Category: Money, Class, and Poverty,

Report: Trump Made Millions of Dollars From Drug Money Laundering in Panama

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, The Americas,Leave a comment

Donald Trump made tens of millions of dollars in profits by allowing Colombian drug cartels and other groups to launder money through a Trump-affiliated hotel in Panama, according to a new investigation by the organization Global Witness.

…The report said the drug cartels purchased hotel units to hide the origins of money earned through drug trafficking and other criminal activity, and Trump is estimated to have earned tens of millions of dollars from the deals.

…“Investing in luxury properties is a tried and trusted way for criminals to move tainted cash into the legitimate financial system, where they can spend it freely,” the report noted. “Once scrubbed clean in this way, vast profits from criminal activities like trafficking people and drugs, organized crime, and terrorism can find their way into the U.S. and elsewhere.”

…One of the men involved in the scheme was David Eduardo Helmut Murcia Guzmán, who a U.S. court subsequently sentenced to nine years in prison for laundering millions of dollars. Another was Alexandre Henrique Ventura Nogueira, who sold units at the Trump Ocean Club and later admitted that some of the people he did business with were members of the Russian mafia.

Trump family members were allegedly involved in directly managing the Panama project.

Trump Made Millions of Dollars From Drug Money Laundering in Panama: Report

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Kushner Cos. repeatedly filed false NYC housing paperwork

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Local Interest,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

The Kushner Cos. routinely filed false paperwork with the city declaring it had zero rent-regulated tenants in dozens of buildings it owned across the city when, in fact, it had hundreds.

While none of the documents during a three-year period when Kushner was CEO bore his personal signature, they provide a window into the ethics of the business empire he ran before he went on to become one of the most trusted advisers to the president of the United States.

…“The fact that the company was falsifying all these applications with the government shows a sordid attempt to avert accountability and get a rapid return on its investment.”

…In all, Housing Rights Initiative found the Kushner Cos. filed at least 80 false applications for construction permits in 34 buildings across New York City from 2013 to 2016, all of them indicating there were no rent-regulated tenants. Instead, tax documents show there were more than 300 rent-regulated units. Nearly all the permit applications were signed by a Kushner employee, including sometimes the chief operating officer.

…In Kushner buildings across the city, records show frequent complaints about construction going on early in the morning or late at night against the rules, improper or illegal construction, and work without a permit.

…Submitting false documents to the city’s Department of Buildings for construction permits is a misdemeanor, which can carry fines of up to $25,000. But real estate experts say it is often flouted with little to no consequences. Landlords who do so get off with no more than a demand from the city, sometimes a year or more later, to file an “amended” form with the correct numbers.

Report: Kushner Cos. filed false NYC housing paperwork

Disgusting.

Mnuchin family has $1 million more things to be “super duper sorry” about

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

The report, compiled by the nonpartisan ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), relies on documents that show that Mnuchin used military jets for at least seven separate trips last year, which cost taxpayers almost $1 million. Those trips would have cost less than $25,000 in total on commercial flights, according to analysis from the New York Times.

“The public still has no reasonable explanation for why Secretary Mnuchin apparently has never used commercial aircraft while his predecessors did, or why he needs military aircraft that can accommodate 120 passengers when his travel manifests contain far fewer names,” CREW attorney Anne Weismann said in a statement.

An investigation by the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General concluded in October that Mnuchin had not violated any laws but did note a “disconnect between the standard of proof” required to use military jets for travel “and the actual amount of proof provided by Treasury and accepted by the White House in justifying these trip requests.”

Mnuchin family has $1 million more things to be “super duper sorry” about – VICE News

Old news, but still worth thinking about

God, Cocaine, Money and Forgetting: A Look at Donald Trump’s New Economic Adviser

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

Kudlow returned to the private sector in 1987, headed to Wall Street and spent some years like every other debauched executive with an excess of cash and a waterbed in the tail end of the Me Decade: on weeklong cocaine binges. His drug problem caused him to resign from the investment bank Bear Stearns in 1994.

…But Kudlow kept drinking and snorting, and National Review fired him after a year. He hit rock bottom in 1995 and shipped out for five months in a Minnesota rehab. There, he ditched the coke and booze for good. Upon leaving rehab, he signed up for some Catholic Opus Dei retreats.

…He soon found his other true calling as the King of All Right-Wing Economic Media.

