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There are plenty of American historical antecedents of Trumpism – fascist movements like the Jim Crow reign of terror, the McCarthy hearings, the gleeful genocide of indigenous people. But when you're thinking about the rise of Trumpism, never forget that America isn't just a nation of cruel bigots; it's also a nation of rich swindlers.
We call Trump a "reality TV star" and it's true, as far as it goes. Trump did play a billionaire on TV long before he grifted actual billions, using his status as the poor man's idea of a rich man to secure liar loans and rip off creditors, contractors, business partners, workers, and governments – local, state and federal.
He rose to power on this, boasting on stage that cheating "makes me smart":
Like so many crooked officials, Trump's brand is "He steals, but he works" (except of course that he doesn't – at any given moment, odds are that he's either taking a nap, watching Fox News, or playing golf):
Remember: the right is the movement that says that governments are inefficient and corrupt, so right wing elected leaders make their own case by being incompetent and corrupt. Someone like Trump has to convince people that they can't rely on institutions or their neighbors. His path to power lies through convincing people that the system is rigged and that he – as a man who is an expert at cheating – knows how to rig it in your favor:
But merely claiming "the system is rigged" doesn't actually win the day. If you want to convince people that the system is rigged, it really helps if the system is actually rigged. Want to convince people that elections are corrupt? Legalize unlimited dark money spending and fill our polling places with defective, unauditable voting machines made by Beltway Bandits selling into no-bid contracts:
Want to convince people that there's a shadowy cabal of rich pedophiles hiding children in a pizza parlor basement? It helps if there's an actual cabal of rich pedophiles hanging out on a private island, abusing more than a thousand children (and counting). Want to convince people that the financial system is a rigged casino so you might as well just gamble on cryptocurrency and betting markets? It helps if the actual financial system is run by banks who receive billions in public money and then steal millions of Americans' homes after Obama takes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runways" for the banks using Americans' houses:
Which is all to say, if you want to understand the origins of the surge of suckers for fascists who are desperate for a strong man to cheat on their behalf in a rigged system, it helps to look beyond racism and xenophobia, to the ways in which the system is, indeed, rigged. Racism and misogyny alone aren't enough to bring about fascism. To groom a nation of fascist patsies, you first need a crooked system:
This is why it's worth understanding finance. The finance sector hides its sins behind the Shield of Boringness (h/t Claire Evans). The layers of overlapping jargon and performative complexity make it hard for everyday people to criticize the finance sector. Finance ghouls exploit this, leveraging confusing ambiguities in the system to insist that their critics don't know what they're talking about and that everything is fine, actually. This is an incredibly destabilizing dynamic. Living in a system where you're being fleeced every day but where people who seem smarter than you have reasonable-seeming explanations about why it's all legit and above-board is a recipe for abandoning all faith in the system, in experts, and in lawful processes, and throw your lot in with a strongman who promises to cheat on your behalf.
Take stock buybacks, a form of stock swindle that was illegal until 1982. In a stock buyback, a company buys its own shares on the open market. When the number of shares goes down, the price per share goes up. This is just a form of "wash-trading," like when NFT and shitcoin scammers buy their own products in order to make it look like they're valuable and desirable:
Advocates for markets as a system of allocation (as opposed to allocating via a democratically accountable state, say) insist that markets are efficient because prices "encode information" about the desirability, viability, and other qualities of goods and services. This is the whole argument for the new crop of rigged casinos we call "prediction markets" that are grooming the next generation of fascist footsoldiers by robbing them blind and then insisting that the whole process was not only legitimate, but scientific, a way to retrieve the "encoded information" about the world around us.
In a market system, stock prices are supposed to reflect the aggregated information about the health and prospects of a company. When a company buys its own stock back, though, its price goes up while its value goes down.
I mean that literally: say a company that's sitting on a billion dollars cash is valued at $10 billion. From this, we can infer that the company's capital stock (factories, inventory, etc), IP (patents, processes, copyrights, etc) and human capital (payrolled employees, contractors) are worth $9 billion. That's a reliable estimate, because we know exactly how much one billion dollars cash is worth: it's worth one billion dollars.
Now, let that company piss that billion dollars up the wall with a stock buyback. The company is relieved of its billion dollars cash on hand, leaving it with no cash, only its physical capital, IP and human capital, which are worth $9b. The company is now worth less than it was before the stock buyback.
