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There’s Still Slack in the Labor Market—But Not a Lot

by RudolfMazza Posted on March 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Brad DeLong looks at a chart showing the employment rate of prime-age workers (ages 25-54) compared to January 2000 and says:

Without nominal wage growth of 4%/year or significantly rising inflation, no way I am going to believe that the U.S. economy is in any sense at “full employment” with an essentially zero output gap right now.

It’s not that I disagree, but I think that choosing January 2000 stacks the deck. That’s the absolute peak of the dotcom boom, and there’s no reason to think we’re going to replicate that anytime soon. A better comparison would be the mid-90s, when the economy was strong and growing but not at the peak of a bubble. Here’s what that looks like:

We’re still not at full employment. But we’re getting there: the unemployment rate is low; the expanded unemployment rate is getting close to low; and wages are increasing a bit. Additional inflationary pressure would be yet another sign of a tight labor market, but we haven’t seen that yet.

We still have work to do to get to full employment—and it’s possible we’ll never get back to 1990s levels. That depends a lot on precisely who’s dropped out of the workforce and why. But we’re getting close.

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There’s Still Slack in the Labor Market—But Not a Lot

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Trump Foreign Policy Adviser Has Ties to Brutal Lebanese Militia

by David Green Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has finally announced the names of five of his foreign policy advisers, and at least one members of his new team is sure to raise eyebrows.

Walid Phares, a Lebanese academic who advised Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012, is one of the five names Trump gave to the Washington Post during a meeting with the paper’s editorial board on Monday. As Mother Jones reported in 2011, Phares was a major player in the Lebanese Forces, one of the Christian militias that fought in Lebanon’s brutal 15-year civil war. According to Toni Nissi, a colleague of Phares’ at the time, Phares helped the group’s leader, Samir Geagea, steep its fighters in religious ideology.

“Samir Geagea wanted to change them from a normal militia to a Christian army,” Nissi said. “Walid Phares was responsible for training the lead officers in the ideology of the Lebanese Forces.”

The Lebanese Forces are now just one of Lebanon’s many political parties, but the group was responsible for one of the war’s most notorious incidents, the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.

Phares is also well known as an anti-Muslim campaigner. He’s appeared on the radio show of Frank Gaffney, the conspiracy theorist who’s a foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz.

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Trump Foreign Policy Adviser Has Ties to Brutal Lebanese Militia

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The Head of Jeb’s Super PAC Is Tired of the Endless Conservative Con

by SherryKifarsy Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mike Murphy is a longtime Jeb Bush friend and loyalist, and he’s also the guy who ran Right to Rise, the Super PAC that blew through $100 million in an epically futile effort to sell Bush to the masses. So it’s understandable that he might be a little bitter about the success of Donald Trump, who almost single-handedly destroyed Bush.

Keep that in mind when you read Matt Labash’s long debriefing of Murphy as he was cleaning up the last remnants of the Right to Rise offices a month ago. At the same time, Murphy is neither a rookie nor a naif, and that gives him a deep perspective on what’s changed over the years in the conservative movement. He acknowledges that Republican voters have grown angrier over the past decade, but he blames a lot of this on Republicans themselves, aided and abetted by a press that barely understands politics anymore and is eager to jack up its ratings by scaring the hell out of people:

He says a lot of the anger is springing from people’s fears and hard realities — the middle class not getting a raise in a decade. Generally pessimistic older white voters see the demographic shifts and don’t like it. The media are incessantly “sticking red-hot thermometers in lukewarm water and saying, ‘Wow, that water’s pretty hot!’ “

….Still, Murphy adds, the problem with our current antiestablishment climate isn’t that people aren’t correctly identifying problems. It’s that the problem-solvers they’re turning to are bigger snake-oil hustlers than the ones they’re turning away from….Let’s think through Trump, Murphy says. “He doesn’t understand the presidency. You don’t call up the head of Mexico and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to build a fabulous wall with first-class gold toilets and you’re gonna pay for it.’…He has no understanding of presidential powers. He has no understanding of Congress. It’s like putting a chimp in the driver’s seat of a tractor.”

….”Then the problem becomes how are we the world’s reserve currency anymore? We get away with a lot of shit because people think we have a stable system….We borrow a lot of f — ing money. Because people think the number one safest instrument in the world is the U.S. Treasury bond. And if we start making reality-show clowns in charge? Run on the American bank. You think the pissed-off steelworker in Akron has trouble now? Wait until we have a financial collapse and they take 25 percent off the dollar. He’ll be serving hot dogs in an American restaurant in China.”

