undermining that assumption is of a piece with introducing into the political arena the idea that people who lose election might lose more than the election: loss of money, freedom, or worse etc.
…
I’ll put a pin in the discussion for now. But this is something to watch very closely as the next thirty days unfold. It is a very, very big deal. Trump has been making this argument explicitly for weeks. As I said, we’re had the voter fraud racket for years. It’s never been weaponized like this As the pressure on him grows and his own anger mounts there’s every reason to think he’ll keep upping the ante.
Looking Back from 1984
Here’s an article about Trump’s “international bankers” speech that makes an important note given Trump’s propensity to do a lot of his neo-Nazi dog-whistling in the midst of some sort of stream-of-Trumpian-consciousness rant: The speech was read from a teleprompter:
“With Thursday’s speech, Trump has baldly laid out his true agenda: a post-election insurrection.”
Yeah, Trumps speech on Thursday that was a prepared and carefully crafted ‘Protocols’-style dog-whistle probably isn’t the best sign for what we can expect from Trump post-election. Especially after his speech on Friday:
“This whole election is being rigged...The whole thing is one big fix. One big ugly lie. It’s one big fix.”
As we can see, in the days following the tidal wave of sexual harassment allegations against Trump, he’s primary response has been to issues neo-Nazi dog-whistles about a global conspiracy against him and the American people and openly declaring the election totally rigged. So he’s consciously backing himself into a rhetorical corner where conceding defeat would be to viewed as allowing allowing the American sovereignty to be destroyed by a global conspiracy. This is where we are. And where Donald Trump wanted us to be just about four years ago:
““Well, back to the drawing board!” Trump tweeted shortly after several networks, including Fox News, called Ohio in the president’s favor, sealing the win.”
That was four years ago. “Back to the drawing board,” indeed.
And in horribly related news, a Kansas militia was caught planning attacks on a local Somali community, and anyone supportive of that community, the attack for the day after election day:
““These charges are based on eight months of investigation by the FBI that is alleged to have taken the investigators deep into a hidden culture of hatred and violence,” Tom Beall, the acting U.S. Attorney for Kansas, said. “Many Kansans may find it as startling as I have that such things could happen here.””
Yes, many Kansans may find it startling that a group was planning on mass murdering one a local Somali community, along with anyone friendly with this community, the day after election day. It’s the kind of news that should startle.
Just as many Americans might find it startling that the GOP’s nominee is an Alt-Right icon who is one verbal outburst away from calling for some sort of mass movement to get him installed as President because otherwise an international banker conspiracy will destroy American sovereignty. And only he can save us. A flirtation with shredding the social contract that keeps democracy operating (accepting the outcome of elections) is ‘on the drawing board’ right now.
It’s a startling, yet still somewhat familiar situation. Like the remake of a horror movie you’ve seen before.
Here’s how Trump and his surrogates spent their Sunday: In case we didn’t already get the memo, the Trump campaign went on to all the various Sunday morning political shows and across the media to inform audiences that the media is rigging the election against Trump. Trump’s surrogates like Mike Pence and Rudy Giuliani took pains to point out that they were just talking about the media teaming up on Trump and not asserting that polling places were getting rigged. Trump himself begged to differ. On Twitter, of course:
“The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary — but also at many polling places — SAD— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016″
Huh, when Rudy Giuliani said, “When [Trump] talks about a rigged election, he’s not talking about the fact that it’s going to be rigged at the polls. What he’s talking about is that 80 to 85 percent of the media is against him,” and when Mike Pence argued that when Trump talks about a “rigged election,” he’s referring to “the monolithic support of the national media for Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” it appears these two key surrogates were pushing a very different message in the media from the one Trump himself was pushing. It sounds like the Trump campaign could use a little media conspiracy of its own otherwise known as message coordination.
So the media is lying and the votes are going to be a lie. That’s Trump’s message to the public. And while the rest of his campaign may not be pushing the “votes are going to be rigged”-meme as aggressively as Trump, that doesn’t that message isn’t getting through to the intended audience:
“And while just 17 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of independents say they believe the election is at risk of being stolen from Trump, a whopping 73 percent of Republicans say they hold such a fear.”