What's more, the drop in corporate valuation is more than the billion the company just blew on its buyback. A company with no cash reserves is brittle and prone to failures. Without a cash cushion, any rent shock, change in market conditions, or other adverse incident will leave the company scrambling to borrow money (at punitive rates, thanks to its desperation) to weather the storm. If share prices are actually "encoding information" about a company's worth, a billion dollar buyback should lop more than a billion dollars off the company's share price. Instead, it sends the share price up.
This is just stock manipulation, which is why it was illegal until 1982. But apologists for this system will tell you that a stock buyback is just a dividend by another name – just another way for a company to return value to its shareholders, who, after all, are the owners of the company and entitled to extract those profits.
This is categorically untrue. Dividends do take money out of the company's coffers and distribute them to its shareholders, sure – but a dividend is a bet on the company's future success, which is why a company's share prices rise after a dividend is declared. Investors observe a company that is so well-run that it can afford to drain some of its cash reserves in favor of its shareholders, so they buy the company's stock in anticipation of more dividends derived from more skilled operations.
But imagine if a company parted with a dividend so large that it meant that the firm would struggle to keep its doors open in the coming year. Imagine a publisher, say, whose dividend was so large that it couldn't afford to pay advances for any more books in the next season, meaning it could only make money from the backlist titles it already had in the warehouse, but was entirely out of the running when it came to publishing next year's blockbuster book.
That dividend would not send investors chasing the company's stock. Why would you bet on a stock whose management had just doomed the company to a bad season, and maybe an unrecoverable death-spiral? Without new books to sell, the company won't have any cash to pay dividends, and when it stops paying dividends, its stock price will fall, leaving shareholders with a hole in their own balance-sheets.
Contrast that with buybacks: to do a buyback, the company need merely spend its free cash flow, or money it borrows, or money derived from the sale of key capital, or money saved through mass layoffs, to buy its own stock. Then the share price goes up.
In other words: when a company's stock price rises on news of a dividend, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's management and its future growth. When a company's stock price rises on news of a buyback, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's future looting to the point of collapse.
I used to think that this was the whole stock buyback story, but as is ever the case with finance, buybacks are fractally corrupt. This week, I've been reading Boston College law prof Ray D Madoff's book The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, and I've learned even more scummy truths about buybacks:
For tax purposes, dividends are "ordinary income," meaning that they are taxed at up to 37%. Meanwhile, if you sell your shares after a stock buyback juices the price, the profits are treated as "capital gains," whose tax rate caps out at about half that (20%). This means that shareholders pay half the tax on money that comes from strip-mining a company than they would get from money derived from managing a company for sustainable growth.
It's worse than that, though, because capital gains can be offset by capital losses. If you invested in a stock that tanked, you can hold that stock in your portfolio until you are ready to sell a profitable stock, and deduct your losses from the gains you've made.
But you don't even have to sell the stock to realize tax-free income from it: the ultra-rich live according to a financial arrangement called "buy, borrow, die" that lets them avoid all taxes.
Here's how that works: if you're sitting on a bunch of stock, you can stake it as collateral for a loan that is tax-free. Better than that, if you're smart, some or all of the interest on that loan is tax-deductible. If you're rich enough, you don't have to make regular payments on the loan, either – you just wait as the stock continues to grow while your loan is maturing, and when it's due, you borrow even more money against the new valuation and pay off the old loan.
That's "buy" and "borrow." Here's "die." When you die, you transfer your assets to your kids, who benefit from something called the "step-up in basis," which lets them avoid all capital gains on the appreciated value of your assets.
Now, maybe you're thinking that you can benefit from this arrangement. I've got bad news for you: you won't qualify for one of those cool loans that you don't need to pay regularly! What's more, if you own any stock you almost certainly own it through a retirement plan like a 401(k), and when you cash out that 401(k), that is treated as "ordinary income" at nearly twice the rate that our plutocrat overlords pay.
Buybacks, then, are part of a system whereby rich people get much richer every time a company that makes something good and employs ordinary people guts itself and sets itself on the path to bankruptcy. Meanwhile, working people don't benefit from this system, even if they own stock. They just get to live in a world where businesses are looted and shuttered and public services are slashed thanks to balanced budget rules that mean that governments can't spend when rich people don't pay taxes.
This is why buybacks have apologists. Buybacks – a stock swindle that was illegal in living memory – make rich people richer, and they spend some of that loot to fund an army of reply-ghouls who push the message that buybacks are dividends by another name.
