DeSantis' War On the Mouse Escalates to Desperation

Ron DeSantis simply cannot give up his war against The Mouse.

Even as Ft. Lauderdale struggles to recover from this weekend's flooding, DeSantis is laser-focused on bullying Disney World Orlando through threats and demands to break that corporation for their pro-Gay policies.

DeSantis is throwing out there every suggestion he can think of, from getting the state legislature to undo the Law Against Perpetuities that Disney used to block DeSantis' incoming hand-picked board of interlopers to proposing the construction of unwanted projects and buildings in the Reedy Creek district to worsen the tourism value of Disney's parks. Dylan Abad at WFLA has the story:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis teased the possibility of erecting a new state prison near Walt Disney World’s Orlando resort while speaking at an event in the park’s district on Monday.

While the press conference centered around DeSantis’ ongoing feud with the company, the governor took a moment to acknowledge the board’s control over district-owned land...

“People said maybe create a state park, maybe try to do more amusement parks,” DeSantis said with a grin. “Someone even said, ‘Maybe you need another state prison.’ Who knows? The possibilities are endless and that is now going to be analyzed to see what makes the most sense.”

The idea of placing a state prison inside the vast district stems from the political expectations that local communities do not WANT a state prison within running distance of their neighborhoods. The threat of prisoners escaping tends to get an HOA screaming NIMBY, and DeSantis wants to alienate Disney World from the cities - from Polk, Osceola, Lake, and Orange (maybe Seminole) Counties - within that range. DeSantis thinks he can get the locals to blame Disney for the new prison, but everyone can see the idiot proposing this is himself.

Building other amusement parks within the Lake Buena Vista area could go against the land-use agreements for Disney itself, and that's arguably a fight that the courts will side with the corporation vs. the state in every regard (Capitalism cannot be denied).

Thrown into this is DeSantis' open bullying, where he announced his effort to get the state legislature to re-write the safety inspection laws so that ONLY Disney parks undergo special inspections, while the similarly sized theme parks in the area - Universal Orlando, Sea World, and LegoLand - retain the exceptions that large-scale parks have been getting. This kind of intentional focus on just ONE company while letting other similar businesses in the same area avoid it is so obvious a punishment that Disney's lawyers ought to overturn it in federal courts as an unfair restriction on business (Again, Capitalism cannot be denied).

DeSantis keeps digging this foxhole, thinking he can win this war against a corporation that's already shown to have the legal smarts and firepower to punch back in ways to make DeSantis bleed on-camera even more.

I dunno who's more delusional about winning an unwinnable war: Putin or DeSantis.

And having said all that, if Princess Lilibet of Sussex does use her powers under the Laws Against Perpetuity to decree it, we can well see Disney World building their own state prison to counter DeSantis' corrupt version, only this state prison will be the most enjoyable, fantastic prison in the World (the prison with the most water slides wins)!

THE TOP TEN RIDES GETTING BUILT IN DISNEY'S SING SING PARK:

10. The Bitcoin Pirates of Silicon Valley

9. Elsa's Frozen Lesbian Blanket Party

8. It's a Small Cell Block After All

7. TRON's Lightcycle Breakout

6. The Black Hole (aka Solitary)

5. Hall of Alcatraz Escapees

4. Haunted Electric Chair

3. Mickey's House of Pain

2. That Spinning Teacups Ride (EVERY park should have a teacups ride)

And the NUMBER ONE RIDE OF DISNEY'S SING SING PARK:

1. DeSantis' Wild Primary Ride (Closed for Repairs)

The Battle for Florida: DeSantis Declares War On the Mouse

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for adding this blog article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment below and peruse the rest of the blog, thank ye!)

When my family moved to Florida, I was seven. We lived in a part of Florida that had just exploded with new housing and thousands of relocating Americans, at the forefront of the 1980s population boom that turned Florida from a swamp-infested minor state to the third most-populated in the nation.

