- Apr 1, 2009
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- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Former president trump indicted.
- Thread starter Worgen
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I mean, he tear-gassed a peaceful protest in a park for a photo op. It might not've been as materially bad but the pettiness is off the charts
I think that's relatively harmless, especially when it's a modest, occasional payday. If an ex-politician wants to take 50-100k to make a speech to some execs, it's vastly less problematic than them being a consultant to or sitting on the board of a corporation, especially one in the area they held a ministry in.
However, politicians raking in huge sums that or any way doesn't look good, for them or national politics. We might note Boris Johnson, on his eviction from Number Ten, is estimated to have made about £5 million in the six months since he left office. And that shitweasel is still an MP.
Generally speaking, liberals got slightly more liberal and conservatives got a *lot* more conservative.
The polarization in today’s Congress has roots that go back decades
On average, Democrats and Republicans are farther apart ideologically today than at any time in the past 50 years.
www.pewresearch.org
Which makes sense: the '08 election saw conservatives go absolutely *berserk*. Birtherism, the Tea Party, etc. John McCain when from firebrand conservative to moderate without changing any actual opinion.
If that politician was absolutely unconnected to the industry that's paying them and if they then have absolutely no further informal connections to sitting politicians and doesn't go back into politics later, then maybe. How many ex-politicians does that describe?
I'm just going to add here as someone who works in Higher Education... courses at accredited universities are serious things, and hard work by dedicated staff. We have all sorts of QA processes - for curriculum, assessment, teaching delivery, acquiring student feedback, and so on. A good course can take years to design, years more refinement when in process. It's not just the ethics of doing a good job because we are professionals, but we have legal obligations to meet standards. That's part of what university accreditation is all about, because in the end our "stakeholders" are not just the students, but the society that they are going to walk out into and use their degrees in. Trump University broke so many of these standards that it should make anyone weep. It is alleged, for instance, that the satisfaction feedback (then used in marketing) was fraudulent. It was set up on outright lies, starting with calling it a "University". After that, Trump himself was used as a major selling point in marketing, but this was false advertising as he took no meaningful role at all in the design, hiring or delivery. The "teaching" appears to have had no meaningfully usable material (knowledge, skills, training, etc.). As it had no QA processes, regulating body or accreditation, its exit certificates were worthless.
Contextually, teaching a students for a year for a standard degree in the USA (i.e. not something unusually expensive like Medicine) costs an accredited university around $10k - 40k, depending on institution. We might note Trump University sold itself claiming Trump had made enough money, and wanted to give power back to the little guy. In which case, $1,500 for a 3-day real estate course (merely the cheapest) without any quality control or verification is staggering.
It wasn't puffery, it was a scam. An ugly, malicious money-making scam, where a bilionaire hoodwinked people vastly poorer to line his own pockets.
That is the sort of man Trump is. Who he has been for decades, and who he still is now.
BLM had about a dozen killed over 9ish months. Some others were killed at nearby pro-Trump rallies
This is compared to LA in 92 where 63 died... in a week. There was around 20 mil across the country for BLM and we have no data for LA protests but highly likely way less.
So yes, it was very different
Yeah, like... why did they need to drop it from a helicopter? Would it still be explosive? Why didn't it cause a bigger explosion with the tank?
It's been a while since I looked it up, but I thought there would be plenty of time for the people inside to escape. So... what happened. Sounded very Wacol to me. It also mignt be too long ago for me to remember all the details
Edit: Should have read Rogue's post first
The other thing is, despite all the jokes about Arts degrees (is there any University campus that doesn't have a toilet roll dispenser somewhere that someone has written "Free Arts Degrees" above it?), with a bit of guidance and advice (funnily enough most Universities have people paid to do exactly that) it's easy to pick subjects that will result in a useful degree.
Easiest way to do it without unnecessarily exposing their explosive ordinance (EO) bods to potential gunfire would be my guess... this is back for the levels of militarisation we see in current US law enforcement.
uhhh... ? Would what still be explosive? The entry/breaching charges would have done exactly the same job if they were hand placed... although an experienced EO bod most likely have taken into account that there was a nearby generator with fuel tank. What they'd've done with that knowledge is anyone's guess.
Explosion(s) ruptures the tank, fuel leaks out and runs over something that can ignite it (smoldering crap, exposed live wires, etc), catches fire, bad shit happens.
Fuel doesn't explode as easily as most people think. Burns like a motherfuck, yes... but getting it to explode is a different thing altogether.
Waco is what happens if no one asks if tear gas is flammable. Plus enough of it into an enclosed space and you've made yourself an ad hoc Fuel Air Explosive just waiting for a spark to set it off. Of course, you can do the same thing with flour or sawdust.
He did turn that money into as much as $4 billion. And our entire tax code is "dubious." I think that is why he feared making his own public. You can give a dozen different accountants a complex tax return fact pattern, and end up with a dozen different tax returns. Keeps the lawyers rich.He's not self made.
NY Times: Trump got $413M from his dad, much from tax dodges
NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Times reported Tuesday that President Donald Trump received at least $413 million from his father over the decades, much of that through dubious tax dodges, including outright fraud.apnews.com
Were I get to do whatever I want? I'd end the income tax. We already print money. Pass a balanced budget Amendment that also ends income tax but provides for the method to measure GDP and print a portion of whatever it had been. No more IRS, let alone another 87K employees. No more loop holes and dubious returns.
Remember when everyone from the far left to Mussolini realised abolishing income tax would be a bad idea? The world has gotten really dumb.
The 1st Amendment exists for this reason. I was brought up, raised by far leftists and they always taught me, the censors are always the bad guys. I will write, when employed, what you say on in the course of your employment can and must be regulated. Often, when you join an organization you have to sign a non-compete clause. You can't tell off your customers just about anywhere. You work at Wendy's but tell every customer they should go to Hardy's instead? That's a problem.