…Those investors apparently don’t know or care that Kudlow has been spectacularly wrong on the biggest economic turning points in modern history. Just before the real estate crash that provoked the 2008 global financial meltdown, he ridiculed people predicting that outcome as “bubbleheads” and was still assuring his listeners and viewers after the financial crash that there was nothing to worry about. As late as 2011, he predicted that the Obama administration stimulus program would create “1970s-style stagflation.” Meanwhile, the country has been seeing the lowest inflation in two generations and the lowest interest rates in history.

…. By selecting two of the discredited Laffer Curve’s biggest cheerleaders as his economic brain trust, Trump is sending up a smoke signal to the party bosses in Washington and in the Koch mansions that he’s still, wink-wink, one of them.

If he’s lucky—and he has been so far—his working- and middle-class supporters have as many holes in their memory as Kudlow does.

God, Cocaine, Money and Forgetting: A Look at Donald Trump’s New Economic Adviser

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Alabama Sheriff Legally Took $750,000 Meant To Feed Inmates, Bought Beach House

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Gulf Coast Region,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

Alabama has a Depression-era law that allows sheriffs to “keep and retain” unspent money from jail food-provision accounts. Sheriffs across the state take excess money as personal income — and, in the event of a shortfall, are personally liable for covering the gap.

…Sheriffs across the state do the same thing and have for decades. But the scale of the practice is not clear: “It is presently unknown how much money sheriffs across the state have taken because most do not report it as income on state financial disclosure forms,” the Southern Center for Human Rights wrote in January.

…”A couple people I knew came through the jail, and they say they got meat maybe once a month, and every other day, it was just beans and vegetables,” Qualls told Sheets. “I put two and two together and realized that that money could have gone toward some meat or something.”

…In 2009, then-Sheriff Greg Bartlett of Morgan County was briefly tossed in jail after acknowledging that he had personally profited, to the tune of $212,000, from a surplus in the jail-food account. Prisoners testified about receiving meager meals.

To cut corners, Bartlett used charitable donations and “special deals,” as CBS put it — including once splitting a $1,000 truck full of corn dogs with a sheriff of a nearby county and then feeding the inmates corn dogs twice a day for weeks.

…In 2015, a sheriff in Morgan County loaned $150,000 from the inmate food fund to a corrupt car lot. The loan was revealed when the business, facing theft and scam charges, went bankrupt.

Alabama Sheriff Legally Took $750,000 Meant To Feed Inmates, Bought Beach House : The Two-Way : NPR

hmmmm

How for-profit prisons have become the biggest lobby no one is talking about

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

via How for-profit prisons have become the biggest lobby no one is talking about – The Washington Post

(An old article but it is circulating again.)

How? For starters, I’m going to go with the fact that advocating for convicted criminally isn’t the sexiest job out there….

And yes, Rubio is a bought and paid for hack. Not exactly breaking news. Even back in 2015, not exactly breaking news. Why is this a surprise to anyone? Have they never watched him speak???!

Exiled Russian Oligarch Khodorkovsky on Putin, and Political Murders and Prosecutions

On By peanutgallerynhIn Central Northern Asia and The Caucasus,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

In 2003, when Khodorkovsky was head of the oil giant Yukos and reputed to have a personal fortune of some $15 billion, he showed up at a Kremlin meeting without a tie (seen as a sign of disrespect) and confronted Putin in front of everybody there: “Mr. President, your officials are bribe takers and thieves.” Since then, it is said, Putin has never forgiven Khodorkovsky for that declaration, despite the fact—or because of it—that many people believe it to be true.

From 2003 to 2013, the erstwhile oligarch was locked in Russian prisons and prison camps for alleged tax evasion and theft. Then, five years ago, Putin pardoned Khodorkovsky, and the former oil tycoon left Russia on the first day of his freedom, joining the large population of exiled Russian businessmen here in “Londongrad” who hope that one day the Russian regime will “fall apart.”

…In the interview with The Daily Beast, Khodorkovsky noted that President Putin has never seen war with his own eyes. “His aides let him watch too many war movies, he has not seen real war, which this time would mean blood and death all over the planet.”

…In Russia, dozens of opposition activists have been arrested, interrogated, beaten, imprisoned. Khodorkovsky said he expected more arrests to come after the vote two weeks away, but his Open Russia Foundation’s group of human-rights defenders and lawyers will provide legal support to Russian political dissidents.

Khodorkovsky is well aware that other critics and opponents of Putin have been killed under highly suspicious circumstances, not only in Russia, but, in one infamous case, here in “Londongrad.”

…In Russia, Anna Politkovskaya, an award-winning independent journalist for Novaya Gazeta, was assassinated in her apartment building a month before Litvinenko was poisoned in London. In 2015 President Putin’s most passionate critic, Boris Nemtsov, was shot four times in the back right outside of the Kremlin’s wall. His assassins are in prison but the mastermind behind his assassination has never been brought to trial.

