4/9/19: A transcript of the congressional testimony of James Baker, former top lawyer at the F.B.I., is released. During questioning by members of House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last October, Baker said he and many other top officials shared concerns that President Trump had obstructed justice in an attempt to thwart the Russia investigation.
“The leadership of the FBI, so the acting director ... The heads of the national security apparatus, the national security folks within the FBI, the people that were aware of the underlying investigation and who had been focused on it,” all feared Trump was trying to cover up an array of crimes.
Baker offered his take on the story that Acting Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein suggested wearing a wire during meetings with Trump.
Those close to Rosenstein now insist he was joking. Baker told lawmakers he
believed he was serious. “This was not a joking sort of time. This was pretty
dark.”
*
IN
A NEW STORY, The New York Times reports that in March, the Trump
Organization had to give the axe to six longtime maintenance workers at Trump
National Golf Course in Jupiter, Florida.
____________________
President Trump believes we need to build a big, beautiful
border wall to keep out the kind of people he likes to hire.
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Increased scrutiny – driven in large part by the “Fake News” folks – had revealed a pattern of employing individuals with fake documents at Trump properties. So, the six workers, from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador had to depart.
The Times talked to one of the six:
“They got rid of me
after so many years of hard work because I don’t have papers,” said Doroteo
Hernández, 42, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who worked for 10 years on
the maintenance crew at Jupiter…
Mr. Hernández, a
diminutive man with a weather-beaten face and workman’s hands, said that in
late March he handed over 11 well-worn, button-down shirts embroidered with his
name and the name of the club, 11 pairs of khakis and a club cap to his
supervisor, who praised him and gave him a farewell hug.
(Personally, I think the President of the United States should at the very least allow Mr. Hernández to keep one embroidered shirt, and one pair of khakis to wear when he gets deported from the United States.)
 |
Maybe departing workers could get a dozen golf balls. |
Indeed, since hotels and golf courses, like the ones Trump runs, love to pay crappy wages and enjoy dodging contributions to the Social Security fund, it’s quite common for them to resort to hiring the undocumented to do the most menial work. Trump’s Florida properties also prefer to hire “guest workers” who enter the U.S. on H-2 visas, including 148 for this year’s winter season. Because, otherwise, Trump would have to pay more to find American workers willing to do the jobs.
Roberto Carlos Méndez, a 29-year old from Guatemala, was another one of the six undocumented workers let go in March. He told the Times that he had been working at Jupiter for four years, ever since he snuck across the U.S. border. Or, to put it another way, President Trump believes we need to build a big, beautiful border wall to keep out the kind of people he likes to hire.
The Times noted:
No one from the management at the Jupiter
club, or at any of the Florida Trump properties, responded to interview requests for this article, nor did officials from
the Trump Organization. But none of the immigrants doubted that club managers
were aware all along that they were undocumented, and were disappointed to see
them go.
“They knew immigrants working there are
here illegally,” said Giovanni Velásquez, a 23-year-old from Guatemala who said
he had been allowed to continue working as long as he did because he was
needed. “The know-how that I have, the work I do, can’t be easily replaced. No
American wants to do it.”
Several
other laborers told reporters later that they had worked at Trump properties,
too, even though they had only fake documents, or no documents at all. One man,
who would give only his first name, Santos, said he had done painting work for
three years at the Jupiter club.
*
RAY DALIO describes himself as “a professional capitalist,” but the billionaire founder of the Bridgewater hedge fund, joined several other members of the top 1% to call for reforms to save capitalism and make it work more fairly. In a paper released last week, he noted that income inequality in the U.S. was the worst it has been since the 1930s.
Citing Dalio’s report, CNBC notes: “The wealth of the top 1 percent of the population is now more than that of the bottom 90 percent of the population combined.” Adjusted for inflation, in the 1970s, 90 percent of 30-year-olds were making more than their parents at the same age. Today only half can say the same.
Dalio, Abigail Disney, daughter of Walt Disney, Warren Buffett, third richest man in America, J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as nearly 200 other members of the top 1% have called for taxes to be raised on people like themselves. Ms. Disney suggested the money raised this way be used to increase affordable housing, improve infrastructure and on other important initiatives like improved education.
President Trump is opposed. “We are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country” he said in his last State of the Union address, and promised that “we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
Dimon
and others aren’t calling for socialism. They’re saying that when capitalism
doesn’t work fairly, it needs to be improved.
Finally, a study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity reveals that some of the largest companies in the country managed to avoid paying any federal taxes under the new Trump Tax Plan.
The 60 largest companies in
the study combined for $79 billion in pretax income and included such giants as
Amazon, Chevron, and Eli Lilly. The last is especially ironic, since Lilly has
devoted the past two decades to gouging type-1 diabetics, as prices for life-saving insulin rose by as much as 800%.
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