Part of that boom relied on the development of a major tourist attraction called Disney World, built outside of Orlando by Walt Disney's corporation in an attempt to expand his theme park empire. The popular Disneyland of southern California brought the company fortune in the 1950s but when he needed to add more rides, all the surrounding land had been bought up by developers who added their own businesses to feed off the tourism trade. By the 1960s Disney realized the next time he started a theme park, he needed to buy up all the land possible first, then start the theme park and expand from there.

The best place he could do that was Florida, where land was cheap and few people lived because the heat and humidity of most months made it untenable for non-agricultural or shoreline living. Picking a spot where a big enough airport existed to help with the flow of tourists and near an interstate to handle traffic, Disney quietly bought up as much as possible between Orange and Osceola counties in order to ensure construction of multiple theme parks and associated hotels/resorts under the company's control.

All of that land development still required a lot of corporate control, so Disney's company worked out a deal with the state of Florida by 1967: Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special taxing district run by the corporation. Disney would be responsible for paying and managing the infrastructure costs and constructions, much like its own city/county: In return, Orange and Osceola residents didn't have to pay anything towards the district, which benefitted both counties when businesses grew up around Disney's area and the population/work force grew to fill all those tourism jobs.

Everybody - except for the massive income inequality that non-union labor has to cope with - kind of won with that deal. Today, Orlando is one of the largest metros in the nation, only second behind the South Florida (Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach) area in the state itself. Florida generates more money from tourism dollars than any other industry. And its allure has drawn in other industries - aeronautics, health care, energy, financial firms - to employ hundreds of thousands more. 

There may be a Busch Gardens theme park in Tampa, a Legoland in Winter Haven, a... well, does Coral Castle count as a theme park? No, it's a roadside attraction my bad. (Big thanks by the way to Neil Gaiman for shouting out the mermaids of Weeki Wachee in his work American Gods) There may be a Universal Studios park in Orlando itself, a Sea World park just down the road, and a hundred attractions along International Drive, but EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING in the Orlando metro revolves around Disney World.

They don't call it Mickeytown for nothing...

This makes it all the more insane that the Florida Republicans running our state - basically operating as one-party rule since 1998 - led by autocrat-wannabe Ron DeSantis have decided to nuke Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District from orbit.

To the Tampa Bay Times (linking to the Associated Press reporting):

The Florida House of Representatives on Thursday gave final passage to a bill that would dissolve Walt Disney World’s private government, handing Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis a victory in his feud with the entertainment giant over its opposition to a measure that critics have dubbed the “don’t say gay” law.

The move could have huge tax implications for Disney, whose series of theme parks have transformed Orlando into one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, and serves to further sour the relationship between the Republican-led government and a major political player in the state. Disney did not return an email seeking comment Thursday...

See, what happened is that DeSantis is angling for the 2024 Republican nomination for the Presidency - he's hoping that current overlord donald trump will be in handcuffs by 2023 - so during this legislative year he pushed for a lot of culture war laws he could sign to win over the GOP's racist/sexist voter base.

That not only included a racist "anti-CRT" law that essentially made it illegal to discuss the history of racism in both Florida and the United States, it also included the "Don't Say Gay" law that makes it illegal to "discuss gender identity" to the point where teachers could get fined saying the word "gender" on school grounds in front of students, and regardless of grade level due to an "age appropriate" clause vaguely worded enough to threaten even high schoolers. When that "Don't Say Gay" law was finally discussed in the legislature and passed by the GOP-controlled House and Senate, there was a lot of media discourse about how Disney World - Florida's biggest private employer - would handle the matter.

See, over the years Disney has garnered a reputation for being Pro-People i.e., a megacorporation that actually thinks about marketing to gay/lesbian/transgender audiences as well as the other demographics (yes, there is always a profit to be made). There's been Gay Days organized at the theme parks since 1991. Disney has never openly denounced the appropriation of popular characters - especially Elsa from Frozen - as gay icons, which helped maintain the fanbase. They market it all - even as they sell themselves as "family-friendly" - as an inclusive community where love and acceptance matters more than culture war posturing.