Ok, so almost 3/4 of GOP voters feared the vote was going to be rigged against Trump. Now where did they get that idea? Of course, as the article noticed, the vast majority of the swing-states where vote-rigging might take place are states controlled by Republicans:
So hopefully someone follows up with Trump as to whether or not he’s concerned about, say, Scott Walker, rigging the election against him in Wisconsin. After all, when Roger Stone was pushing the “all the polls are going to be rigged against Trump”-meme back in August, it was Scott Walker’s Wisconsin that Stone cited as the most prone to rigging, with RNC chairman Reince Priebus helping out:
“As someone with great sentimental attachment to the Republican Party, as I joined as the party of Goldwater, both parties have engaged in voting machine manipulation...Nowhere in the country has this been more true than Wisconsin, where there are strong indications that Scott Walker and the Reince Priebus machine rigged as many as five elections including the defeat of a Walker recall election.”
So, is the media going to start asking the Trump campaign, or at least Roger Stone, if they’re still convinced that Republican governors are going to be rigging the vote in all those key swing states controlled by Republican governors? Especially Wisconsin, the home state of RNC-chairman Reince Priebus. Is Wisconsin going to rig the vote too? If so, who are they rigging it for? Are Scott Walker and Reince Priebus going to fix the polling stations for Hillary? Is that what Trump is suggesting? Would it be naive to believe otherwise? How about states like Ohio or Florida? These are the kinds of questions Trump is begging the media to ask. Of course, he’s also threatening to charge the media with being in on a giant conspiracy against him if they ask questions that make him look unhinged. Of course.
Big shocker: Large numbers of top Republican officials agree with something horribly irresponsible Donald Trump said:
“Only a handful of RNC members expressed confidence in their own states’ ability to police voter fraud or noted that overwhelming evidence suggests such fraud is rare and inconsequential.”
That sure sounds like the RNC largely agrees with Trump’s “It’s all rigged!” strategy. Yes, plenty of GOP secretaries are state in key swing states might refute Trump’s assertion that they personally are going to rig the election in favor of Hillary Clinton, but it’s pretty clear that Trump’s “It’s all rigged!” meme is really little more than a slight readaptation of the same old fear-mongering about dead voters and undocumented immigrants that the GOP has been using for years.
It’s something to keep in mind because, should Trump lose and refuse to concede because “It’s all rigged!”, we probably shouldn’t assume that the rest of the GOP will play of the role of the adult. Especially after Mike Roman, Trump’s new head of “election protection” and the guy known for hyping the “New Black Panthers” hysteria back in 2008, finds some new fake outrages to get the GOP outrage-machine into high-gear. There are new reports that Roman has actually come up with a new fake scandal, but given his background he’s probably going to ‘find’ something:
“Hasen, who viewed the case as a “complete tempest in teapot”, said of Roman that he was “somebody who has been more willing to put forth more outrageous statements about voter fraud and election process”. Hasen added: “I don’t consider him a very responsible voice among Republicans on this question and I’m not surprised that Trump would be using him for polling related efforts.””
With Mike Roman hired to find (or ‘find’) instanced of voting irregularities, should we expect lots of reports about armed men intimidating the voting polls to be one of the main stories coming out of the Trump campaign on election day? That’s entirely possible, especially if you consider the high likelihood of armed Trump supporters watching out for threats to the integrity of the vote (non-ironically):
““For most states, the law doesn’t create a lot of specificity about what counts exactly as intimidation in the way that would allow you to know about when carrying a gun crosses the line. It will often depend on the behavior and what the result is,” said Adam Gitlin, a counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan public policy and law institute.”
That’s right, Trump is encouraging his supporters to “watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” and there’s nothing stopping these supporters from bringing their guns along to assist in their ‘watching’ efforts. And determining whether or not this behavior constitutes a form of voter intimidation is a subjective call for most states. Great. Watch out for those ‘New Black Panthers’ on election day. Plus actual threats to the integrity of the vote.
