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Nevilledog

(51,279 posts) Mon Sep 28, 2020, 12:16 PM Sep 2020

Trump's Tax Returns Have Exposed Him as a Massive Failure Who Thrived in the Age of Plutocracy

Link to tweet

Tweet text: Charles P. Pierce
@CharlesPPierce
Donald Trump has been exposed as a failure who was allowed to thrive because he failed at a time in which politics and government were rearranged to keep his particular genre of failure ever from being fatal.

Donald Trump Now Stands Exposed as a Massive Failure
The 'New York Times' report is the final and conclusive evidence that everything the president* has sold about himself is the purest moonshine.
esquire.com

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a34192749/trump-tax-returns-failure-plutocracy/

By happy accident, the latest bombshell from The New York Times dropped one day after some nice folks in New York sent along a copy of Without Compromise, a collection of pieces written for the late, lamented Village Voice by the late (and equally lamented) Wayne Barrett, who wrote that newspaper's "Runnin' Scared" column for almost 40 years. There is absolutely no point in trying to understand the current president*, the sleazoid New York milieu that birthed him as a public figure, and our immediate peril without having read Barrett's dogged pursuit of Manhattan's landshark demimonde and how it put the screws to everyone else. From the Go-Go Gordon Gecko 1980s all the way through Rudy Giuliani's fealty to developers (and criminal cops) as the city's mayor, without fear or favor, as the old muckrakers used to say, and using the country's signature city as his index patient, Wayne Barrett traced the steady corruption that came along with nearly a half-century of shoving the nation's wealth upwards, a process that, hitched to retrograde politics, made someone like El Caudillo Del Mar-a-Lago not only possible, but inevitable. That Barrett died the day before this president*'s thoroughly corrupt inauguration is one of those episodes in which history and Providence get together to rob us blind.

Barrett was onto the president* early on. In 1979, Barrett published an insanely detailed two-part epic in the Voice describing not only the president*'s initial rise to New York power broker, but also his own battle with the president*, who already was ham-handedly trying to manage his own press. "In this two-part history," Barrett concludes, "we've been looking into a world where only the greed is magnified. The actors are pretty small and venal. Their ideas are small, never transcending profit. In it, however, are the men elected to lead us and those who buy them. And in it, unhappily, are the processes and decisions that shape our cities and our lives."

And, in 2016, those two groups merged into one vulgar talking yam, someone whose innate contempt for democratic government was reinforced, as Barrett explains, by how easy it was to buy his way into it, or around it, if needs be.

He had prided himself on never having met a public official, a banker, a lawyer, a reporter, or a prosecutor he couldn’t seduce. Some he owned, and others he merely manipulated. As he saw it, it was not just that everyone had a price, it was that he knew what the price was. He believed he could look across a table and compute the price, then move on to another table and borrow the money to pay it. "Everybody tries to get some money" was his assessment in one unpublished interview of what motivates the people he dealt with. It was his one-sentence summary of human nature.

*snip*