However, Disney is still a business, and a pretty big one at that: So they've always had their eye on keeping their corporate taxes low and government regulation off their backs. This means a lot of campaign contributions to Republicans on a regular basis, especially at the state level to ensure nobody messed with the flow of revenues.

So when Disney's head honchos were all asked about how they felt about Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill, their first response back in March was... well, hem-hawing at best. Which led to a major walkout of Disney employees angered by the spineless owners. Shamed by the public display, the CEO took a harder stance early in April, after which DeSantis still signed the bill into law while accusing Disney and others who opposed it of "grooming" kids, like the theme park was staffed by registered sex offenders.

And at that point, DeSantis called for a special legislative session - usually the state legislature works for six weeks to pass bills, and if it misses anything they have to hold special sessions at taxpayer expense - not only to force the legislature to approve his gerrymandered nightmare of a Congressional map but also to remove Disney's special tax district as punishment. Back to the AP article in the Tampa Bay Times:

The bill passed by the legislature on Thursday would eliminate the Reedy Creek Improvement District, as the 55-year-old Disney government is known, as well as a handful of other similar districts by June 2023. The measure does allow for the districts to be reestablished, leaving an avenue to renegotiate its future. The bill now moves to DeSantis’ office to be signed into law...

Democrats have criticized the Disney proposal as clear retaliation against the company and warned that local homeowners could get hit with big tax bills if they have to absorb bond debt from Disney — although such details are far from clear.

Disney is one of Florida’s biggest private employers, last year saying it had more than 60,000 workers in the state. It is not immediately clear how the company or local governments around its properties would be affected if the district was dissolved...

You can kind of see the carrot the Republicans left in the bill, where they could re-institute the special district if only Disney would behave like a good little puppet for DeSantis' political ambitions.

But the Republicans are risking a lot on this brash and open assault on a major economic revenue source for the entire state. If Disney World is curtailed, shut down, reduced in any way, that's a serious hit to the surrounding hotels and restaurants responsible for the hotel and sales taxes flowing into Tallahassee. 

One noted effect of losing the special district status is that Disney would have to fire the county-level emergency services people - the EMTs, the fire fighters, the police - working within the district. The district itself disappears, meaning the counties it's in - Orange and Osceola - would have to pick up the slack and staff those services themselves. Those counties would start have to paying for all that, not Disney.

Adding on top of that is a bond liability Disney has tied into the Reedy Creek finances, a massive debt worth around $1 billion (it might even be $2 billion) that those counties - not the state, which is really rubbing it in hard - would have to cover. If we refer to that CNBC article by Robert Frank:

Reedy Creek has bond liabilities of between $1 billion and $1.7 billion, according to the district’s financial filings. Under Florida statute, if Reedy Creek is dissolved, those liabilities are transferred to the local governments — either Bay Lake or Lake Buena Vista, or more likely, Orange and Osceola counties.

State Senate Minority Leader Gary Farmer, D-Fort Lauderdale, tried to amend the bill to include further study of the bond debt, but the amendment failed on a voice vote.

Farmer said the bond debt could total more than $2 billion and that tax authorities are increasing their estimates as they learn more about Reedy Creek’s outstanding liabilities.

“This is a very real impact, the extent of which we don’t fully understand yet,” Farmer said.

If the liabilities of $1.7 billion or more are transferred to Orange and Osceola counties, he said, the debt could amount to $1,000 per taxpayer...

In short: If Reedy Creek goes, the state government gets all the money while the local counties are forced to pay the bills.

All of this damage happening all because DeSantis and his fellow Republicans are vindictive assholes.

This is only part of the stuff that can happen if (more like when) DeSantis gets his revenge on Disney.