…Hundreds of thousands of educated Russians, including successful businessmen, flee Russia every year. According to the Atlantic Council, about 1.8 million Russian citizens emigrated in the period between 2000 and 2014.

…Khodorkovsky said that he is convinced that opening and closing of criminal cases in Russia was pure business, like the “indulgences” offered by the church: “It has nothing to do with groveling before Putin, Titov is trying to make a new deal with exiled businessmen, assure them that their cases would be closed now, and then later they would pay the system,” Khodorkovsky told The Daily Beast.

But “when the first Russian businessman got arrested upon his arrival,” said Khodorkovsky, “it became obvious to us in London, that nobody in Russia had a huge desire to let Titov change the rules of the market [and] there are no illusions left that the criminal charges against businessmen on the list would be dropped.”

Exiled Russian Oligarch Khodorkovsky on the Real McMafia, Vladimir Putin, and Political Murders

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Trump killed a rule restricting coal companies from dumping toxic waste in streams

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Environment,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

Coal mining is a messy business. In parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, mining companies often get at underground coal seams by blowing up the tops of mountains — a process known as mountaintop removal mining. Once that’s done, they’ll dump the debris into the valleys below, which can contaminate streams and waterways with toxic heavy metals.

Appalachian Voices, an environmental group, estimates that coal companies have buried over 2,000 miles of streams in the region through mountaintop removal mining since the 1990s. And there’s growing evidence that when mining debris and waste gets into water supplies, the toxic metals can have dire health impacts for the people and mostly rural communities living nearby.

…Community groups across Appalachia and environmentalists had long pushed to update the regulations here, especially since mining practices have changed drastically over the past three decades and scientists have learned more about the harmful effects of water pollution from coal mining.

…Trump signed the bill, which means the stream protection rule is now dead. Coal companies will have a freer hand in dumping mining debris in streams.

Why Trump just killed a rule restricting coal companies from dumping waste in streams – Vox

hmmmm

U.S. monthly budget deficit largest in 6 years

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

New Treasury Department numbers show that the US government racked up a $215 billion deficit in February — the largest monthly deficit in six years.

…For the full fiscal year, Treasury now projects the annual deficit will near $833 billion, and then $984 billion in fiscal 2019.

The climb back to trillion dollar deficits — a hallmark of the financial crisis — has been hastened by policies put into place in the past several months.

U.S. monthly budget deficit largest in 6 years – Mar. 12, 2018

…Because incompetence.

Teachers, students separated by 20 miles face very different circumstances

On By peanutgallerynhIn Money, Class, and Poverty,, Schools,Leave a comment

The schools in Bow – an affluent, suburban community bordering Concord – have always enjoyed a sterling reputation for academic success and good pay for educators, where teachers earn on average $63,169 a year.

Twenty miles away, the schools in Pittsfield – a geographically isolated, depressed former mill town – have faced test scores and graduation rates well below average. There, teachers are paid on average $22,000 a year less than Bow. While the district has a contingent of veteran staff, it faces high turnover – sometimes up to 20 percent a year – and a steady churn of young, untried teachers.

…Frustrated by taxes, Pittsfield has, on several occasions, flirted with closing its high school. But each time the proposition has been considered, the conclusion has been the same: between tuition, special education and transportation, taxpayers wouldn’t save much, if at all.

Teachers, students separated by 20 miles face very different circumstances

hmmm

Parkland Survivors Meet With Chicago Students To Tackle Gun Violence ‘Beyond Gated Communities’

On By peanutgallerynhIn Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

The Parkland survivors and their #NeverAgain movement to end school shootings have attracted and maintained national media attention for weeks. The ubiquitous coverage has proven bittersweet to many inner city activists.

…This surge in gun violence has taken a massive toll on American children, especially black children. From 2012 to 2014, the annual firearm homicide rate for black children was roughly 10 times higher than the rate for white children and Asian-American children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, firearm-related fatalities are the third leading cause of death overall for U.S. children, according to the CDC.

 

https://twitter.com/Emma4Change/status/970300513253171205

https://twitter.com/Emma4Change/status/970300519267762177

 

Parkland Survivors Meet With Chicago Students To Tackle Gun Violence ‘Beyond Gated Communities’ | HuffPost

I was really hoping for some intersectionality in their activism.
Go, go gadget woke kids!

Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco

On By peanutgallerynhIn Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Race,Leave a comment

In search of reasonable rent, the middle-class backbone of San Francisco — maitre d’s, teachers, bookstore managers, lounge musicians, copywriters and merchandise planners — are engaging in an unusual experiment in communal living: They are moving into dorms.

Shared bathrooms at the end of the hall and having no individual kitchen or living room is becoming less weird for some of the city’s workers thanks to Starcity, a new development company that is expressly creating dorms for many of the non-tech population.

…These are not single-family homes that are being used as group houses.

Instead, Starcity residents get a bedroom of 130 square feet to 220 square feet. Many of the buildings will feature some units with a private bath for a higher rent.

…Starcity’s target demographic makes $40,000 to $90,000 a year. Most of the residents, who range in age from their early 20s to early 50s.

…The Starcity community manager (a.k.a. the building manager) is extremely involved in household affairs, dropping off care packages when someone is sick and organizing birthday parties. If tenants sign up for premium services, Starcity will do their laundry for $40 a month, clean rooms for $130 a week and even arrange for dog day care.

…Wearing muddy leather boots, black jeans and a hard hat, he examined Mason Street, formerly a residential hotel that served homeless and low-income people in the Tenderloin neighborhood. It will soon be 71 Starcity units.

The Tenderloin, a traditionally working-class and diverse neighborhood with a large arts scene and a sizable homeless population, has been slowly gentrifying, leading to rising tensions. (Most of Starcity’s residents are white.) On the sidewalk outside Mr. Dishotsky’s construction zone that morning, there were used needles and several tents.

Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco – The New York Times

hmmm

How Trump changed the rules to arrest more non-criminal immigrants

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Race,Leave a comment

In Trump’s first year, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 109,000 criminals and 46,000 people without criminal records — a 171% increase in the number of non-criminal individuals arrested over 2016.

…The Trump administration has subtly blurred the distinction between criminals and those with final orders of removal, which is a civil, not criminal charge.

…Critics say including people with decades-old final orders of removal as priorities is more about boosting numbers by targeting easily catchable individuals than about public safety threats.

…Sandweg said that people with final orders, especially those who are checking in regularly with ICE, are easy to locate and can be immediately deported without much legal recourse. Identifying and locating criminals and gang members takes more investigative work.

…”We shouldn’t spend one penny on low-hanging fruit,” said Sarah Saldana, the most recent director of ICE before Trump’s inauguration. “What we should be spending money is on getting people who are truly a threat to public safety.”

…If 20 officers are assigned to identify targets with final orders, “those are 20 officers who won’t be out focused on finding gang members or criminals,” said Bo Cooper, a career official who served as general counsel of ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

“When there are a finite amount of resources, choices you make come at the expense of other choices,” Cooper said. “It really is a significant policy choice.”

How Trump changed the rules to arrest more non-criminal immigrants – CNNPolitics

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Trump Organization Ordered Presidential Seals For Trump Golf Courses

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

“We made the design, and the client confirmed the design,” Joseph E. Bates, who owns Eagle Sign and Design, told ProPublica while declining to identify the customer.

ProPublica and WNYC reported that they had reviewed an order form that listed Trump International as the buyer.

…It is illegal to use the U.S. presidential seal in a way that would convey or give a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the U.S. government. It is also illegal to knowingly manufacture, reproduce, sell or purchase the presidential seal for resale.

…Trump vowed that profits from foreign government representatives’ stays at his family’s properties would be donated to the U.S. Treasury, but that’s a promise the family has yet to keep, the The Associated Press reported in January.

Since Trump took office, the Trump Organization has received more than $600,000 from political organizations, companies, foreign governments and officials that stay at Trump hotels and resorts, watchdog group Public Citizen reported.

Trump Organization Ordered Presidential Seals For Trump Golf Courses: Report | HuffPost

Brazen defiance or complete idiocy? Do these people not understand that laws actually apply to them?!

Police evict Trump staff from Panama hotel amid ongoing dispute

On By peanutgallerynhIn Money, Class, and Poverty,, The Americas,Leave a comment

More than a dozen police wearing bulletproof vests entered the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Panama on Monday morning and evicted the Trump Organization’s staff, a move that comes after weeks of simmering tensions over control of the property.

…Trump employees …allegedly took some of the building’s computer equipment with them.

…“I am the owner,” said Orestes Fintiklis, who last year obtained control over more than 200 units in the tower, as police and Trump employees pushed and shoved one another. “Love and peace!”

…Fintiklis has argued in documents filed in a U.S. court in Florida that the Trump Organization had mismanaged the property, causing occupancy levels “to collapse” and expenses to “bloat.”

