Trump
© Joshua Roberts / Reuters
Donald Trump has made a big deal about Hillary Clinton being beholden to Wall Street. That's true. Wall Street's mega banks and hedge funds have been major donors to Clinton's campaign committees after showering her and Bill Clinton with millions of dollars for speeches. But Donald Trump is just as beholden to Wall Street's mega banks because they are financing his business empire, doing so frequently behind an opaque curtain.


Comment: Well, it's one thing for a businessman to do it, it's well another for an elected official. We don't elect CEOs, they don't have the public trust, they don't take oaths to represent their constituency. We aren't the Department of Pre-Crime here, this isn't Minority Report.


[...]

Trump has said that his adult children will run his business enterprises should be become president. But Trump will be in a position, just as a President Hillary Clinton would, to grant Wall Street mega banks their wish list for Chair of the Federal Reserve, Treasury Secretary, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair and appointees to head other Federal bank regulators. That certainly adds some leverage to the art of the deal.


Comment: The possibility of committing a corrupt act doesn't imply one will commit a corrupt act. Leaving that aside, the authors seem to imagine that the President of the United States actually has the power to make those decisions. Somehow we doubt that.


Fortune's Tully pointed out another issue with Trump's real estate debt in his August 24, 2016 article: it's highly concentrated in just a handful of properties. Tully explains that "$846 million of Trump's $1.11 billion borrowings" are owed on just five buildings, "or almost 80 cents of every dollar in debt, using the best estimates of the liability side of his balance sheet." Those five buildings are in just three markets: New York City, Washington D.C. and San Francisco. If commercial real estate is in a bubble, those markets are unlikely to escape the downturn.


Comment: Irrelevant facts that don't support the authors' premise. We think they try to imply that because Trump has loans, he'll be inclined to take corrupt actions, for what? To pay off the loans? So...basically...almost every American is imminently corruptible because: loanz? That is the silliest idea we've ever heard. All of these big numbers are supposed to make us shake our heads in envious disgust and stoke the fires of our sklavenmoral.

Grab your pitchforks Comrades, there's rich people who need some wealth re-distribulating!


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Comment: One marvels at the pointlessness of the entire article, and the incredible hysterics of the authors. They finish with a quote from some Judicial Activists in an important SCOTUS decision:
The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court's disposition of this case. In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.

- Justice John Paul Stevens
That quote comes from the SCOTUS dissent in Citizen's United vs The FEC, and is a rambling screed about how corporations aren't people. Of course they aren't, and no one is saying they are. Corporations are people in the sense that they are a legal fiction that represents people. Corporations have no existence, they have no money, they have no politics - the people who run them do, and those people are ... well .. people. Good people, bad people, but still people. Citizen's United was representing the political ideas of its board and members, which are people.

The verbal virtuosity needed to make this error is dumbfounding. The whole article is nonsense, and spends most of the time talking about Donald Trump (ostensibly a person, we're not entirely sure), and how much he owes in real estate loans, and then segues into the SCOTUS decision that allows corporate entities to practice politics in the public sphere via free speech (like fair use?), which seems to be there to imply that Big Bad Banks are going to control Trump because: loans. They certainly will influence him; they'll probably bribe him. They'll buddy buddy with him. But none of that has anything to do with the SCOTUS decision. That kind of backshish is done under cover anyway. They make it sound like some Deutsche Bank representative is going to stroll into the White House with a briefcase full of unmarked bills handcuffed to his wrist.

So what exactly was the case in question?
In the case, the conservative non-profit organization Citizens United wanted to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton and to advertise the film during television broadcasts, which was a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as the McCain - Feingold Act or "BCRA".[4] Section 203 of BCRA defined an "electioneering communication" as a broadcast, cable, or satellite communication that mentioned a candidate within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary, and prohibited such expenditures by corporations and unions. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia held that §203 of BCRA applied and prohibited Citizens United from advertising the film Hillary: The Movie in broadcasts or paying to have it shown on television within 30 days of the 2008 Democratic primaries.

- Wikipedia
Citizen's United, whether you like them or not, was a non-profit organization that wanted to show a movie about Hilary Clinton, one that was very negative and meant to influence voting (Le Duh).

But then again, is that not what SOTT does? Isn't that what Wall Street On Parade is doing? The complete lack of self-awareness of the authors (writing political commentary FOR a company most likely) and the company itself beggars belief.

While the Martens are cursing those five justices that ruled in favor of Citizen's United, perhaps they should pause and think about the deleterious effects on democracy if the opposite position, the one presented by Justice Stevens and his liberal cronies, had actually been adopted.

Precisely where should we draw the line? For profit corporations? Non-profit corporations? Unions? Alternative news websites? What amazes us is the liberal tendency to cut off one's nose to spite the face by not thinking anything through very far at all.