What happens when the Walt Disney Company, megacorporation generating around $68 billion a year, decides to fight back?

Remember at the beginning of the article when I mentioned my family moving to Florida? We moved to the Tarpon Springs area, and during those early formative years I witnessed up close the Disney company going after a day care center right off Klosterman Road. The day care had painted on the exterior a number of kid-friendly cartoon characters, among them Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Disney did not approve, because they were not affiliated to that day care. I didn't fully understand as a kid what trademarks meant and "controlling the brand" was all about, all I knew was a big business in Disney was going after a tiny local business on the side of the highway.

What I learned back then was something a lot of people understood over the decades that Disney turned into the media behemoth it is today: You do not fuck with Disney. You NEVER fuck with Disney. They go after day care centers, for God's sake.

This is an international company, with a reach extending to nearly every country on the planet. They hire hundreds of thousands of workers at theme parks across the globe. They make movies and television shows every minute of the day. They own the franchises of nearly every cultural foundation - their own animated characters, Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, they just bought 20th Century Fox a couple years ago to seize the X-Men characters for future MCU planning - of modern fandom. They only things they don't own are Star Trek and Dr. Who, and Gods help us if they ever buy those up.

And they have on staff hundreds of lawyers all working to ensure protection of their trademarks, to brush aside lawsuits and damage claims, with a ruthlessness that would impress Sith Lords.

In terms of this retaliatory - and rushed - law DeSantis is about to sign, Disney can easily send an army of lawyers to poke enough holes in the law to where the courts - even the Republican wingnut ones - can invalidate it. 

On top of the legal fight about to ensue, Florida Republicans ought to start realizing that Disney - and a number of Disney's corporate allies - may not be sending fat checks to their campaign war chests, which is an important thing this midterm elections cycle. It wouldn't be logical of Disney's CEO to help pay for a political party that just kneecapped him and stripped one of the most profitable pieces of Disney's corporate empire of its power.

While businesses may think the Republicans are the "Pro-Business" party, what DeSantis and the Florida GOP just did demonstrated that when it comes to pandering to the voting base on culture war issues, the Republicans will sacrifice and abuse their corporate "buddies" for cheap political points. Republicans, it turns out, are NOT really Pro-Business: Republicans are Pro-Power, and they are not going to share that power with anyone...

Would Disney roll over on this issue? I wouldn't expect them to: Show DeSantis or any other bullying politician that you're willing to cave, and all the other state governors and elected officials will pile right on. So I would expect Disney to take stock of the state political landscape, take a deep breath, and begin funding Democratic candidates - especially the centrist Pro-Business ones - with truckloads of SuperPAC funds and ad support and voter turnout efforts.

For all the gerrymandering the state Republicans have done, they are still vulnerable to voter turnouts (DeSantis barely won in 2018 by little over 3,000 votes). This stunt the Florida GOP is pulling is about to hit the wallets of hundreds of thousands of residents - and not just in Orange and Osceola counties - in a way that they'll view as unforgivable. No amount of culture war fearmongering can distract from families coping with higher property taxes and lost jobs.

If the Florida Republicans are kneecapping you with punitive laws to make you suffer, you fight back to make sure those Republicans are out of office by the next election (which is this November).

And that's all the LEGAL stuff Disney can do to punish DeSantis for starting this culture war fight. You might expect some of the illegal stuff like literal kneecapping to happen over the next couple months.

In the meantime... well, in THIS fight between Wingnut Assholes vs. Corporate Overlords, I'm gonna have to side with the Corporate Overlords. 

#GoDisney 

and #SayGayFlorida

Strange Days Inside the Job Lines (w/Update)

(Update: Many thanks to M. Bouffant at Crooks&Liars to include this blog article in Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please visit the site and check out the vacation pics from Virginia!)