“Operators gross incompetence and deficient sales organization stands in the way of [the] owner making any profit on its investment, all the while lining the [Trump Organization’s] pockets,” he alleged in a court filing.

…Fintiklis gained access to the tower’s main office late Monday morning. The colorful property owner told reporters he would not be commenting about the morning’s actions at this point. He then played a song on the piano for the gathered onlookers with lyrics that, when translated, said, “Fascism will not prevail.”

The Trump name was removed from the outside of the building shortly thereafter.

Police evict Trump staff from Panama hotel amid ongoing dispute – ABC News

hmmmm

US inequality persists 50 years after landmark report

On By peanutgallerynhIn Money, Class, and Poverty,, Race,Leave a comment

Barriers to equality pose threats to democracy in the U.S. as the country remains segregated along racial lines and child poverty worsens, according to study made public Tuesday that examines the nation 50 years after the release of the landmark 1968 Kerner Report.

…The percentage of people living in deep poverty — less than half of the federal poverty level — has increased since 1975. About 46 percent of people living in poverty in 2016 were classified as living in deep poverty — 16 percentage points higher than in 1975.

…The report blames the black homeownership declines on the disproportionate effect that the subprime mortgage lending crisis had on African-American families.

In addition, gains to end school segregation were reversed because of a lack of court oversight and housing discrimination, the new report said. The court oversight allowed school districts to move away from desegregation plans and housing discrimination forced black and Latino families to move into largely minority neighborhoods.

In 1988, for example, about 44 percent of black students went to majority-white schools nationally. Only 20 percent of black students do so today, the report said.

Study: US inequality persists 50 years after landmark report | Boston Herald

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The subtle ways colleges discriminate against poor students, explained in a cartoon

On By peanutgallerynhIn Education,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

University of Cincinnati psychologist Shane Gibbons, who has researched this topic and counsels first-generation students, said these students are often raised by parents who have working class jobs — and in those work places, being assertive or individualistic can get you fired.

…Sociologist Annette Lareau followed dozens of children for a decade and found in her 2003 book, Unequal Childhoods, that more privileged children tend to be raised to reason with and question authority.

…When these first-generation college students begin to struggle, there’s something really pernicious that starts to happen. They already feel like they are at a disadvantage because of their background, and they start seeing themselves at the mercy of that expectation.

…”In psychological literature, they call it stereotype threat,” Gibbons, the University of Cincinnati psychologist, said. “When a prevailing stereotype is elicited, like being reminded of being undereducated, you’ll see a decrease in their scores. That effect is that part of their cognitive resources are turned toward fighting against that stereotype — and in expending those extra cognitive resources, there are less cognitive resources for studying, researching, and such.”

…When students were told in a mere one-hour session that their class backgrounds shape their college experiences — and that they need to cater their actions accordingly — it influenced their ability to get caught up to everyone else.

It doesn’t mean their experience wasn’t harder. After all, they tend to work more in college, have more family responsibilities, and have larger financial barriers. Rather, it just means someone needed to tell them about the biases of higher ed they will have to overcome.

The subtle ways colleges discriminate against poor students, explained in a cartoon – Vox

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Melania Trump Parts Ways With Adviser Amid Backlash Over Inaugural Contract

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

The first lady, Melania Trump, has parted ways with an adviser after news about the adviser’s firm reaping $26 million in payments to help plan President Trump’s inauguration.

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who has been friends with Mrs. Trump for years, had been working on a contract basis as an unpaid senior adviser to the office of the first lady.

Stephanie Grisham, Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman, said the office had “severed the gratuitous services contract with Ms. Wolkoff,” who Ms. Grisham said had been employed as “a special government employee” to work on specific projects.

Melania Trump Parts Ways With Adviser Amid Backlash Over Inaugural Contract

Trump company agrees to settle suit brought by former members of Jupiter golf club

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

A golf club in Jupiter owned by President Donald Trump has agreed to pay $5.45 million to settle claims from former members who said they were wrongfully denied refunds of their deposits.

A class-action lawsuit alleged Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter violated contract terms 65 members had signed with previous owner Ritz-Carlton.

Trump company agrees to settle suit brought by former members of Jupiter golf club – Sun Sentinel

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Trump steps up war of words on trade with threat to tax EU cars

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Europe,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

In a tweet on Saturday, the president said: “If the EU wants to further increase their already massive tariffs and barriers on US companies doing business there, we will simply apply a Tax on their Cars which freely pour into the US.

Trump steps up war of words on trade with threat to tax EU cars – BBC News

Oh, good lord….