What King Trump Did to New York City

For Americans who want to know what Donald Trump would do as president look at what he did in his home New York City.

He destroyed a beloved building, used illegal foreign workers, didn’t pay some of them and destroyed art deco works he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“After New York gave up to 90% in Tax Abatement to Trump; Donald Trump purposely smashes $200,000 in Art Sculptures He promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” reports Frederica Cade’s Blog.

Frederica Cade's Blog

“The three piece semi-nude Goddess 15-foot bas-relief sculptures was a part of the Bonwit Teller building of 1929,” Cade said.

What he has put forward as a fairy tale image turns out to be more like King Kong.

“Thirty-five years ago, a small army of illegal immigrants (the Polish Brigade) was used to clear the site for what became the crown jewel of Donald Trump’s empire, the Daily Beast says. They slept on the site.

The Daily Beast

“They were undocumented and worked ‘off the books,’” Manhattan federal Judge Charles Stewart said of the workers after they became the subject of a 1983 lawsuit. “No records were kept, no Social Security or other taxes were withheld.”

Many wore no helmets or other safety equipment, but no safety reports were fiiled. They were often not paid.

When their checks kept bouncing they sued.

It was the beginning of a process. The workers won a $325,000 settlement but ultimately it was replaced with a sealed settlement 19 years after the demolition began, according to “The Making of Donald Trump,” by David Cay Johnston.

Trump paid nothing for the art deco pieces the workers had smashed to pieces.

The author said donating the goods for a tax deduction was a waste of time because Trump was paying no taxes during the construction years.

The New York Time said, “With 12 stories of severe, almost unornamented limestone climbing to a ziggurat of setbacks, the Stewart store was the antithesis of the conventional 1928 Bergdorf Goodman one block north.

Plain as the building might be, the entrance was like a spilled casket of gems: platinum, bronze, hammered aluminum, orange and yellow faience, and tinted glass backlighted at night. In 1929 American Architect magazine called it “a sparkling jewel in keeping with the character of the store.”

“At the very top of the facade were limestone relief panels of two nearly naked women brandishing large scarves, as if dancing. The architects were Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore, super-traditional Beaux-Arts designers of mansions and clubs — a puzzling choice for a such an outré building. In time the reliefs would become a Bonwit Teller signature.”
New York Times

Trump’s Manager Made Millions Working for Torturers

In the years I spent in Africa working for Associated Press I knew at least two of the most vicious leaders I traveled with had a Washington lobbyist.

That man, who worked for Zairean dictator Mose Sese Seko and Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi, turned out to be Paul Manafort.

I was stunned to find this same man is now working for Donald Trump.

“The list of questionable characters, shady lawsuits, and international scandals he has been involved in would require at minimum a few day’s worth of non-stop reading, and we here at Paste Magazine realize that our readers have actual lives outside of the internet. What’s really amazing is that all of this information is readily available online if one only makes the arduous effort to enter “Paul Manafort” into a Google search. This is a man whose firm was prominently featured in the report “The Torturer’s Lobby,” by the Center for Public Integrity, and whose name appears no fewer than forty times in the investigation. This is a man who is quoted in a federal hearing as arguing, “You might call it influence-peddling. I call it lobbying,” while attempting to defend himself during a federal investigation into a $43 million scam involving the Department of Housing and Urban Development,” Paste reported. MSNBC said Manafort is not being paid.

Paste

Manafort also worked for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

As a young Republican he had worked for Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

But the latest news getting attention makes all this seem petty.

The New York Times has reported that it is possible Manafort got $12.7 billion while working for ousted Ukrainian dictator Victor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia where he is sheltered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin, Manafort and Trump have what some call a love affair because the Russian hates Hillary Clinton.

New York Times

The Ukrainian government that replaced Yanukovch, and found his burned and scorched data files in a swimming pool, says it is still investigating.

“A spokeswoman for the anti-corruption bureau, Darya Manzhura, said Monday that payments to Manafort were listed in a ledger recovered from the headquarters of Yanukovych’s political party, the Party of Regions. Investigators did not specify the reason the money was designated for Manafort from 2007 to 2012,” the Washington Post was told.

“The anti-corruption bureau cannot make indictments but must pass on any evidence to prosecutors, who can decide whether to file charges. Manzhura said that processing the list will take a long time, as will matching signatures to individuals and proving that money actually changed hands,” she said. Manafort is not the priority, so he may get  a pass.

For investigators, she said, Manafort is not the priority.

Paste said: “Even more shocking is Manafort has been the subject of almost no scrutiny from the mainstream US media. On the contrary, his hiring was seen as a victory for Trump, that a man so successful and embedded in the GOP establishment would be willing to work for an “outsider” such as Trump. In reality, it shouldn’t be the least bit surprising that a man known for his willingness to work with anyone, no matter how brutal and corrupt, would decide to work for Donald Trump, known for his failure to pay bills, his praise of questionable world leaders such as Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin, and general fascist tendencies such as banning numerous journalists from events and certain religions from our nation. With the recent DNC hack being linked to Russia, and with Russia becoming increasingly more aggressive towards US positions in Syria, this is a man whose Russian ties should at a minimum raise a few alarm flags.

“Ultimately the real concerning issue is that no one seems to know, or even worse, care, just exactly what Paul Manafort’s end game is.”

Vice President Joe Biden today said on national television that Trump “would have loved Stalin.”