….Murphy starts waxing philosophic….Everything is so postmodern and meta that “nothing means anything, because everything is what the scam is….So many simpleton reporters — whose depth of knowledge extends to whatever they read in the Real Clear Politics polls average that morning. Fly-by-night pollsters feeding the media, which is creating news so that they can report on it.

….I suggest to Murphy that many of these things he’s decrying have been the tricks of his trade. He’s like a magician denouncing the false-bottomed top hat. “I don’t mind technique,” he says. “I can be shameless. I have a long career at this. But when everything is a short con, then there’s never another short con. Because you need trust, and you’ve destroyed it.“….

….The cable-news business establishment who are, whatever they insist, for Trump, since Trump equals ratings….But just as notable, he points out, is the antiestablishment establishment….”Like, Antiestablishment Inc.,” Murphy says. “You can find them at 123 Establishment Lane, Des Moines, Iowa. Often, they’re involved with the postage meter or credit card machine somewhere for small-dollar donations.“

….Take, for instance, he says, the Tea Party — “a racket, though it’s supposed to be a nonracket,” full of faux four-star generals who say, ” ‘You’ve got to pay me because . . . I represent the Nebraska sub-Army 14 of the Tea Party.’ “…Murphy concedes there are lots of voters who “subscribe to a loose set of principles that D.C.’s broken. They’re tired of the establishment. Tired of people in the racket.” But there’s a racket of people sending them letters asking for money. “The poor old lady sends her $25 to defeat Nancy Pelosi, and $22 of it goes to ‘fundraising costs.’ “

Rick Perlstein in particular has written a lot about how the modern conservative movement has largely turned into a machine for swindling people—especially the elderly. There’s Glenn Beck pitching gold as a hedge against nonexistent hyperinflation. Fred Thompson hawking reverse mortgages. The acolytes of direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie setting up operations that scare the bejeesus out of old people but use most of the money they raise to pay themselves and their consultants. The talk radio hosts who repeatedly insinuate that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster—and then quickly break for a commercial. Mike Huckabee peddling diabetes cures and Ben Carson praising the glories of glyconutrients to their evangelical fans. The endless production of simpleminded right-wing books as a handy income stream, some of them with more than the usual whiff of corruption.

Even some conservatives have finally started to recognize that the short con—which is elderly enough that it’s become a long con—is hurting the conservative cause. Mike Murphy is apparently one of them, and he considers the rise of Donald Trump little more than just desserts for a party that’s either tolerated or actively encouraged this behavior for decades. In the end, Trump took a look at the conservative movement and decided that they were amateurs. The big con needs more than talk radio or direct mail or scary ads. It needs national TV provided willingly and often—and Trump knew exactly how that game worked. He’s not running his con any differently than conservatives always have. He just knows how to pull it off way better than they do.

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The Head of Jeb’s Super PAC Is Tired of the Endless Conservative Con

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The Enchanting Solo Flight of Singer Aoife O’Donovan

by Mariano8587 Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jacob Blickenstaff

At 33, singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan already boasts a distinguished music career that stretches back 15 years. As a teenager attending the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, her hometown, O’Donovan helped assemble the innovative bluegrass ensemble Crooked Still, which would release four albums between 2005 and 2010. Her warm, earthy voice and musical versatility have made her a go-to collaborator, appearing on 2011’s “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” with high-strata talents such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolinist Chris Thile (of Punch Brothers fame), bassist Edgar Meyer, and bluegrass multi-instrumentalist Stuart Duncan. O’Donovan (whose first name is pronounced “eee-fah”) also recently recorded and toured with Sarah Jarosz and Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins as part of the Americana power trio I’m With Her.

This year marked the release of her second solo album, In the Magic Hour—a follow-up to 2013’s Fossils—which moves into more experimental territory. (Both albums were produced by Tucker Martine, whose credits include The Decemberists, My Morning Jacket and Neko Case.) On her latest, O’Donovan surrounds herself with, but is never overshadowed by, a cast of talented collaborators as she forges an intimate path through nostalgia and memory, meditating on death, rebirth, and our magical relationship with nature and the universe.

Mother Jones: What kinds of adjustments are necessary when you go from being part of a group to making music as a solo artist?