Of all the questions raised by the wave of sexual harassment/assault allegations against Donald Trump, one of the more darkly fascinating questions is what on earth has former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes been advising Trump on this matter. Because it’s what only been a few months since Ailes was ousted for a very similar sounding wave of allegations and informally started advising the Trump campaign. So it seems impossible that Trump and Ailes haven’t discussed this topic as it’s exploded in recent weeks. Although maybe it’s possible if they’re no longer speaking:
“Vanity Fair contributing editor Sarah Ellison reportedly offered an alternate explanation from the perspective of Trump’s campaign, saying that Ailes “kept going off on tangents and talking about his war stories” instead of helping Trump prepare.”
It sounds like we have a “he said/he said” story going on here. At least no one got groped.
So that’s a pretty big if this report is accurate, less so for what it means for the Trump campaign and most for what it might mean for Trump’s post-election schemes assuming he loses. Who’s going to run “Trump TV”? Wasn’t Ailes the Trump TV dream CEO? Is Trump no longer talking about Trump TV too?
“For all of these reasons, I think if there’s a post-campaign Trump media vehicle it’s far more likely to be a bargain-basement but perhaps high traffic website on the model of Breitbart: garish, crazy but with a ready market of deplorables who come to TrumpNews.com for their news.”
TrumpNews.com?! Another crappy far-right ‘news’ outlet? Is that the big right-wing media scheme that Trump’s post-election plans have been reduced to? We’ll see. Maybe Trumnp is still thinking about Trump TV and is hoping to generate enough enthusiasm with conservative audience in the final weeks of the campaign to get the investors he’ll need. Maybe. But as Josh Marshall notes, if Trump’s campaign is any indication of what we can expect from a Trump TV effort, that effort is going to be cheap and half-assed. And it’s not going to be easy to make something as capital intensive as a tv news network function with cheap, half-assed management. Unless that becomes Trump TV’s theme: You’ll know it’s real and gritty because of the low production value. The cable news equivalent of right-wing chain mail. People seem to like that stuff so maybe low end Trump TV is a winning strategy.
But if not, there’s going to be quite a few hurdles for Trump TV which makes the prospects of a TrumpNews.com crappy website all the more likely. Which raises the question: what do Steven Bannon and the rest of the Brietbart crowd thing about Trump making another crappy far-right ‘news’ outlet that’s competing for exactly the same market as Brietbart? Fusing with the Trump campaign was a great business move for Bannon and Brietbart, but not if Trump spends the election catering to the Brietbart audience only to wind up trying to steal that audience away for TrumpNews.com. People only have so much time in the day for right-wing ‘news’ and that’s already a saturated market. Wouldn’t it be something of Trump ends up cannibalizing Brietbart.
Of course, it’s also possible that Trump ditches all his plans for a new media venture and simply spends the bulk of his post-election time fuming and tweeting about how the whole election was rigged and he should be president. It’s a possibility we can’t rule out, which raises another question: can someone run an entire news outlet exclusively from Twitter? Because that might be the new media solution Trump needs. And the best part of a TrumpTwitterNews is that almost no employees would be needed so Trump could feel safe hiring Roger Ailes (assuming they’re still talking) without having to worry about him bankrupting the company with future sexual harassment lawsuits. Sad! But practical.
Oh how cute: Donald Trump just gave a ‘first 100 days’ speech during which he pledged to be a Lincoln-like leader who would heal and unite a nation almost as divided as it was during the Civil War. He also further charged that the election is being rigged against him and promised to sue the
10 women11 women charging him with sexual assault. It’s going to be a particularly busy first 100 days for President Trump. And where was the location of Trump’s “I’ll be a modern-day Lincoln” speech? Gettysburg, Pennsylvania:““Gettysburg was the moment where the war turned,” the aide said. “It was a symbol of sacrifice. It’s obviously a very fitting location.””
