Drain the swamp!

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It is a time-honored tradition for presidents in both parties to give at least some ambassadorial positions to friends and political donors, over people who have actual qualifications or experience. But President Donald Trump has taken the practice to a new extreme. According to a paper recently published in the Duke Law Journal, less than 59 percent of ambassadorial appointees under Trump have experience as foreign service officers — none of the last five presidents, going back to 1981, dipped lower than 68 percent. Trump’s ambassadors also are the least likely since the Reagan administration to know their host country’s language (55.2 percent), and the least likely since the Clinton administration to have any professional experience with their host country at all (41.4 percent). What Trump’s ambassadors do seem to have are deep pockets. The same study found that people appointed as U.S. ambassadors under Trump contributed a combined $96,900 to the president’s election campaign. For perspective, the total amount contributed to the campaigns Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama by all of their respective ambassadors combined adds up to about $99,100.

Trump’s ambassadors are the least qualified in 40 years — but gave record amounts of money to Trump: report – Alternet.org

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Trump’s refusal to deliver the great middle-class tax cut he promised (twice, in 2016 and 2018) has only two possible explanations.  One, he is spectacularly stupid.  Not mediocre, lazy, or nearly invincibly ignorant.  It takes spectacular stupidity to be unable to see, after months of meeting and press reactions, that the middle-class will love major middle-class tax cuts and hate tax cuts designed by Trump’s puppet masters to go overwhelmingly to the exceptionally wealthy. Trump is the laziest, most corrupt, and most narcissistic President in U.S. history.  It is clear whenever he speaks that he is far from intelligent.  He is not, however, spectacularly stupid.  He is normal stupid.  He knew that a real middle-class tax cut would have made him spectacularly popular.

The other explanation for Trump’s breaking his tax promise to his base also explains his breaking his infrastructure promise.  In both cases, Trump has chosen the policy option that is worst for the American people – and for Trump’s popularity.  In both cases, Trump kowtows not to his base but to the wealthiest and most rapacious American elites. Trump is spectacularly cheap.  He did not fund his presidential election and he was not remotely as wealthy as he claimed to be for decades.  He cannot borrow from any reputable bank in the world.  He is in office not due to a wave of small contributions from his base, but because he kissed the ring of a whole string of plutocrats who share two Trumpian traits.  They are sleaze and they are greedy.  They provided the funding to put Trump in office. 

Their members and minions populate the horror show that is the Trump administration.  The plutocrats crafted the Trump tax cut to provide the astonishing transfer of wealth to the plutocrats. The plutocrats knew that if Trump delivered a real middle-class tax cut and infrastructure program he would become spectacularly popular.  That would make him far more powerful and potentially independent from his plutocratic puppet masters.  A real middle class tax cut would have given tax relief overwhelmingly to the middle-class instead of the plutocrats. 

The puppet masters hated that idea and killed it before it ever became a policy alternative in the Trump administration. Similarly, a real infrastructure stimulus plan would have made regular Americans far better off, made Trump widely more popular, and driven bipartisan agreement.  Trump’s plutocratic puppet masters killed that option before it could become a policy alternative.  The result is a plan designed by and for the puppet masters. Their predatory “partnerships” have the public provide the financing while the plutocrats skim the profits and dump the losses on the public.

We have run two real world tests of the relative power of Trump’s base versus his puppet masters. In both tax cuts and infrastructure, Trump has shown slavish fealty to his puppet masters even when it harms and upsets his base and prevents tens of millions of other Americans from adding their support.

Why Did Trump Choose to Be Such an Unpopular President? | naked capitalism

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The latest Trump political donor to draw controversy is Li Yang, a 45-year-old Florida entrepreneur from China who founded a chain of spas and massage parlors that included the one where New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft was recently busted for soliciting prostitution. She made the news this week when the Miami Herald reported that last month she had attended a Super Bowl viewing party at Donald Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club and had snapped a selfie with the president during the event. Though Yang no longer owns the spa Kraft allegedly visited, the newspaper noted that other massage parlors her family runs have “gained a reputation for offering sexual services.” (She told the newspaper she has never violated the law.) Beyond this sordid tale, there is another angle to the strange story of Yang: She runs an investment business that has offered to sell Chinese clients access to Trump and his family. And a website for the business—which includes numerous photos of Yang and her purported clients hobnobbing at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach—suggests she had some success in doing so.