Aoife O’Donovan: It’s really nice to have both outlets. I started this record at the end of 2014, when I was still touring with I’m With Her. Having the solace from the band while working on your solo stuff was helpful. I could hunker down by myself and listen closely to mixes, but then to be able to have a sounding board of peers to get advice and feedback. Performing alone—it’s a very solitary experience. When you’re in a band, when something amazing happens on stage you can look at each other, “Yeah! we’re so locked in.” Or if something goes wrong, you can look at each other and shrug and say, “Oops.” If you’re doing it by yourself, you reflect on it in a completely different way. You might not be riding high on a great show for as long because you didn’t have people to share the joy with. Same if you had a bad show, it just rolls off you more easily.

MJ: Lots of your past collaborators have guest roles on this record, and yet you manage to maintain a consistency of message.

AO: I think the consistency comes from the parts. There’s the thread of Eyvind Kang’s viola weaving in and out, and Chris’ mandolin lines on a couple songs. The strings appear on the later half of the album, so it all weaves together and creates a circle. This was such a different process than my first record, which also had many of my close friends on it. The songs came from a more solitary place and I hadn’t played them with many people before recording. So I just added the layers of people who are in my life, and built up the songs with Tucker, who brought in his people to help me make a finished product that I think is greater than the sum of its parts.

MJ: Did you have certain themes in mind before going into the studio?

AO: They presented themselves throughout the process. I had this collection of songs, some of which didn’t make it onto the record, but this was a meditation on solitude and life and death and nostalgia and on looking back to your childhood. I just finished a tour in the UK. At two separate shows, when I sang the line from Magic Hour—”Songs about Old Ireland/songs about being young again/I wish I was young again”—twice people cried. I saw them. That is the whole point of the record: crying, not out of sadness for your loss of youth, but the moment of nostalgia for when we were all kids. And then how the album ends with “Jupiter,” where we all get old and we all die, it’s just what happens.

MJ: “Jupiter” is quite a shift from the intimate perspective of the rest of the album: Zoom! Suddenly we’re floating out in the solar system. How does that song relate?

AO: It comes out of left field in that way. The lyrics make it a post-apocalyptic love song from me to somebody else. It’s what I would say at the end of my life: The world is ending and I’ll be at your side until we’re planets. It’s very cosmic and maybe a little silly, but it is a universal theme of The End. In the first song on the album, “Stanley Park,” there’s a lyric, “See that baby at her mother’s breast/if I could I’d take my rest/back in the belly from where I came.” It all starts over again. The album is partially inspired by my grandfather dying. But within a week of his death, two great-grandchildren were born, so it does start over.

MJ: Did you have a deep connection to him?

AO: It’s more like a deep connection to family than to him specifically. My relationship to all my family in Ireland is more to family as a whole. It wasn’t that we had a very specific one-on-one relationship. He had 27 grandchildren! It was more that he was this figure, and we were all kids running around.

MJ: So, there’s this recurring theme on the album of human to animal transformation, especially birds.

AO: I don’t think I realized it was so prevalent until the record came out. I’ve always been fascinated by flight and the freeness of birds. On the record, as we talk about the life cycle, the cosmos, etc., the idea of coming back as something else fits in with that. I love the idea of birds having human qualities. It’s hard to even get close enough to a bird to imagine that they are having any human thought. But I think all humans want to be birds so we can fly.

MJ: How did Tucker Martine shape this project?

AO: He was hugely instrumental in assembling the musicians and helping me realize what kind of sonic landscape I was trying to create. A lot of the songs were not fully formed. Some weren’t even fully written. So bringing in the bass and drums—Steve Nistor plays drums on everything, and there are two different bass players, Sam Howard who lives in Portland, and Nate Query from the Decemberists—and getting the basic stuff down. Tucker got Tim Young to come up from LA to play guitar, he got Eyvind Kang to play viola, plus Rob Burger on keys. It’s a very cool assembly of people.

MJ: You’re from a background of traditional and acoustic music. How open were you to the rock-oriented and experimental elements that made it onto the album?

AO: Very open. My listening tastes have always included artists like Joanna Newsome or, when I was younger, Suzanne Vega or the Story or Downtown New York jazz like Peter Epstein Quartet—stuff that’s more than just fiddles and banjos.

MJ: You seem so busy with your various groups and solo projects. Where do you encounter this solitude you refer to, and is there an element of loneliness in it?