Well, seeing as how Trump has now cast himself as some sort of Obverse Abraham Lincoln, it is kind of fitting, in a Bizarro World way, that Obverse Lincoln would give a speech intended to delegitimize an upcoming election at a place like Gettysburg. Divisive diversions for unity! How Lincolnesque.
It was also a extra fitting location for such a speech after the Pennsylvania GOP just filed a lawsuit to allow for out-of-county GOP poll watchers who specifically want to watch the polls in counties with large minority populations:
“”“The argument is that the failure to allow some voters within the state to serve as poll watchers violates equal protection, due process and First Amendment speech rights,” Hasen wrote. “I have never seen such an argument not extended to the act of voting, but to the act of watching at the polls.”””
As you can imagine, election law expert Rick Hasen is having a busy year. And that’s not going to end with this election if GOP calls for vigilante hyper-partisan “poll watching” targeting minorities become the new norm.
But note that even if the Pennsylvania GOP doesn’t win their out-of-county poll watching lawsuit, that doesn’t mean there won’t be an army of GOP poll watchers descending on inner city polling locations across the country on election day. Except they won’t be part of the GOP’s official efforts. Or the Trump campaign efforts. It will be Roger Stone’s army, so it’s totally independent and not at all associated with Trump or the GOP *wink*:
“Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, shared Epstein’s concerns over using exit polls as way of measuring the legitimacy of an election and warned: “It doesn’t sound like a scientific way to do things, nor do I think it’s a sound way to ferret out machine problems, it sounds much more like a Roger Stone dirty trick.””
Might Roger Stone have a dirty trick in mind? No way. How could a plan like this be a dirty trick:
Yes, an army of 1,300 “Citizens for Trump” volunteers, including “Bikers for Trump and Infowars is going to conduct exit polls in Stone’s chosen cities (with high minority populations) using polling methodologies designed by professionals Stone refused to identify, and we’re all expected to compare the Stone/Infowars exit polls with the actual reported results as means of determining whether or not massive electronic voter fraud was taking place. That couldn’t be a Roger Stone dirty trick, could it?
So here we are: Trump just assumed the role of Obverse Lincoln in Gettysburg, PA, and expanded on his arguments for why the whole election rigged while Roger Stone and Alex Jones plan on unleashing an army of poll watchers targeting minority communities as part of a plot convince the public after the election that the reason there’s going to be appalling low support for Trump in minority communities is due to massive electronic voting machine fraud and not because Trump is an Obverse Lincoln. That’s the plan to heal a divided nation, which totally makes sense but only because its Obverse Lincoln’s Bizarro plan.
There’s no word yet on whether or not President Trump will declare the world is flat during is first 100 days, but based on what we’ve seen so far we definitely can’t rule it out.
Here’s an interesting consequence of Donald Trump’s “enemies list”, a list that includes all the Republican “Never-Trumpers” who are either still refusing to work for a Trump administration or, by virtue of being on Trump’s enemies list, aren’t going to be welcome in a TRump administration: The Trump transition team can’t actually find enough people in the national security establishment willing to work for him:
““Everybody who has signed a never-Trump letter or indicated an anti-Trump attitude is not going to get a job. And that’s most of the Republican foreign policy, national security, intelligence, homeland security, and Department of Justice experience,” Paul Rosenzweig, who held a senior position at the Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration, told The Daily Beast. (Bush told reporters on Tuesday that neither he nor his wife, Laura, cast a vote for president.)”