His name, fair or unfair, was also associated with excellence. I concede this much: an up market makes geniuses of us all. He was in Real Estate when that market really took off.
Which is why I think they all do it and can ward each other off like a Mexican standoff.
No way am I believing that Biden's real concern was limiting Ukraine corruption. He and his (not just Bidens but fellow travelers) are the ones doing dandy with corruption over there. It was and is a cess pool of corruption. The danger to Hunter? You start getting some of the corrupt on the hook, they benefit by rolling on others, which could ultimately have included him. Or do you think a drugged out hedonist failure was being paid big bucks because they loved the sound of his voice over there?
The left wants totalitarian control: either to have state owned control of the means of production or private control of those means, but with government control of those in the private sector. Giving up the income tax hurts that power so of course they'd be against this. R&R it with a national sales tax? We actually have a lot of these sort of "sin" and use taxes that are extremely regressive. $1 per gallon to a poor man is a heck of a lot harsher than to a very rich man.
Dersh on this: https://rumble.com/v2cyk4i-trump-will-be-indicted-and-probably-acquitted.html
We'll see what happens.
We'll see what happens.
He did.
But I also wonder. Let's imagine your father had invested a few thousand dollars into Apple or Microsoft in ~1980, and gave you the shares. When you're a millionaire in 2000 from those shares, did you make that money? I mean, in a sort of sense you "made" it, but not through any skill or talent. Likewise if you owned $500 million of New York property mostly inherited from your father, and New York went through a boom where prices skyrocketted well over the rate of inflation, to what extent did you actually make that money? Didn't it just happen to appreciate through external factors during your ownership?
Secondly, Trump cheated a lot of his creditors. He was blacklisted by most Western finance companies, because he had a habit of borrowing money of them and refusing to pay it back. They had to take him to court, and this was so expensive and time-consuming that many would settle for a write-down. This is in a way "business", a form of cutting costs. On the other hand, it's not really making money as we might want to imagine it either. It's akin to theft: Trump gets more money for himself, but not through the virtue of making something of value. Similarly, he was able to write off a lot of his losses through the tax system.
Trump has shown a lot of guile and canninness in certain ways, and it's made him a lot of money (or at least, maintained his wealth). But the point of capitalism at a societal level is to drive wealth creation: assets, jobs, productivity that benefits society as a whole, from which the capitalist takes a hefty chunk in profits. So where we should esteem entrepreneurs as wealth-creators, they should actually create wealth. For all Microsoft's faults, it has also provided society with a vast amount of utility; similarly Exxon, Goldman Sachs and others.
Has Trump?
It's very unclear to me that he has. He's clearly not without competence, otherwise as you point out he wouldn't be a billionaire at all. But his massive failures - casino bankruptcies, other write-downs and many frauds - must cause us to seriously question whether he's that good. Scruntity of his many, dodgy business practices might cause us to wonder whether there's a lot of trickery rather than core business acumen.
OK. Fact remains that in doing so, Clinton was not engaged in anything corrupt or uncommon.
I'm sorry, but this narrative simply doesn't make sense.
The investigation was already over. How on earth could there be a quid pro quo in order to stop an investigation... when that investigation was already over? There was no investigation that could've even hypothetically impacted Hunter.
You've twisted this into knots because you want to find corruption. But it simply doesn't add up.
The more business you do, the more failures you'll have. Part of the game.
We do know he had some despicable business practices (making people sue him to force him to pay his contractual obligations). Bill Gates would do the same sort of things. He would roll a 3rd parties functionalities into Windows. Don't recall which one (an unzip utility?) but after losing the case to the 3rd party, that party then offered to do it the right way and sell it to MS with the response, "no thanks, we've developed our own code now that you're bankrupt."
Did Trump contribute to our economy? You can do a look up of his still functioning businesses. There are a number of them. Examples: https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/business/donald-trumps-valuable-business-ventures/
He seemed to have the right read on China and was taking steps (aborted by Covid) to do things about it. Is he that smart, or is our system that blind to abuses the US is suffering at their hands?
Correct. Giving a speech for $700K is not illegal. That's why they do it this way. There is no way someone thought the sound of his voice was worth $700K to an audience. And once they no longer had power to sell, people stopped paying these kind of fees.
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
Arthur Conan Doyle
No way a US VP flies to the other side of the world to get a prosecutor fired for any other reason than to actually protect his corruption.
You really think an investigation into corruption is ever "over"? A particular investigation may be but not the over all need to maintain that infrastructure. Or maybe they don't even need a judicial system in Ukraine anymore?
ITMT: this looks to be interesting. May have to pick this up. Its title says it all for me though. I'll never forget Trump becoming POTUS and the immediate calls to have him impeached, prosecuted, etc. They had the man. Now they just needed to apply a crime. Not a good look for a nation that would be free.
K. Then you've gotta also believe that nearly every past President was equally corrupt-- including Trump.
Trump himself boasted of having the highest speaker's fee ever.
US VPs fly all over the world for shit all the time, dude. What you're doing here is taking an incident that's actually very common and expected (a VP trip to another country) and painting it as more evidence that something was afoot.
Truth is, you got nothing. No investigation, ever, looked into Hunter's time at Burisma. No investigation was happening at all at the time. All you've got to fill the gap left by zero evidence here is... speculation.
And yes, corruption investigations do end. Obviously: they cannot possibly keep every investigation they open ongoing without end. There is zero testimony, and zero evidence, the investigation was ongoing in any way; and there's direct contradicting evidence.
That is the dog that didn't bark. Heh, Sherlock again!
ITMT: OK, even I think this funny...