AO: It’s not as much loneliness as the experience being on the road by yourself for so many hours a day. You wake up in your hotel room, go for a run, have your coffee, eat lunch alone, sit in your car by yourself, you might stop for a scenic view alone. You show up at the gig at five o’clock, and you go out on stage and you’re still alone, even though there’s people out there and you’re having this kind of conversation. It’s a very different head space to get in, and one that I’d never really experienced being from a big family and growing up in a big community and coming up in a band and not ever going on the road totally alone. It really taught me to be comfortable being alone. Even when I’m not on the road, it’s given me a reason to carve out that time. Some people never get to.

MJ: Tell me about the lyric “weighed down with family photographs and relics” from your song “Not the Leaving.” Is there a dark side to your nostalgia?

AO: That song is what I’d imagine to be a love letter my grandfather would write to my grandmother, even though they wouldn’t have used language anything like that. I’m imagining where the song takes place, Inchydoney Beach in West Cork, Ireland. It’s an image I had of walking straight out to sea holding all of your belongings, draped with photos all around your neck, and not so much going under as walking toward the other side. It’s a weird image, but I’ve always wanted to be thrown into the ocean when I die—to be rowed out to sea and thrown overboard into the Atlantic.

MJ: There are a lot of proclamations about your own death on this album.

AO: I know! I really am planning on living to be 100. People ask, “Why are you so depressed?” I’m actually a very happy person. It’s not a morbid thing, but I think I’ve never been afraid of death, which is maybe why I love writing about it. It feels like the beautiful unknown, and I feel like there is all this magic in the world. It’s not that I literally believe in magic or spirits. In my logical life I absolutely don’t believe in any kind of mumbo jumbo. But I do have this belief in the greater magic of the universe. Maybe when I die and I’m thrown overboard, I’ll turn into a mermaid.

Continued here – 

The Enchanting Solo Flight of Singer Aoife O’Donovan

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It’s True: Smart People Would Prefer You Went Away

by glasulmaramuresuluianunturi Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Most people are happier when they have a lot of social contact. But Christopher Ingraham points to a new paper suggesting an exception to this general rule: smart people, true to stereotype, prefer being left alone. But why?

I posed this question to Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness. “The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it … are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective,” she said.

Think of the really smart people you know. They may include a doctor trying to cure cancer or a writer working on the great American novel or a human rights lawyer working to protect the most vulnerable people in society. To the extent that frequent social interaction detracts from the pursuit of these goals, it may negatively affect their overall satisfaction with life.

To put this a little less nicely, average folks don’t really have anything very interesting or enthralling to do with themselves, so getting interrupted by friends represents a net improvement in their daily lives. Smart people do have enthralling—even obsessive—intellectual interests, and social activities take them away from that. So this represents a net loss in happiness.

(Important note for smart, argumentative people reading this: we’re talking about averages here. There are plenty of extroverted smart people and introverted dumb people. But on average, smart people tend to dislike socializing because it takes them away from work they find more rewarding.)

But back to the paper. The authors, Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman Li, have a different theory about all this: the measured difference in social preferences is all due to the way we evolved way back on the savanna. Back then, they say, you had a much better chance of surviving if you had lots of friends, so we naturally evolved to value having lots of friends. Things have changed since then—cell phones, computers, cities, houses, etc.—and even though evolution hasn’t yet had a chance to adapt to a world where social contact isn’t as important, “extremely intelligent” people can use their sheer brainpower to adapt anyway:

“More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionarily novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations,” they write….Smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they’re pursuing some loftier ambition.

This odd thing is that this isn’t really an application of evolutionary psychology, even though the authors are evolutionary psychologists. The hypothesis that humans evolved in hierarchical, medium-sized groups that relied on tight social networks for survival is pretty widely accepted. It’s nothing new. What’s new is the suggestion that smart people can overcome the constraints of cognitive evolution more easily than most people. And that’s not really evolutionary psychology. It’s just regular old psychology, or perhaps regular old neuroscience. It’s pretty likely that this has always been true of smart people, but we just don’t know it. Our social science datasets are shockingly inadequate for dates before 20,000 BCE.

Now, I don’t have access to the paper itself, and it’s possible that the authors address this. The abstract doesn’t give any hint of it, though. For the time being, then, I’ll take this as a fairly banal observation: people with intense intellectual interests value them more highly than social contact, and almost by definition, it’s mostly smart people who have intense intellectual interests. As a refugee from the tech world who dealt with a lot of programmers, and as a blogger who gets annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of writing a post, color me unsurprised.