Ok, so the bulk of the GOP-leaning individuals that would normally be manning a new Republican administration’s national security team basically can’t (because they were Never-Trumpers and Trump “has a long memory”) or refuse to do so. Does this qualify as a national security threat? It’s hard to say since we’re talking about Republican national security experts here, which is not a great sign if we’re talking about warmongering neocons. But this could actually be a significant problem if we’re talking about career national security professionals without a particular warmonger agenda but instead those who understand the byzantine nuances of running the national security agencies, which is probably the case for the kinds of jobs the Trump administration is finding particularly hard to fill:
That sure sounds like there could be an abundance of open slots in the Trump administration’s national security apparatus. Any takers? Anyone? Anyone who isn’t a neo-Nazi? Please?:
“Johnson told TPM his plan now is to “wheedle my way into a Trump administration.” He said he’d love a position as ambassador to Japan or the Philippines, countries home to many of his legal clients, or under secretary of Agriculture, as he runs a small persimmon farm. These likely remain pipe dreams, given that the Trump campaign has said in the past that it “strongly condemns” Johnson’s rhetoric.”
Awww...William Johnson would love to be part of the Trump administration, but it’s probably just a pipe dream since the Trump campaign strongly condemned his rhetoric. Except, of course, the condemnation only came after if was discovered by the media that Johnson was set to be a Trump delegate at the GOP convention. So while it might be a little difficult for Johnson himself to join the Trump administration at this point given his notoriety, maybe it’s not such a pipe dream for all the lesser known neo-Nazis trying to climb aboard the Trump train. After all...
When Steve Bannon is your campaign manager, it’s hard to see why exactly your administration would have any opposition to filling key roles with neo-Nazis. At least not easily identifiable neo-Nazis who can quietly wheedle their way into a position.
And if that doesn’t happen and we’re lucky enough to not end up with crypto-Nazis filling up the Trump administration’s lower-level posts, the neo-Nazis will probably still be pretty satisfied:
So there we go...the neo-Nazis might not actually need to bother trying to wheedle their way into the Trump administration. It would be redundant.
Oh boy, well, it looks like Donald Trump isn’t even going to bother trying to shed his Alt-Right/neo-Nazi image: Guess who Trump is reportedly strongly considering choosing to be his chief of staff. Steve Bannon! So the campaign that made its Alt-Right/neo-Nazi pedigree completely clear by choosing Steve Bannon to take over as the campaign COO is now going to make that very same point very clear about the actual administration (not that it wasn’t already obvious):
“Bannon has also been a major force behind some of Trump’s more controversial stunts, including when Trump held an impromptu press event with women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault and misconduct. Bannon was spotted in the back of the room smiling as reporters were led in for the debate night surprise.”
Considering that America’s political system basically operates in a kind of “permanent campaign” mode where the politics never, just take a moment to recollect Donald Trump’s over-the-top toxic Alt-Right campaign. Now imagine that that very same toxic Alt-Right campaign went on for four years. It’s coming.
In other news, look who joined the Trump administration’s transition team. Here’s a hint: He has openly said he doesn’t think women should have gotten the right to vote. While that might not be a big enough clue given the Alt-Right nature of Trump’s circle of advisors, here’s another clue: He’s a fascist. Ok, that’s probably not a good enough clue either. Oh well, the answer is Peter Thiel
“Thiel, who will serve on the Trump transition executive committee alongside Trump’s children, Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr., stands to gain from possible policy decisions by the Trump administration. For example, he’s an investor in ride-hailing company Lyft, which is subject to regulatory scrutiny for its challenge to the taxi industry, and co-founder of data crunching company Palantir, which is a government contractor.”
It sounds like the ‘gig economy’ is about to get completely deregulated. And while it’s unclear what kinds of regulations Palantir, a private NSA, is dealing with, you can bet that they are going out the window too.
But let’s not forget one of Thiel’s other pet projects: Seasteading. So it will be interesting to see if the Seasteading movement experiences a sudden resurgence (there’s already plans for a floating city off the coast of French Polynesia) because if there was any the US government was doing to thwart Thiel’s Seasteading ambitions, you can bet that’s going to end. Ironically, despite all the deregulation Trump is promising — and it was regulations that Theil frequently cited as what he wanted to escape via a private floating city — Thiel might not actually have that much incentive to create his offshore private kingdom:
“In an essay published by the Cato Institute, an influential libertarian think tank, Thiel questioned the very idea that the right to govern flows from the will of the governed. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel claimed. He added that he thinks America made a serious wrong turn when it began extending basic human rights to women and poor people.”