Crooked Trump Has Mob Ties

The story of Trump University has been widely told but it is only the tip of the iceberg where Donald Trump’s links to crime are concerned.

We rarely hear about  his mob-ties.

In “The Making of Donald Trum

p,” Pulitzer Prize winner Cay Johnston writes that the Donald “mobbed up” with gangster unions and companies to build his towers with ready-mix concrete instead of steel girders. The best providers had criminal records, and could guarantee the concrete would be delivered even during strikes.

Several of the men he did business with were convicted of federal crimes, John Cody was one of them.

When Trump decided to get into the newly legalized casino industry in New Jersey he should have been blocked. No one who has been investigated by law enforcement should be granted a casino license. Trump got licenses in record time.

Always on the prowl for some new enterprise, Trump and some colleagues went overboard when created a new professional football league, USFL, which would play in the spring.

It lasted only from 1983 to 1985.  Plans for an 1986 season fell through.

Trump and his counterparts thought a lawsuit would make them competitive.

Earlier attempts had failed though one, the American Football League merged with the NFL.  The NFL had been around since 1920 with teams in virtually every major city, and in some cities more than one franchise.

Television revenue made the NFL a fortress.

The USFL thought it could do the same.

The USFL filed an antitrust lawsuit against the older league, claiming it had established a monopoly with respect to television broadcasting rights, and in some cases, to access of stadium venues, Wikipedia reported.

 “The case went to trial in the spring of 1986 and lasted 42 days. On July 29, a six-person jury handed down a verdict that devastated the USFL, even though it technically won its case. The jury declared the NFL a ‘duly adjudicated illegal monopoly’, and found that the NFL had willfully acquired and maintained monopoly status in professional football through predatory tactics.

“However, it rejected the USFL's other claims. The jury found that the USFL had changed its strategy to a more risky goal of forcing a merger with the NFL. Furthermore, the switch to a fall schedule caused the loss of several major markets (Philadelphia, Denver, Houston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Miami, the Bay Area).

“Most importantly, the jury found that the NFL did not attempt to force the USFL off television. (Indeed, ESPN remained willing to carry USFL games in the fall,[15] several of the league's teams also had local broadcast contracts, and 1986 also happened to be the inaugural season of the Fox Broadcasting Company, a network that would eventually become the fourth major broadcast network.) In essence, the jury felt that while the USFL was harmed by the NFL's de facto monopolization of pro football in the United States, most of its problems were due to its own mismanagement. “It awarded the USFL nominal damages of one dollar, which was tripled under antitrust law to three dollars. It later emerged that the jury incorrectly assumed that the judge could increase the award.”

Trump was a major player in this fiasco.

Trump Destroys League

Trump's Freudian Slips Showing

As a long-time writer and editor it is is hard to imagine what story could knock one with a quotation about “titties” from the top of American newspapers.

Especially when the statement was made by the Republican candidate for president.

At a rally in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday,   Trump warned that it would be “a horrible day” if Clinton were elected and got to appoint a tiebreaking Supreme Court justice.

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know,” the New York Times reported.

New York Times

The nation has suffered numerous gun slayings, even massacres, and in some cases authorities had warnings the killings were planned.

Trump has been under pressure to calm his rhetoric and read from a script on a teleprompter.

Instead his comments made another big splash, though this time hilarious not violent.
Though it is not clear Trump knows who Sigmond Freud is, he qualified with a “major league” one even while using a teleprompter.
Some critics complain Trump can’t even pronounce big league.
But there was no doubt his speech in Detroit on Monday included one of those slips.
Promoting his economic plan, Trump said: "Our lower business tax will also end job-killing corporate inversions and cause trillions in new dollars to come pouring into our country," he said. "And, by the way, into titties like right here in Detroit,” he said in a speech telecast around the nation.
So far no tweets declaring he was misheard. Perhaps it was supposed to refer to “cities.”

So far no tweets declaring he was misheard. Perhaps it was supposed to refer to “cities.”

Wikipedia says of a Freudian slip: “A Freudian slip, also called parapraxis, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is interpreted as occurring due to the interference of an unconscious subdued wish or internal train of thought. The concept is part of classical psychoanalysis.

Wikipedia says:

“The Freudian slip is named after Sigmund Freud, who, in his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, described and analyzed a large number of seemingly trivial, bizarre, or nonsensical errors and slips, most notably the Signorelli parapraxis.

“As in the study of dreams, Freud submits his discussion with the intention of demonstrating the existence of unconscious mental processes in the healthy…”

It could not have come at a worse time for Trump, whose profane language has angered many evangelicals, and even led to a prominent Mormon to declare himself as a presidential candidate this late in the race.

Trump is not in trouble just for his language, but also for things said by his supporters at rallies.

“Until last week, when the New York Times ran an uncensored video compilation of Trump supporters at his rallies, I didn’t understand how horrifying his crowds are. That’s because the Times, like almost all TV news, bleeps profanity and hate speech; because the Trump campaign traps cameras and correspondents in a press pen, preventing them from covering the crowd; and because, until three Times reporters — Erica Berenstein, Nick Corasaniti and Ashley Parker — pointed it out, I didn’t realize what enablers the courteous people at his rallies turn out to be,” Marty Kaplan of the Huffington Post reported.

Huffington Post

Calling opponent Hillary Clinton a witch and a devil may also be hurting with evangelicals, his original base. They do not think these are joking matters.