It's part of the ripoff economy that has seen crypto-billionaires lobby, bribe and terrorize lawmakers into merging their speculative assets with the real economy, endangering the economic well-being of everyday people:
The ripoff economy is baked into the American experience. It is the foundation of Trumpism. It is the financial basis for things like "Project 2025" – literally! The Heritage Foundation (who created Project 2025) was founded and funded by the founders of Amway, a destructive Ponzi scheme that was rescued from criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford (Congressman to Amway's founders) became president and ordered the FTC to let them off the hook:
Trump's right: the system is rigged. If you're going to pull the people you love back from the nihilistic descent into fascism, you have to be able to understand and explain how the rigging works. We can't insist – as Hillary Clinton did – that "America is already great":
America is not great. It has been gutted by the Epstein class, who robbed us blind, raped our kids, and are now selling us shitcoins and chatbots and the spectacle of protesters being shot in the streets. But it's not enough to know that the system is rigged. Everybody knows the system is rigged. To build a movement and save our future, we have to know how it is rigged and who rigged it.
Here’s the truth: you cannot tax ____ionaires in the hope that they pay a “fair share”.
(1) The only fair tax is a 10% flat tax with zero deductions. If you make $500/year or $5M/year, that’s fair.
(2) The Federal Congress AND state congresses use taxes in order to increase spending. No one passes a zero balanced budget. Meaning, x is what you have to spend. You can’t spend more than x. Government doesn’t like that principle, because a zero balanced budget caps your spending AND pays off debt. Congress likes to kick the debt problem down the road for someone else to solve. Factor in that Congress gets to raise its own credit limits, and you have a nasty problem. We have out of control spending and get to continue raising our limits. To offset the spending, Congress isn’t cutting spending. Instead, they raise taxes and find new ways to tax everything.
With a 10% Flat Tax, that would be all the money Congress ever has to spend. Easy tax returns that a Caveman could do. No money back from the IRS. No owing money to the IRS or further docking your paychecks. 10% and that’s it.
(3) The tax code was written by business owners for business owners. You’re taxed on profit, not worth. As an individual, all income (your paychecks) are profit to you. As a business, there are legal ways to dispense income and thereby not have any profits to tax. In other words, if Income-Expenses=Zero then there are no Profits and no taxes on the non-existence of Profits. Do you realize how many business tax deductions there are?!
(4) The idea that you can tax anyone more just because it’s “fair” to you is ludicrous. You’re more wealthy than someone else. Why not tax you more? That ideology is the evil of socialism built off the fear of not having enough and encourages a divided society to envy others.
(5) You cannot tax the wealthy, but you can join the wealthy. That’s the advantage of capitalism: anyone, ANYONE, can rise above and succeed. Your limits are only limited by you, your fears, and your lack of knowledge. Get out there and learn. Do the work. Level up.
(6) Notes.
Rich is a term of comparison. You’re richer than me.
Wealth equals how many days you can go without needing a full-time job.
Driving for Lyft has been Cherri Murphy’s primary source of income for nearly three years. At first, she said it seemed like a good and flexible job option while she put herself through graduate school to get her master’s degree in theology. “Over the...
Yes yes fuck Uber/Lyft rah rah rah meanwhile this is just as much on horrible government tax policy as it is on Uber/Lyft. The working person is getting squeezed between Uber’s rock and the tax code’s hard-place for independent contractors, who pay higher taxes on income than any other company or person in America, roughly 39.5% of all income for independent contractors get taken by the government. This income tax percentage is more like 19-25% for the richest Americans or for Americans who are able to have formal W2 employment in a year when over 50,000,000 American jobs were erased through violent governance and scapegoating a preventable pandemic.
Make no mistake, I did my homework about prop 22 and eventually voted against prop 22 and encouraged everyone to join me. Only 42% voted against prop 22, meaning that now Uber/Lyft take as much exception to prop 5 as independent journalists, writers, and photographers.
If the government just started taxing Uber/Lyft/Doordash/Instacart workers at the normal W2 employee rates that employees are taxed at, this whole labor mess (of rideshare drivers getting paid below minimum wage net every expense including astronomical income taxes) would evaporate. Meanwhile California billionaires still pay the lowest taxes in the state of any bracket, and they get to enjoy living in one of the nicest areas in the world essentially tax-free, meanwhile the paycheck-to-paycheck workers who shuttle their porky asses around get taxed at close to double the billionaires’ rate while making less than minimum wage, how the fuck is that fair in any way? If you’re a billionaire you should be tipping every Uber driver you hire like $300, and know that they are paid about $5 an hour to work in the SF Bay Area, one of the most expensive places in the world to live. Why have minimum wage laws at all when it’s this easy to get around them? Holy fuck.