A Florida Massage Parlor Owner Has Been Selling Chinese Execs Access to Trump at Mar-a-Lago – Mother Jones

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Among the other revelations from his time in the White House, Cohn said a tipping point for him leaving was a meeting Navarro and Ross secretly set up with heads of the steel and aluminum industry to notify them that the administration was planning to levy tariffs on imports of the metals. "What happened in the White House is we got to a point, unfortunately, where one or two people decided that they were going to no longer be part of a process and a debate," he said. Asked to confirm that it was Navarro and Ross who set up the meeting, Cohn said, "Yes. Those are the two people. When the process breaks down, then you're, sort of, in my mind, living in chaos. I don't want to live in a chaotic organization."

BLFS 17.69 0.80 4.74% : BioLife Solutions, Inc. - Yahoo Finance

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With the winding down of the annual Palm Beach social circuit comes the end of another season of controversy, scandal and ethics concerns that swirl around the exclusive resort, which drips with gold-leafed opulence and where a $200,000 “initiation fee” appears to cover the privilege of bending the president’s ear. This year’s cast of notable characters includes the Chinese former owner of a massage parlour snared in a high-profile prostitution sting, a Russian investor wanted in his home country for tax fraud and a cosmetic dentist who influenced Trump’s thinking on veterans’ care by writing policy advice on a cocktail napkin. Add to the mix last summer’s confirmation as ambassador to the Dominican Republic of Trump’s longtime friend and former insurance agent Robin Bernstein, a Mar-a-Lago founding member, and renewed concerns by ethics experts over the ease of access to and influence over Trump when he visits his resort are easy to understand. “The Mar-a-Lago club has turned into a pay-for-access to the president club, with a president with almost no knowledge of governmental policy,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a Washington-based pro-transparency group that has criticised Trump for continuing to profit from his business operations while in office.

'Pay-for-access to Trump club': Mar-a-Lago faces renewed ethics concerns | US news | The Guardian

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A newly reported recording reveals that oil lobbying executives boasted in 2017 about having "unprecedented access" to Trump administration officials, including "direct access" to a former oil industry lobbyist tapped to fill a top role in the Interior Department. The recording, obtained by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, reportedly features Dan Naatz, political director of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), and a group of oil and gas producers at a June 2017 meeting in southern California..

Oil execs boasted of 'unprecedented access' to Trump officials: report | TheHill

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Industry lobbyists writing parts of EPA memos..

That is apparent, they argue, because of a 2017 EPA memo that was issued just months after then-Administrator Scott Pruitt called for input on what EPA regulations should be repealed. The Air Permitting Forum responded to that call, arguing that companies should only be held responsible for pollution for which they are the predominant cause. Identical text was used just a few months later in a memo that reversed the EPA’s position in litigation against DTE Energy Company, one of Harlow’s clients while employed at Hunton. Wehrum was similarly accused of borrowing language from industry when he worked at the EPA under the George W. Bush administration.

Dem senators call for probe into EPA officials over memo language | TheHill

[Admin]

The system is rigged, but not quite as Trump claims it is.. From Fortune

How Did Trump Live So Large While Reporting Such Huge Losses?
Joe Light
Fortune•May 15, 2019

The Battle for Donald Trump’s Tax Returns

Real-estate developer Donald Trump in 1992 lived in a New York luxury apartment, traveled by limousine and had personal bodyguards. That year, he also reported a negative $750 million adjusted gross income to the IRS. 
How the future president could live so large while reporting such huge losses has been a question since the New York Times revealed a decade of Trump’s tax information last week. While the president claims there were paper losses that could be chalked up to real-estate activities, four tax experts said that for the president to have claimed such a giant negative income, his businesses must have bled money for years.
Real-estate developers enjoy some of the best advantages in the tax code. But the magnitude of Trump’s losses can’t be explained by that alone, the tax experts said.

To have achieved a billion dollars in losses, Trump would have had to lose actual money. And the fact that he continued to live in high style even after such failures means he would have had to either lose someone else’s money or get cash injections from another source.

