Unequal power and airtight roles within the family

A big online discussion topic continues to be the state of the nasty guy’s finances and how much he paid in taxes. Yesterday Bette Midler tweeted:

I think at tomorrow night's debate, #JoeBiden should start every response by looking at the moderator & saying, "Well, that's the 750 dollar question, isn't it?"

That debate had begun before I posted this. I have no interest in listening to the nasty guy lie, no matter how comforting it will be to hear Joe Biden talk sense. Besides, it will end at my bedtime. So I’ll read summaries in the morning. Kos of Daily Kos discussed what the nasty guy’s tax returns show. He started with a tweet from Jason Kander.

To summarize the NYT story: Trump got a bunch of $ from his daddy. He lost it all, but then he got paid hundreds of millions to play a billionaire on TV. He tried to use that $ to become a real billionaire, but he lost it all again. Now he's starting over, but we're his daddy.

Yeah, he made $427 million as a TV star on The Apprentice. That show portrayed him as a billionaire who cut fabulous deals. And he was neither a billionaire nor a fabulous dealmaker. Kos related one deal. A property development deal fell through. The other investors sold out. The nasty guy went to court and was awarded 30%. Someone else managed the properties and the nasty guy made $176.5 million. Kos summarized:

Got it? Everything Trump has managed has failed and is deeply in debt. He somehow lucked into this 30% share of this one project that someone else took over, and it made him $176.5 million. When he had control, it was a failure. When someone else took over, it made a ton of money.

Mark Sumner of Kos reviewed the consequences of that fake portrayal of the nasty guy as a billionaire. He concluded:

It’s what allowed Trump to run for president. Donald Trump was never a successful businessman, but thanks to Mark Burnett, he did play one on TV. Burnett and MGM sold the nation on a product that was Trump, real estate tycoon. And it didn’t matter to them that the real Trump was clueless, racist, misogynist bastard who lost more money in a month than most people saw in a lifetime. They simply did not care. Because if Trump made money from this image, it’s a small fraction of what Burnett and MGM made selling the lie of Trump.

Adam Davidson, author of The Passion Economy, tweeted about the tax story. In 2011 the nasty guy clearly had a new source of funds. These appear to be oligarchs with ties to Putin. All of them are known to be laundering money through golf courses, which are one of the best ways to launder money. Rather obvious why the nasty guy has a string of golf courses. But do they make money? Frank Figliuzzi of MSNBC’s Deadline White House retweeted a quote from the show’s feed:

From a counterintelligence operator's standpoint, if we saw a target with this kind of debt, this kind of possible fraud and tax avoidance at his country, we would be on him like crazy to recruit him.

Then Figliuzzi tweeted another quote:

The counterintel concerns about Trump’s taxes and debt don’t just go away when he goes away.

House Republicans are demanding an investigation. Not into the wreck of the nasty guy’s finances and how that exposes him and the country to foreign pressure and how he paid so little in taxes. Oh, no. Not that. The want an investigation into how the New York Times got a hold of the tax returns. Joan McCarter of Kos says it’s a ploy to change the subject away from how little tax the nasty guy has been paying. Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to House Democrats about what would happen if the Electoral College was tied. If that happens the House chooses. But it isn’t a simple vote. Each state delegation gets one vote. And even though Democrats have a big lead in representatives, there are more states with a Republican majority than a Democratic majority. Some examples: Michigan has 14 representatives, 7 D, 6 R, and one independent who is retiring. The Michigan delegation could be tied. Then there is Alaska, which has one representative (currently R) but still gets one vote of 50. So Pelosi’s letter was to urge colleagues to flip a few more seats to get a few more Democrat majority delegations. Marissa Higgins of Kos discussed a story by British Channel 4 News that reported a huge effort in the 2016 election to deter about 3.5 million black voters. Wrote Higgins:

You might be thinking: Well, doesn’t everyone use data on voters? Sure. But, as Jamal Watkins, the vice president of the National Association for the Advanced of Colored People (NAACP) told Channel 4 on the matter, the idea is to use voter data to encourage people to vote, not to suppress them. “We don’t use the data to say who can we deter and keep at home,” Watkins told the outlet. “That just seems, fundamentally, it’s a shift from the notion of democracy.”

The method of suppression was ads through Facebook, which can finely target who sees which ads. Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, tweeted a series of videos that might explain more. Meteor Blades, as part of his Sunday Night Owl for Kos quoted an essay by driftglass. Here’s a part of it:

And the reason that this gang of Republican criminals and monsters feel so free to commit their atrocities so openly and proudly—the reason that they boast about it—is because so much time, money and effort was expended last time to make sure that the last gang of Republican criminals and monsters and their media enablers were never brought to book for a god damn thing.

Blades included a quote of the day:

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family. ~~Gloria Steinem (1980)