Sales people get this too, where the paltry “salary” they give you is taxed at W2 rates (aka 19.5%) while your “commissions” are taxed at the 1099 rate of 39.5%. But most companies sell people on earning high commissions as the way they will make the bulk of their salary, but again commissions are taxed double so you keep exponentially less of that than your W2 salary income. I call it total bullshit that stifles innovation to have taxes that high on working class people like myself, while the super-rich pay half that tax rate. And no republikkkan is coming to the aid of this defense because they hate the working class as much as a mosquito hates a cow (like “go ahead get malaria, bitch, i don’t care, i just need to suck your blood” vibes).
The tax code is slavery to these people, it’s beyond unfair. I see the government basically enabling billionaires to enslave the working class, it’s transparent as fuck and totally pathetic. I blame Uncle Sam because they write the game, meanwhile Uber and Lyft are just playing the game. Hate the game, not the player. Fuck you IRS / state tax systems, this backwards-ass medieval indentured servitude BULLSHIT is totally unacceptable in any society that fancies itself “modern” which America is not and has not been even before Connald Rump came into office.
House Republicans introduced the “End Zuckerbucks Act” on July 1 with the goal of stopping donations from certain tax-exempt “nonprofit” organizations to election organizations. The act has 12 Republican co-sponsors including Rep Dan. Bishop of North Carolina and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas.
It targets organizations like the mammoth “philanthropy” group built by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, known as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). If the legislation passes, the IRS would have the power to strip 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status from groups that donate directly to state and local election officials
CZI is a major funder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), a Chicago-based education organization. It coined the “social and emotional learning” concept more than 20 years ago and is now the nation’s largest source of SEL programming, with programs operating in 20 states. It claims to reach as many as 1.7 million students with its left-wing ideology.
CASEL was founded by Daniel Goleman, author of “Emotional Intelligence,” and philanthropist Eileen Rockefeller Growald. The program’s expressed goal was to help “children acquire the skills to recognize and manage emotions, develop caring and concern for others, make responsible decisions, establish positive relationships, and handle challenging situations effectively.”
However, CASEL isn’t just offering social-emotional learning, they’re now pushing a variant known as “transformative SEL” which is heavily steeped in concepts that encourage students to obsess about their race and supposed gender identities. Schools using prying surveys to promote concepts like these have been accused of violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which requires parental access to students’ survey answers.
CASEL’s program literature describes concepts of critical race theory such as “White racial entitlement and dominance.” It promotes leftist ideology under the guise of student and parental “critical social awareness,” and raises concern with “most” teachers being “middle-class White women.”
Mitch McConnell said that he would “absolutely back Donald Trump”, if Trump chose to run for the presidency again in 2024.
To be clear about what is REALLY happening: The fraud “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” which was actually the biggest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra wealthy is set to expire in 2024. So of course Mitch McConnell would back Trump again. They want to get him elected in 2024 to extend the tax cuts for the ultra wealthy after the one from 2017 expires.
Republicans want the “trailer park” vote to get those tax cuts for the ultra wealthy who only number about 400. And only Donald Trump can bring out the trailer park crowd in big enough numbers to win.
Again...400 individuals own more wealth than the rest of the 350 million Americans combined.
In three and a half years since Trump took office, the 400 ultra wealthy got 1 trillion dollars richer with Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan’s tax cuts. At the same time, we see record numbers of corporations going belly up, closing a lot of stores or going overseas. Carrier Air Conditioner, Harley Davidson, Toys-R-Us, Neiman Marcus, Luby’s, GM, Macy’s, Fry’s to name just a few.
For those of you who voted to get Trump out of office, please show up in 2022 and 2024 to kick Republicans out of office and keep Trump out too. The middle class cannot afford Donald Trump making life harder while making ultra wealthy people even richer by pushing the federal income tax burden down to the middle class.
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
Published on Mar 8, 2019
Disney Heiress Smothers Clueless CNBC Panel With Logic
Disney heiress Abigail Disney knows what needs to happen in America with taxes, and she recently appeared on CNBC in an attempt to drill it into their heads. Sam Seder and the Majority Report crew discuss this.