What with the ongoing COVID pandemic happening, and the power struggles between Blue America and Red America over masking and vaccines and everything else, the American economy seems to be chugging along at a normal pace... except that it's doing things that are freaking out the economists and setting off red flags that make no sense to them. This article from Derek Thompson in The Atlantic is one of the latest OMFG essays from the punditry trying to make sense out of nonsense:

Americans are buying more stuff than ever before. That’s good. But because of supply constraints, it can feel like there’s a painful shortage of just about everything. That’s bad. Economic growth is booming, but the president’s approval rating on the economy is falling, which is a historically odd juxtaposition. Businesses everywhere are struggling to fill jobs, which sounds bad, but employer pain is workers’ gain, and wages are rising, which is wonderful. But because prices are rising too, inflation-adjusted hourly-wage growth actually declined in September, which is not wonderful...

The great mystery of this moment is the labor shortage. America’s GDP is larger than it was in February 2020. But the total economy is down about 7 million workers. That’s akin to the entire labor force of Pennsylvania sitting on the sidelines. In September, the number of people working or actively looking for work mysteriously declined, which is not what you would expect to see in a rapidly growing economy with simmering inflation. Wages are rising. Job openings are everywhere. But we’re running out of people who seem to want a job right now...

This seems to be the thing at the crux.

Thompson tries to go through the usual list of suspects: The reality we're still in a pandemic where a majority of Americans don't WANT to go into a workforce that would expose them to COVID, and the ghoulish realization that the 700,000 (and going) deaths in the United States put a dent in that workforce is another likelihood. That's not even counting the hundreds of thousands of Americans suffering from the long-term effects of COVID that could well keep them out of employment. 

But Thompson thinks that's not enough of a reason: The numbers of vacancies (7 million) don't match up to the COVID numbers (a tenth of that). So he goes pointing to a potential solution with the financial aid packages passed in 2020 and early 2021 that eased money woes for much of the working class:

The most complete explanation is that the massive fiscal-policy response to the pandemic reduced the urgency of looking for work. The United States has spent trillions of dollars to help families get through the economic deep freeze, via stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, and the moratorium on student-loan interest payments. National eviction bans have taken pressure off renters. Then there’s the record-high surge in savings among families who haven’t gone on vacation or splurged on experiences in more than a year. Add to that the fact that job openings have hit record highs—which means people know that if they wait a month or three, there will still be jobs aplenty to apply to. Seeing this whole picture, more Americans clearly feel like they can take a more leisurely approach to going back to work...

Except that might not be it. The stimulus checks were nice but they barely took care of two-three months' worth of rent, and the most recent checks were back in March/April of this year. The moratorium of student-loan payments doesn't cover the entire population that's still avoiding the open job market. The eviction bans ended during this summer, and the rental aid meant for those families are backlogged by state bureaucracies. Those expanded unemployment benefits might still be helping out in Blue states, but many Red states had cut back on those benefits in a mad attempt to force people back into the workplaces (guess what, didn't work).

What might really be at work (for lack of workers) here is the shift in workplace realities. The ability to work from home for half our households seemed to have convinced two-income families they didn't have to sacrifice to the demands of businesses to commute, waste nine hours in a cubicle, and then struggle to race home to deal with latch-key children stressing over schoolwork (from Thompson's earlier article about the fall of office space):

If the past year and a half has taught us anything, it’s that white-collar workers can do hard work from home just about as well as they can do it in the office—and maybe even better, precisely because their colleagues aren’t interrupting them...

For a decade or more, productivity experts have been telling us that cross-group collaboration and weak ties are the skeleton key to unlocking radical creativity... This sounds like a loud endorsement of the office. But the internet does all of this at a much larger scale than any office floor... What’s more, if today’s corporate conventional wisdom were true, the pandemic would have created a hellscape for productivity. Instead, corporate earnings are rising, wages are rising, and official measures of productivity are rising too, in practically every state...

