Revealed: Trump lawyers' last-ditch effort to stop him from being prosecuted for Stormy payments
March 16, 2023
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What connects the two biggest stories now dominating the news — Donald Trump’s likely arrest and the Fed’s bailouts of shaky banks?
Start with multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, and follow the money.
You may recall that in 2016, Thiel spoke at the Republican National Convention to make the case for why Trump should be the next president of the United States.
In the midterm elections of 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to the Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
Thiel also donated at least $10 million to the Arizona Republican Senate primary race of Blake Masters, who also claimed Trump won the 2020 election and who admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.
Masters lost. But thanks to Thiel’s munificence, Vance is now in the U.S. Senate.
Thiel and other wealthy self-described “libertarians” want Trump to be re-elected president in 2024. I’ll get to the reason in a moment.
What connects Thiel to the bank bailouts?
Days before Silicon Valley Bank failed, Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund, advised clients to pull their deposits out. This contributed to the run on the bank.
Some $50 million of Thiel’s own money was still stuck in the bank. Then, guess what? Thiel and other rich depositors got bailed out by the Fed.
Charges of hypocrisy have been leveled at Thiel and other wealthy depositors who claim to be libertarians but were rescued by the government.
There was nothing hypocritical about it. Thiel and others like him aren’t really opposed to government, per se. They’re opposed to democracy. They prefer an oligarchy — a government controlled by super-wealthy people like themselves.
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Thiel is part of the anti-democracy movement, of which Trump is the informal leader.
Their antipathy to democracy comes from the same fear that the extremely wealthy have always harbored about democracy — that a majority could vote to take away their money. That fear has been heightened by the fact that more and more of the nation’s wealth is going to the top, combined with demographic trends showing the majority of voters becoming less economically secure, more non-white, and politically left.
Thiel and his ilk see in Trump an authoritarian strongman who won’t allow a majority to take away their wealth. In December 2017, Trump and his Republican allies in Congress engineered a giant tax cut for the super-rich and the companies in which they invest. Many believe that a second Trump administration, backed by a Republican Congress, will cut their taxes even further.
They also support the Fed. Like most of the world’s central banks, the Fed is removed from democratic accountability, out of fear that financial markets otherwise won’t trust them to do unpopular things like bailing out banks or controlling inflation by slowing economies and causing millions to lose their jobs. The Fed is run largely by bankers. You might say it’s part of America’s oligarchy.
A few years ago, Thiel wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Presumably he was referring to the freedom of oligarchs like himself to be unconstrained by taxes and regulations. In this narrow sense, he’s correct: Oligarchy is incompatible with democracy. Nor is oligarchy compatible with the freedom of the rest of us.
Thiel and others like him want to return to an era when American oligarchs had freer reign. In that same essay, Thiel wrote:
The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
But if “capitalist democracy” has become an oxymoron, it’s not due to excessive public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are undermining democracy with giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates.
I’m old enough to remember a former generation of wealthy Republicans who backed candidates like Barry Goldwater. They called themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to conserve American institutions. But Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve anything — at least anything that came after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote (except for the Federal Reserve’s bailouts for the rich and its ability to draft average workers into fighting inflation).
The 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when the richest Americans siphoned off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of America had to go deep into debt to maintain their standard of living and sustain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced. When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.
It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.
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When Dominique Bernardo’s colleagues in 2020 expressed support for a social media campaign critical of their company’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests, they were summoned to meetings where they were “grilled” by a regional manager.
Some Seattle employees say they had been retaliated against for participating in the protests, and in Portland, Ore., an employee alleged in a lawsuit that they were fired for criticizing the company.
What’s perhaps most surprising is that allegations described aren’t against a corporate behemoth known for flouting workers health and safety laws, but rather at Trader Joe’s, the grocery chain where progressives love to shop, The Los Angeles Times reports.
“I think our customers would be so bummed to learn Trader Joe’s isn’t as progressive and accepting as it likes to project,” said Bernardo, who works at the chain’s College Avenue store in Oakland, California.
Watch: Jordan Klepper finds small crowd but big delusions at Manhattan MAGA rally
The plight of Trader Joe’s employees described in the report is the basis for a union drive at the company.
The Oakland store where Bernardo works is the first in the state where workers are officially seeking unionization.
Trader Joe’s is among several companies with progressive reputations where union drives are underway, according to the report, which notes that Starbucks and REI are among the others.
So far, three stores have voted to join Trader Joe’s United, an independent union, the report said.
“I feel like it was true at one point that Trader Joe’s was an exceptional grocery store to work at,” Trader Joe’s United communications director Maeg Yosef said.
Workers cite inconsistent wage scales, concerns over reporting sexual harassment and a refusal to implement conveyer belts that would reduce repetitive strain among the top reasons for seeking unionization, the report said.
Workers allege that during the pandemic the company cut hazard pay, stopped giving raises and gutted retirement benefits, the report said.
Nava Rosenthal, a 23-year-old Trader Joe’s employee who has worked for the company for almost five years said lifting of COVID-19 protocols signaled that employee health and safety wasn’t a high priority.
“While we’re putting our health at risk during the pandemic, and our families’ health at risk, that’s how they thanked us,” Bernardo said.
“It’s just so disrespectful. You feel so devalued as a crew member when you’re sacrificing so much to show up for the company. And how they repay you is to take money out of your pockets.”
ALSO IN THE NEWS: QAnon follower charged in bizarre booby trap incident that injured salesman
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'A serious crime': Former DA slams pundits who argue Trump's hush money scheme isn't a big deal
March 23, 2023
Conservative gadfly Bill Kristol dismissed the seriousness of the charges against Donald Trump for the hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Some legal experts have a different take.
Kristol compared Trump to former presidential candidate John Edwards, who engaged a third party to make the hush money payments. The jury ultimately acquitted Edwards — but Trump's case is more complicated.
In Trump's case, he not only paid off Daniels through his lawyer, but he also paid off Karen McDougal through a third party, The National Enquirer. The tabloid's chief, David Pecker, was given immunity in the case involving Michael Cohen.
What was also different in the Trump case is the former president used his business to funnel the money and created false records to hide it.
On Wednesday, MSNBC host Ari Melber cited a New York Times report saying that the falsification of business records is the "bread and butter" of the Manhattan district attorney's office case.
Rebecca Roiphe, former Manhattan assistant district attorney appearing with Melber, explained it's illegal — and it's particularly serious if the accused person was doing it to cover up another crime.
"I wouldn't get caught up in whether it's an A felony or a B felony or an E felony," she said. "It's a felony. That's a serious crime."
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