4/6/18: The stock market begins the day by plunging 700 points on growing fear of a trade war with China.
It ends the day down 572.
____________________
Russians
looking to do some laundry.
____________________
Shortly after the market closes, the Treasury Department announces sanctions on 17 Russian officials, 12 companies, 7 Russian oligarchs and 6 Lords-a-Leaping. Among the sanctioned: Oleg Deripaska and eight of his companies.
Can we find any connection to anyone in the Trump 2016 campaign? Yes, we can! But not, “Yes, we can,” in the Obama sense.
Deripaska and campaign manager Paul Manafort were in business together for years, prior to Trump’s run for the money…uh…presidency. Alexander Torshin, also among the sanctioned, worked through the N.R.A. to set up a meeting with Don Jr. during the campaign. A third gentleman on the list is Suleiman Kerimov, accused of smuggling cash into France in suitcases, $20 million at a time. Then he laundered it all by buying fancy villas.
Why might that ring alarm bells in Trumpistan? NPR explains:
The Treasury Department’s
singling out of Kerimov for allegedly smuggling cash out of Russia
followed a report this week by CNN that said Justice Department special
counsel Robert Mueller’s office has been interdicting wealthy Russians as
they fly into the United States [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] in
order to interview them about potentially transporting cash.
If Russia funneled money to
American political campaigns or organizations as part of its attack on the 2016
election, one way it might have done so is by simply smuggling paper dollars in
order to avoid electronic transfer records.
Foreign contributions are barred
in U.S. elections…
One way in which illicit money
allegedly moves out of Russia is via real estate. A rich person buys property
in the West (in London, New York or South Florida) without living in it. Instead,
hot real estate markets in those places make it simple to resell a condo or a
mansion and free up legitimate cash. In Kerimov’s case, he was allegedly using
this scheme in the south of France when he was arrested in Nice last year.
In 2008, Donald Trump sold an
estate he had purchased for around $42 million in Palm Beach, Fla., to Russian
tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million.
Who else was on a January 2018 Treasury Department list for possible sanction? Yes, Rybolovlev! Aras Agalarov, who helped broker the secret meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower, was another. Sergei Gorkov, a Russian banker who met with Jared Kushner during the transition period, before Trump took office, was a third. Gazprom, a Russian oil company and Rosneft Oil, tied to Carter Page, the Trump aide who became a target of the FISA court, would make four and five.
There are so many potentially corrupt links and conflicts
of interest in this story it takes Politico
seven charts to include them all.
*
AT 9:44 P.M., I SETTLE in front of the TV for a little channel surfing. I catch Sean Hannity bitching about how the left hates Trump and never gives him a fair shake.
It makes Hannity sick, he tells three guests, knowing “this president” has created “3,000,000 jobs.”
Once again, being a fact-based liberal, I check the Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Jobs Report. Trump is enjoying a solid start to 2018. I may look at news with a left-of-center slant. But the math is the math is the math.
Gertrude Stein said that. She was a real math afficionado.
The March jobs report is relatively weak: 103,000 jobs added to the economy. The first official report for a month is “preliminary” and can change, up or down, but usually not by much.
Let’s see how Trump has done so far, starting January 20, 2017, when he took office. We’ll give him 11/31st’s of that month’s job gains. Then we’ll total up jobs added from February 2017 through March 2018. Not bad, President Buffoon. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in just under fourteen-and-a-half months Trump has added 2,625,903 jobs.
Not quite Hannity’s “3,000,000.”
Still, not bad.
We now look to see how Obama fared when it came to adding jobs. For simplicity’s sake we’ll work backward from January 2017. We’ll give Obama 19/31st’s of that month’s job gains, the same as Trump. (I’m not splitting January 20, since Trump took over at noon. We’ll just ignore that day and call it a tie.) Next, we can work backward, fourteen months: December 2016 to November 2015.
We pull out the calculator and the total is – 2,933,903 jobs created in the last fourteen and 19/31st’s months, under Trump’s predecessor.
Now, let’s Google: “Sean Hannity credits President Obama with creating jobs” and see what we find.
Okay: Nothing.
I did find this, however, which I definitely found amusing:
*
ONE GUY we can say is definitely adding jobs, is E.P.A. head and Swamp Creature Scott Pruitt. Pruitt who protects our air and water, at least in theory, has had to hire a twenty-person security team to protect him from…what, air pollution? That’s twenty jobs right off the bat; and a twenty-first goes to Samantha Dravis, who serves as associate administrator at the agency.
Sadly, that job ends Wednesday when Dravis resigns under a cloud. But what fun while it lasted! Dravis got to fly first class, all over God’s creation, at taxpayer expense, just like her boss.
Flexible hours at taxpayer expense.
Dravis was always safely by Pruitt’s side, what with twenty security personnel keeping angry taxpayers at a distance. Also, the hours were flexible, to say the least. One Democratic congressman recently sent a letter to the Inspector General of the E.P.A, alleging that Dravis had not come to the office “for much if not all of the months of November 2017-January 2018.”
POSTSCRIPT: Did you know Pruitt also wanted to design a special “challenge coin” or souvenir coin representing the E.P.A.?
Did you even know the government was wasting tax dollars designing and handing out “challenge coins?”
I admit I did not, until I noticed a story some months back about the coin Trump designed for himself. Naturally, it was bigger than any of the coins of his presidential predecessors. And it had the word “Trump” slapped on one side and his fat mug appeared on the other.
Now we know Pruitt wanted a coin he could call his own. First, he would make his bigger than all the E.P.A. coins that came before. Second, he would remove the E.P.A. logo. Who needed that! Other possibilities included adding a buffalo, indicative of Pruitt’s Oklahoma roots (and maybe, since the buffalo almost ended up extinct, indicative of Pruitt’s less than aggressive efforts to protect the environment), a Bible verse to reflect his own religious tastes, and, naturally, his name in big bold letters. Finally, there was some thought of adding an oil company lobbyist to the inverse…
Ha,
ha, I made that one up. If you knew anything about Pruitt, and most of you
don’t, you might believe it was no joke.
 |
Under Pruitt, oil spills are no big deal. |
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