This points to the possibility that a lot of workers - many of them part-timers who held two jobs at the same time - want to stick with the at-home jobs that may have well paid better with fewer expenses that would have necessitated those second jobs. I'd love to see if anyone's done surveys on how many part-time employees before 2020 - those who juggled multiple jobs - decided to just stick to one job during/after the pandemic and found they did well enough financially to not seek a second.

There is also the possibility that the pandemic forced a number of workers to find alternatives to the established job markets by going into self-employment. Monetization of performing arts, creative arts, crafts - all things you can do from home and upload to the Internet, hello TikTok! - seemed to increase during the pandemic, and a lot of that from the younger populations that would otherwise fill those job vacancies.

There is one other thing that would explain the jobs gap, and Thompson points it out a little later in his article: The United States is seeing a gap in the workforce numbers due to the decrease in immigration that would have filled those jobs under normal circumstances. As he notes:

Whether or not today’s worker revolt becomes tomorrow’s worker revolution, what’s abundantly clear is that America needs more workers. America’s prime-age population stopped growing more than a decade ago, and because of declining fertility rates, it’s unlikely to recover through natural growth alone. If the U.S. needs more workers, the arithmetic is straightforward: We need more immigrants.

Welcoming immigrants is more complicated than putting up a help wanted sign at the border. Democrats are looking for ways to expand legal immigration—a matter of moral and long-term economic urgency—while avoiding a xenophobic backlash from the right. One great way to do this would be to “recapture” surplus permanent-residency visas, or green cards, that went unclaimed in previous years. Since 1992, hundreds of thousands of green cards authorized by Congress have not been issued because of administrative hiccups; last year, unused green cards reached a record high...

I wouldn't call it a hiccup: The pile-up of unused green cards was due to an overall lack of travel due to COVID restrictions, but before that the unused green cards was a policy decision by trump's anti-immigrant agenda. That's been 4 years already of the Trumpian Far Right putting the screws to a jobs market seeing dwindling population numbers before the pandemic hit. We're just now seeing the results of that.

Whether or not this screwy jobs market gets straightened out, there ought to be honest benefits out of this long-term: desperate corporations and businesses realizing that their decades-long refusal to pay workers better is going to have to end, and they're going to have to start paying Americans - and any immigrants still wishing to move here - better if they want those jobs to get done.

Time to Conduct Some Semiconductor Business At Home

If anybody's waiting on an order for a new Atari VCS microconsole, you might have to wait awhile. There seems to be a massive shortage of semiconductors required for... practically every electronic device we have. Per David Atkins at Washington Monthly:

But there’s increasingly an argument to be made that a just-in-time lowest-cost supply system may not just be bad for the climate or for domestic employment. It may also in many cases be bad for business. The semiconductor crisis tells an exemplary tale. As information technology becomes essential to daily life in developed countries, semiconductors are essential for making the world go round. Phones, computers, gaming consoles and automobiles all require increasingly sophisticated semiconductors. And most of them are made by a single company: Taiwan Semiconductor. Indeed, Taiwan Semiconductor is so dominant in the field that few competitors can match them, and they’re falling farther behind...

We've got a hundred different manufacturers putting together a 1001 different electronic devices, and NOBODY seemed to notice they ALL relied on ONE supplier for a required component to their devices???

The semiconductor shortage is harming vehicle production lines. It’s why the next generation gaming consoles that were supposed to be available last Christmas are still in vanishingly short supply. It is starting to impact smartphones and personal computers as well.

There are many correlated aspects to this problem. It’s partly a matter of national security: what does the global economy do when it relies so heavily on a single actor in a location of geopolitical instability? It’s partly a problem of monopoly: is the market truly free or stable if so many essential products depend on the fate of a single company? How can there be genuine competition if the cost of entry makes establishing new competition prohibitive? It’s partly a matter of the pandemic: Taiwan Semiconductor and other manufacturers have been struggling to meet production targets due to reduced capacity from COVID restrictions.