Yep, Peter “democracy and capitalism are incompatible and everything went wrong because women and the poor get to vote” Thiel was reportedly under the impression that if Trump won he would nominate Thiel for the Supreme Court justice. And now Thiel is on Trumps transition team executive board. That’s a pretty big sign that Trump has something for Thiel in mind.
Also keep in mind that should Thiel end up on the Supreme Court, he could be the for a long time. A VERY long time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016–12-08/deutsche-bank-may-have-rigged-index-in-paschi-deal-audit-shows
Deutsche Bank May Have Rigged Index in Paschi Deal, Audit Shows
Bloomberg News by Vernon Silver•December 8, 2016 — 12:00 AM EST
Deutsche Bank AG employees may have manipulated internal indexes as part of an allegedly fraudulent scheme to help Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA conceal losses, according to an audit commissioned by German regulators.
The study, requested by watchdog Bafin and seen by Bloomberg, says an internal Deutsche Bank review described “abnormalities” in the values of proprietary indexes used to set the price for the Monte Paschi deal in December 2008. While investigators at the Frankfurt-based bank couldn’t “unequivocally” link that to manipulation or the deal’s outcome, Deutsche Bank didn’t have any guidelines for monitoring the indexes for potential rigging, according to the audit.
The internal Deutsche Bank report has never been made public. Its findings are also cited in Italian court documents seen by Bloomberg.
The audit shows banker abuse of benchmarks may have gone beyond the rigging of industry measures such as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, that has already triggered probes and fines for global lenders. Deutsche Bank last year paid $2.5 billion to settle claims of interest-rate manipulation — more than any other lender — amid accusations of a widespread effort to rig rates for financial gain.
“The Paschi deal is dependent on indexes, and then the indexes may have been manipulated to be more in favor of Deutsche Bank,” said Michael Dempster, founder of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Financial Research, who has consulted for clients suing banks over derivatives deals. “It is a subtle part of the structure that could be used to load it to the bank’s advantage.”
Milan Trial
The index trades also show the layers of complexity underpinning a deal Italian prosecutors say was an illicit scheme to mask losses at Monte Paschi, which is fighting for survival eight years after the ill-fated transactions. Deutsche Bank and six current and former managers were indicted in a Milan court Oct. 1 for allegedly helping falsify the Siena-based lender’s accounts through the deal, known as Santorini. The trial is scheduled to begin Dec. 15.
Michele Faissola, who oversaw global rates for Deutsche Bank at the time, and Ivor Dunbar, former co-head of global capital markets, are among those facing trial. Both were top deputies to former co-Chief Executive Officer Anshu Jain, and both have left the company. Faissola declined to comment, and Dunbar didn’t respond to messages. The audit doesn’t link any individuals to the trading that may have influenced the indexes.
Charlie Olivier, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank in London, declined to comment beyond an October statement that said the lender intended to “put forward our defense in court.” Oliver Struck, a spokesman for Bafin in Bonn, said the regulator doesn’t discuss individual firms.
Deutsche Bank in February said Bafin completed inquiries into multiple cases including Monte Paschi, crediting the firm for implementing changes and planning to take further measures. An overhaul of the management board and the departure of some senior executives contributed to the regulator’s assessment that the remedial actions taken by the company were sufficient, a person with knowledge of the matter said at the time.
Masking Losses
The Monte Paschi deal came to light in 2013, when Bloomberg revealed how the trades enabled the lender, the world’s oldest, to obscure hundreds of millions of euros of losses on a previous transaction with Deutsche Bank. The German firm reaped about 60 million euros ($64 million) in profit from the Santorini deal in the first two weeks of December 2008, according to documents outlining the transaction.
Deutsche Bank conducted its internal probe from November 2013 to April 2014. Bafin commissioned accounting firm Peters Schoenberger & Partner in January 2014 to conduct the separate audit, which was completed that December. That probe examined Deutsche Bank’s role in the transaction and its subsequent internal inquiry. The outside auditors said they had nothing substantial to add to the bank’s findings regarding the index movements. Italian prosecutors submitted both documents to the judge in the Milan court case in August.