’Massive Write-Offs’
Based on tax transcripts it obtained, the New York Times showed that Trump reported a negative adjusted-gross income for each of the years between 1985 and 1994 and that his core businesses lost about $1.17 billion over that period. Several Trump casinos and other properties declared bankruptcy in the early 1990s. Charles Harder, a lawyer for Trump, did not respond to a request for comment. The president on Twitter last week said the losses were due to “massive write offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases.” Trump, like most developers, likely owns dozens of so-called pass-through entities such as partnerships or LLCs. Those companies don’t pay income tax at the corporate level. Instead, the income flows through to their owners’ personal tax returns. That means when the businesses post losses, the owners can count it against their other income, even if it has nothing to do with the business.

Real Estate Breaks
Real-estate developers get huge deductions of paper losses that help reduce their tax bills, and the losses are magnified by the leverage they typically take on most purchases. The main such deduction stems from the Internal Revenue Service’s determination of the useful life of a building. A typical commercial property, according to the IRS, can last 39 years. In return, the IRS allows the building’s owner to take a loss of 1/39th of the building every year. So for a building that costs $10 million — not including the land underneath it –the developer could take a loss of more than $256,000 every year and count that against his or her other income, even if it has nothing to do with the building.

The more debt a developer has, the stronger the effect, said Gary DuBoff, a principal in the tax and accounting department for MBAF, an accounting firm in New York. Even if the developer only invested a fraction of his own money in the property and borrowed the rest, he still gets to take depreciation on the entire $10 million purchase. The interest expenses on his mortgage are also deductible.
Add it all up and real-estate developers get one of the best suites of tax deductions available to any business owner, said tax attorney Jonathan Blattmachr. “If I had my life to live over again, I would have gone into real estate,” Blattmachr said.

Yet even those deductions aren’t enough to explain Trump’s losses, according to Blattmachr and three other tax attorneys. The losses in the Trump core businesses in the decade through 1994, would have required Trump and his companies to own billions of dollars more in real estate than he did. “I am skeptical of the claim that his losses were largely attributable to depreciation expenses,” said James Repetti, a tax-law professor at Boston College Law School. Repetti said hotel chains whose expenses might be comparable to those of casinos that Trump owned at the time show it was unlikely he could have depreciation expenses anywhere close to what he claimed in losses. It’s much more likely that the failure of Trump’s companies in the 1980s and 1990s generated hundreds of millions in losses, said Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. As the businesses failed, their losses flowed through to Trump’s own returns, and he used them to offset any income he made elsewhere.

Trump also appears to have tried to stretch the tax code to magnify those benefits even more, Rosenthal said.
Usually, when a company’s debt is forgiven or restructured, it has to count the reduction in debt as income, which lowers the loss the company can take for tax purposes. Bankruptcy court documents revealed in 2016 that Trump used an unusual method that let him avoid counting the forgiveness as income by trading the debt for shares of other partnerships. That, in effect, let him use his creditors’ losses to his own benefit, Rosenthal said.
“Was Trump worse off after a decade of red? Not really because it was other people’s money,” Rosenthal said.

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A bank CEO, Stephen Calk, has been indicted for approving loans for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, hoping to get a job in the administration.   According to NBC News:   "As alleged, Stephen M. Calk abused the power entrusted to him as the top official of a federally insured bank by approving millions of dollars in high-risk loans in an effort to secure a personal benefit, namely an appointment as Secretary of the Army or another similarly high-level position in the incoming presidential administration," Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement.

Trump news - live: President lashes out over Putin story after Rose Garden 'hissy fit', as calls for impeachment intensify | The Independent

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The Chinese government has granted Ivanka Trump's company preliminary approval for another five trademarks this month, as her father's administration pushes ahead on trade negotiations with China. Four trademarks, including child care centers, sunglasses and wedding dresses, were approved on Sunday. A fifth, covering brokerage, charitable fundraising and art valuation services, was approved on Jan.6, according to online trademark office records. The applications were filed in 2016 and 2017. If no one objects, they will be finalized after 90 days.

China grants Ivanka Trump 5 trademarks amid trade talks