An over-reliance on global trade and shipping, combined by corporate eagerness to find the cheapest labor instead of reliability and location, have led us to this bloody mess. The Pandemic merely highlighted our vulnerabilities.

At no time in the past 20 years it seems - as the Internet revolution exploded the computer tech industry into the behemoth it is today - anyone planned far enough ahead to plan for possible shortages or cuts to supply lines. It never occurred to anybody relying on tech parts like semiconductors that it would help to establish their own manufacturing to compete for that key part in more than one country/continent so that they didn't rely on Taiwan Semiconductor Inc itself. That company could have branched itself out, using its expertise in its manufacturing techniques to build more factories in other places to maintain a stranglehold on its monopoly of semiconductors while improving its supply chain to ensure availability. Apparently nobody - even the company aware of its own situation - wanted to spend the money to do that.

I'm not a businessman, don't have a degree in economics, but even *I* know it's foolish to rely on one provider of one product from one location that just happens to be so needed for almost everything out there.

But monopolizing practices don't seem to breed expansion or competition, only complacency. Nobody wants to spend profits on improving service or supply. Until it's too late.

If the United States wants to respond properly to this crisis, our own government ought to push for business start-up funds to get semiconductor manufacturers up and running here (and to hell with the local CEO mindset against hiring workers in the U.S. because they might ask for living wages). We've got manufacturing towns dying out because they've been abandoned: This could be a good time to reinvest in those places that can handle the semiconductor industry.

Sort of what Atkins says at the end of his article:

The world has a mutually invested interest in distributing production of goods like semiconductors–and it’s not clear that the private sector should be wholly responsible for taking on the burden. (To say nothing of the leftist critique that the benefits of successfully adding semiconductor production should not redound merely to the shareholders.)

The governments of the world have both a competitive and cooperative interest in ensuring that resources like semiconductors are not at the mercy of geopolitical conflict, and that production can be ramped up as needed even if problems should arise in one company, country or corner of the globe.

What say ye, President Biden? Care to invest America in much-needed semiconductors to generate much-needed jobs?

The Two Certain Things In Life: Trump Being a Con Artist and Taxes.

So the New York Times received an envelope mailed from Barad-dur Trump Tower itself, and they apparently took the time to get the papers inside that envelope vetted, and last night they released what their Sunday paper was going with on the front page:

Trump Tax Records Obtained by The Times Reveal He Could Have Avoided Paying Taxes for Nearly Two Decades

Remember the constant drum beats from Democrats, critics, certain media pundits, and pretty much most Americans that Trump should publicly release his tax records the way most candidates have done since 1968?

Remember how Trump kept throwing up excuse after excuse after lie?

"Oh, I'm being audited, rules say I can't release while I'm audited." IRS says nuh-uh, nothing stopped him from that obligation.

"It's meaningless, I'm rich, believe me." Reagan taught us to Trust But Verify, Ferret-hair.

"Oh, you won't like what you see so I just won't release them." ...Well, that turned out to be right.

Just the brief taste of revelation we're getting here - a set of state-level returns documenting the fallout of Trump's disasters in the early 1990s - is enough to raise more red flags than a mailbox vendor convention:

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period...

I don't who this is worse for: Trump, or the state and federal governments whose tax laws allow a massive black hole like $916 MILLION IN LOSSES turn into a decades-long benefit for uber-rich people. I doubt that kind of loss for a middle-income small-business owner would turn into 18 years of write-offs.

Just remember: The NYTimes reportedly has more tax returns in their possession. They just needed to release this one first because all the following tax papers require this context.

Aside from the schadenfreude of guessing just who within Trump Tower itself has betrayed their master,* this brings up a set of troubling facts:

1) This revelation demonstrates once again that the current tax code benefits the wealthy over the rest of us. The tax breaks Trump is qualifying for - even with his massive financial disasters - are simply unavailable to lesser incomes,

2) This one tax return is showing massive losses close to A BILLION DOLLARS. Given Trump's obvious habits of bankruptcies, failures, sinkholes, money pits, shell games, and additional screw-ups, how bad are the other years' returns?