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It’s True: Smart People Would Prefer You Went Away

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What’s the Deal With Donald Trump’s Mustache?

by whatisthebestcctvdvrsoftware Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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The last couple of weeks have been pretty hard on Donald Trump, and he’s showing the strain by turning up the insult meter to 11. His favorite quarry, of course, is Megyn Kelly:

Crazy @megynkelly supposedly had lyin’ Ted Cruz on her show last night. Ted is desperate and his lying is getting worse. Ted can’t win!
Crazy @megynkelly is now complaining that @oreillyfactor did not defend her against me – yet her bad show is a total hit piece on me. Tough!
Highly overrated & crazy @megynkelly is always complaining about Trump and yet she devotes her shows to me. Focus on others Megyn!
Everybody should boycott the @megynkelly show. Never worth watching. Always a hit on Trump! She is sick, & the most overrated person on tv.

Plus there’s been all this in just the past couple of days:

$35M of negative ads against me in Florida…. Stuart Stevens, the failed campaign manager of Mitt Romney’s historic loss…. lyin’ Ted Cruz has lost so much of the evangelical vote…. @WSJ is bad at math….Who should star in a reboot of Liar Liar- Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz?…. Lyin’ Ted Cruz lost all five races on Tuesday.

@EWErickson got fired like a dog from RedState…. millions of dollars of negative and phony ads against me by the establishment…. Club For Growth tried to extort $1,000,000 from me…. Lyin’ Ted Cruz should not be allowed to win in Utah – Mormons don’t like LIARS!…. Mitt Romney is a mixed up man who doesn’t have a clue.

I’ll grant that Trump has a point about the Wall Street Journal. Their editorial page really is bad at math. The rest is just a sustained whinefest from a guy who judges everyone in the world by the standard of how sycophantic they are toward Donald Trump. His preoccupation with Megyn Kelly prompted this from the normally mild-mannered Bret Baier:

Fox favorite Geraldo Rivera, no shrinking violet, said Trump’s obsession with Kelly “is almost bordering on the unhealthy.” Almost? Fox News itself followed up with a barrage of anti-Trump tweets and this statement on Facebook:

Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land….As the mother of three young children, with a successful law career and the second highest rated show in cable news, it’s especially deplorable for her to be repeatedly abused just for doing her job.

So there you have it. It’s Fox vs. Trump yet again. So far, I don’t think Fox has won any of these street fights, but maybe they’re due. I guess it depends on whether they keep it up, or lamely make amends the way they usually do.

Finally, in other Trump news, this is from an interview he did a couple of days ago. What’s with the mustache?

Excerpt from:

What’s the Deal With Donald Trump’s Mustache?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 March 2016

by MaryjoWollstonec Posted on March 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today is wildlife watching day. Our squirrel is sitting calmly on our fence snacking on something or other, and the cats are fascinated. They are extremely dedicated to the study of small, local ecologies—with an emphasis on fauna rather than flora.

In non-feline news, I was prepared to link to some baby rhino cuteness, but instead my sister recommends this video of a dog trying to get its human to play fetch. I hate to admit it, but dogs really are smarter than cats. Until they learn to purr, though, cats will always have the edge.

Link to article:

Friday Cat Blogging – 18 March 2016

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A Few Wee Questions

by WendellFBQX Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m a little confused:

I understand why Donald Trump pulled out of today’s scheduled debate. He figures there’s nothing in it for him. But why did John Kasich pull out? Does he figure he’s so well known by now that he no longer needs free publicity?
Why can’t Donald Trump find any foreign policy advisors? Sure, as best we can tell his foreign policy is juvenile and erratic, which probably puts off most competent foreign policy hands. But what about the less competent ones? Or the ambitious little gits who just want to hook up with a winner? Why can’t he lure any of those folks into his tent?
Why doesn’t Merrick Garland figure out a way to quietly leak the notion that he’s opposed to abortion and thinks Roe v. Wade is bad law? He has no track record on abortion, so it would seem perfectly plausible. That would really put Republicans in a tough spot, wouldn’t it?

That’s all for now.

Continued: 

A Few Wee Questions

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Quote of the Day: The Middle Class Doesn’t Care If We Cut Taxes on the Rich

by NatishaRoney Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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From House Speaker Paul Ryan, talking about his view of tax reform:

I do not like the idea of buying into these distributional tables.