Banks use benchmarks such as Libor to set borrowing costs for transactions. Some derivatives are linked to formulas developed internally known as proprietary indexes. For Deutsche Bank’s deal with Monte Paschi to have worked as planned, indexes tied to interest rates needed to hit certain levels at the transaction’s inception, according to the audit.
They did. Deutsche Bank employees “appear to have traded in the futures contracts that determined the development of the indices,” the audit found, citing the bank’s own probe. The traders may have “deliberately” influenced the indexes and the outcome of the interest-rate bets, according to the internal probe. Milan prosecutors also mentioned the audit’s findings in an Aug. 30 filing, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg.
Proprietary Indexes
The Monte Paschi deal involved two Deutsche Bank proprietary indexes, the DB FRB EUR (2) Index and the DB Trends EUR Index. Both were tied to the value of derivative products wagering on the Euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor.
The two-pronged Santorini trade had to be carefully calibrated so that at the outset one leg would be a winner and the other a loser, according to the audit. Monte Paschi used the winning leg to offset the old loss, and then retained the new, losing arm without immediately disclosing that it was carrying a growing loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The audit also raises the possibility that Deutsche Bank employees may have created a smokescreen for manipulation. Bank executives involved in the deal told auditors that one index chosen for the transaction was going to have heavy trading on the Santorini pricing day because it was the index’s roll date, when trading books are rebalanced.
“A targeted impact on the indices due to an increased level of trading activity could be ‘concealed,’’’ the audit found, without concluding whether that was the case.
Desired Target
The trading that aroused suspicions had enough volume to move market prices and took place in a short period of time, according to the separate Italian court documents that summarized Deutsche Bank’s internal probe into the deal.
The transactions led to an estimated jump of 7 basis points, or 0.07 percentage point, in the price of the securities that determined the indexes, the documents show. That move on Dec. 5, 2008, helped ensure that the interest-rate bets hit the desired target.
Global banks use proprietary indexes for some complex financial products they sell to clients including hedge funds, corporations and retail customers. Deutsche Bank runs about 3,500 of them through a group called DB Index Quant, or DBIQ, according to its website. The indexes are linked to everything from corporate debt to the price of wheat.
While regulators have fined the biggest banks about $9 billion since 2012 for their abuse of public indexes, watchdogs have just begun to pay attention to ones that banks develop in private. In Europe, lawmakers included proprietary indexes in a regulation approved this year monitoring the use of “benchmarks in financial instruments.”
‘Sometimes Obscene’
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last year warned of the complexity and lack of transparency of some financial products sold by banks that use internal indexes. Bank of America Corp. paid $10 million in June to settle SEC claims it masked costs and misled retail investors when selling $150 million of securities tied to a proprietary index in 2010 and 2011, according to an agency statement. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined Barclays Plc $1 million last year for using “materially inaccurate” information when publishing an in-house index.
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UBS Group AG, the world’s biggest wealth manager, paid the SEC almost $20 million last year to settle claims the firm misled investors who bought $190 million of securities linked to a proprietary currency index in 2009 and 2010. UBS employees, some using “colorful and sometimes obscene language,” added unjustified costs to the deal while making their own trades in advance of transactions related to the index, according to an SEC statement. The Zurich-based lender lacked “meaningful controls” over such trading, the agency said.
UBS, Bank of America and Barclays didn’t admit to wrongdoing as part of the settlements.