3) We've had Trump running around this Presidential campaign cycle claiming he's worth $10 Billion. Yet this one tax return suggests he's lost hundreds of millions before with little evidence he's been able to reclaim any of that back (the reports of him living entirely off credit and Other's People Money become more obvious by the minute). Either he's really not worth billions of dollars - in which case he's clearly lying to EVERYBODY from the Beltway pundits to the American voters - or he's falsely reporting lost earnings to the tax collection agencies in order to scam them on the benefits of reporting these "losses". Either way, he's committing FRAUD.

This is Trump, aiming for the hat trick of stupidity, scamming, and self-aggrandizement.

Never one to apologize or admit a mistake of this scale, Trump's response to this has been to accuse the leak of being illegal and then argue via Tweet that "I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them."

Of course he knows those complex tax laws, he's been playing them like the con artist he is turning billion-dollar losses into fool's gold. But there's no way this con artist is going to fix a rigged game that benefits himself. His own tax cut proposals - killing the estate tax entirely, dropping the upper income rates to their lowest at 33 percent, and reducing corporation tax rates to an insane 15 percent - are proof of that.

I wouldn't trust Trump on taxes simply because he doesn't value them at all. He's clearly gaming the system to avoid paying as much of it as possible, and when confronted on his avoidance he smugly claims "that makes me smart."

No, Donald, that makes you a tax-dodging tiny-fingered Cheeto-faced ferret-wearing shitgibbon. And Americans DO NOT TAKE KINDLY TO TAX DODGERS.

* Personally, I got money on an elite team of high-tech accountants who performed the Heist of the Century (well, until the Wu Tang Clan and Bill Murray team up to steal their album back from PharmaBro).

Telling Tales Out of School

I got into a brief conversation on Twitter about the stories now floating out there about Trump's business practices.

I never fully worked in the private sector - I've mostly been a librarian, that's public sector, any private sector gig has been as part-timer wage slave - so it kind of stuns me that there's no shared or collaborative awareness of who the good guys and bad guys are in the business world.

It boils down to the concept of "telling tales out of school," an old phrase about giving up confidential hush-hush information about somebody that you might not wanna do (unless you want the reputation of being a snitch). Like Octavia's Daughter points out, going public by bad mouthing a client could have been bad for business overall (future clients might want confidentiality).

The thing, I've got a solid point here: Trump has a consistent history of intentionally ripping people off.

Trump would hire contractors, get the service done, then complain about the finished product and refuse to pay. He would draw it out with the lawyers up to the point where he knows the contractors needs money to pay off their own debts and force them to take less, killing any profit those contractors could expect. Some of those contractors had to go into bankruptcy themselves.

His own Presidential campaign has generated tales about his refusing to pay out money he promised to charities, to providers, to state agencies. He's currently getting sued by a troupe of girl performers who sang at his rallies, for God's sake.

And as far as we can go with the "telling tales out of school" phrase, there's no finer example than Trump University.

And to Trump, it's just "good business."

This is a man who does not respect anyone else's rights or needs to be well-paid for services rendered.

Do you honestly think he's going to stop thinking like that the second he enters the Oval Office?

We're talking about a man who'll likely empty out the federal coffers faster than Speedy Gonzales emptying out a cheese factory. (No offense to Speedy Gonzales, and besides he raids the cheese factory to feed the starving villagers)

It's good that the stories are getting out there now, during a period that our voters can realize that Trump isn't a successful businessman, he's a successful thief. But it bothers me that someone like Trump was allowed to operate like this for over 40 years and got away with it. Shouldn't some requirement of business ethics DEMAND that a crook of Trump's venality be hauled into the spotlight for his sins long ago? Before it got worse?