“These distributional tables” are the ones that show Republican tax plans giving enormous cuts to the wealthy and nothing much at all to the middle class. Ryan calls them ridiculous because once you account for the economic boom of Republican tax cuts for the rich, everyone is going to be rolling in dough. Besides which, Ryan insists, “I think most people don’t think, ‘John’s success comes at my expense.'” Bottom line: distributional tables are for losers. “Bernie Sanders talks about that stuff. That’s not who we are.”

On a more amusing note, Ryan says he’s not looking at how to fund a border wall. “Remember, we’re not going to pay for that, recall?” So true.

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Quote of the Day: The Middle Class Doesn’t Care If We Cut Taxes on the Rich

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Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

by RamiroRestrepo9 Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s pretty common knowledge that Donald Trump lies routinely about his wealth and his businesses. He can get away with this because he runs a private company and isn’t required to open his books to the public.

But there was one period in his life when he ran a public company. Here’s the backstory: During the ’80s, Trump invested heavily in Atlantic City casinos. He ended up owning three of them, culminating in the Trump Taj Mahal, a billion-dollar monstrosity that was ill conceived and poorly run, hemorrhaging money from the day it opened. Trump had borrowed heavily during this period, guaranteeing many of the loans personally, and this was the last straw. His company was bankrupt.

He would have been personally bankrupt, too, but his creditors decided to put him on a leash and let him try to work his way out. He made steady progress, but the casinos continued to be a millstone around his neck. By the mid-’90s, however, the stock market was getting hot and lots of small investors, then as now, were mesmerized by the Trump name. So Trump decided that as long as there were lots of rubes who still thought he was a great businessman, he might as well take advantage of them. Timothy O’Brien tells the story in TrumpNation:

In a masterstroke of financial maneuvering, and in a tribute to the sucker-born-every-minute theorem, Trump managed to take two of the Trump casinos—the Plaza and the Taj Mahal—public in 1995 and 1996, at a time when Donald was unable to make his bank payments and was heading toward personal bankruptcy. The stock sales allowed Donald to buy the casinos back from the banks and unload huge amounts of debt. The offering yanked Donald out of the financial graveyard and left him with a 25 percent stake in a company he once owned entirely.

…In one fell swoop someone else became responsible for the debts that almost sank Donald…Exactly what investors thought they might get for their Trump Hotels investment wasn’t entirely clear. Donald had already demonstrated that casinos weren’t his forte, and investors were buying stock in a company that was immediately larded with debts that made it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade the operations.

…Allan Sloan, the financial writer who had opined with great accuracy on many things Trump, offered a fair warning to Trump Hotels’ investors: “Shareholders and bondholders have to be total fools ever to think that Donald Trump will put their interests ahead of his own.”…Donald spent several years proving Sloan correct.

…Just a few months after Trump Hotels absorbed the Taj, Donald sold his last Atlantic City casino, the Castle, to the public company. That is, Donald sold his own casino, with all of its heavy debts, to a public company he controlled. The $490 million price tag for the Castle was about $100 million more than analysts thought it was worth…sending the company’s stock into a nosedive from which it never recovered.

…Although Trump Hotels’ shares were sinking and there were no earnings to be seen, Donald paid himself $7 million for his handiwork at the company in 1996…Jerry Useem at Fortune took note in 2000 of Donald’s “disquieting” tendency to “use the casino company as his own personal piggy bank.” In addition to the multimillion-dollar bonuses Donald was lifting out of Trump Hotels, Useem pointed out that “the pilots of his personal 727 are on the casino company’s payroll” and that in 1998 Donald “had the already cash-strapped company lend him $26 million to pay off a personal loan.”

Trump’s fans were conned into buying up his debt-laden properties and turning them into a public company. Trump, who plainly had no interest in running a casino and had demonstrated no corporate management skills during the prior decade, paid himself millions of dollars from the company’s coffers for doing essentially nothing. He then unloaded his third casino onto the public company at an inflated price.

The public company didn’t show a profit during a single year of its existence. In 2004 the stock was delisted and the company forced into Chapter 11 reorganization. It was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts, but with Trump still at the helm it continued to pile up losses and amassed debts of nearly $2 billion. In 2008, after missing a $53 million bond payment, it declared bankruptcy yet again and Trump resigned as the company’s chairman. Its investors lost all their money.

In case you’re curious, this is how Trump treats the little people. Some of the investors in his casinos were big guns who should have known better. But plenty of them were moms and pops who believed Trump when he insisted he was the greatest businessman the world had ever known. Trump didn’t care: He figured he could fleece them, and he did. That’s what happens to people who trust Donald Trump.

Link: 

Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

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