“Those investors can’t understand the investments themselves, let alone the indexes,” said Craig McCann, an economist at Securities Litigation & Consulting Group who published a paper on proprietary indexes in October. “Fundamentally, such a product is great for investment bankers. Not investors.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016–12-08/deutsche-bank-records-alleged-to-show-banks-rigged-silver-prices
Deutsche Bank Records Said to Show Silver Rigging at Other Banks
Bloomberg News by David Glovin and Edvard Pettersson
December 7, 2016 — 10:26 PM EST December 7, 2016 — 11:31 PM EST
After German bank settled, it gave documents to plaintiffs
UBS, Barclays, Bank of America joined scheme, suit says
Deutsche Bank Records Said to Show Silver Rigging Scheme
Deutsche Bank Records Said to Show Silver Rigging Scheme
Eight months after Deutsche Bank AG settled a lawsuit claiming it manipulated gold and silver prices, documents it disclosed as part of the accord provide “smoking gun” proof that UBS Group AG, HSBC Holdings Plc, Bank of Nova Scotia and other firms rigged the silver market, plaintiffs claim.
The allegation came in a filing Wednesday in a Manhattan federal court lawsuit filed in 2014 by individuals and entities that bought or sold futures contracts.
According to the plaintiffs, records surrendered by Deutsche Bank show traders and submitters coordinating trades in advance of a daily phone call, manipulating the spot market for silver, conspiring to fix the spread on silver offered to customers and using illegal strategies to rig prices.
“Plaintiffs are now able to plead with direct, ‘smoking gun’ evidence,’ including secret electronic chats involving silver traders and submitters across a number of financial institutions, a multi-year, well-coordinated and wide-ranging conspiracy to rig the prices,” the plaintiffs said in their filing. The new scheme “far surpasses the conspiracy alleged earlier.”
New Complaint
The plaintiffs are seeking permission to file a new complaint with the additional allegations. Their proposed complaint broadens the case beyond the four banks initially sued to include claims against units of Barclays Plc, BNP Paribas Fortis SA, Standard Chartered Plc and Bank of America Corp.
Representatives of UBS, BNP Paribas Fortis, HSBC, Standard Chartered and Scotiabank didn’t immediately respond to e‑mails outside regular business hours seeking comment on the allegations. Barclays and Bank of America declined to immediately comment.
A judge dismissed the lawsuit against UBS this year but allowed the plaintiffs to file a new complaint against the bank.
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The Deutsche Bank documents show two UBS traders communicated directly with two Deutsche Bank traders and discussed ways to rig the market, the plaintiffs said. Among other things, the traders shared customer order-flow information, improperly triggered customer stop-loss orders, and engaged in practices such as spoofing. Spoofing entails submitting bids or offers with the intention of canceling them before they’re executed as a way to drive prices.
“UBS was the third-largest market maker in the silver spot market and could directly influence the prices of silver financial instruments based on the sheer volume of silver it traded,” the plaintiffs allege. “Conspiring with other large market makers, like Deutsche Bank and HSBC, only increased UBS’s ability to influence the market.”
The case is In re: London Silver Fixing Ltd. Antitrust Litigation, 1:14-md-02573 U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
It sounds like Donald Trump found someone who shares his apparently very strong beliefs in genetic determinism: Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin also has a strong belief in ‘superior genes’. More specifically, ‘perfect genes’. Even more specifically, Donald Trump’s ‘perfect genes’:
““He’s got perfect genes,” Mnuchin said of Trump. “He has incredible energy, and he’s unbelievably healthy.””
Yes, yes, that Trumpian energy with little need for sleep is perfection! And putting aside the actual problems with the science behind eugenics thought — like how genes tend to involve biological trade offs and the notion of genetic ‘perfection’ doesn’t really make sense — it’s certainly possible that there’s a genetic factor driving Trump’s sleep habits and energy levels since there have been genetic variants identified with that trait. Still, if Trump and his team are seriously going to be promoting his allegedly awesome genes as some sort of leadership quality, it’s worth noting that there’s more than just genetics that could be behind Trump’s energy levels and if Trump isn’t actually a short-sleeper but instead is just acclimated to being really, really sleep deprived the story about Trump’s ‘perfect genes’ might be masking a perfect storm of bad decision-making. And while that make public calls for Trump to release his DNA sequence so he can prove he’s a genetically driven short-sleeper tempting, we probably don’t want to encourage him in this area.