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"10 Things Trump Supporters Are Too Stupid To Realize"


Mitch Cronin

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14 minutes ago, Mitch Cronin said:

What an unbelievable spin of pure BS. Defcon, you've been had. The spin masters have apparently found the precise avenue they could lead you down.

Many of us would say the same thing about you.

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12 hours ago, deicer said:

Morning Upper Deck

What is being glossed over here in my opinion is the fact that if Mr. Trump was as successful businessman as he wants us to believe, he wouldn't have to take such massive tax deductions. He would be paying his contractors, who would be paying taxes, and he  would be paying his own income tax.

As it is, he is gaming the system, not supporting any of the social structure of the United States, yet taking all the benefits that come with being a citizen.

That's why I cannot believe in the man.....

P.S.  If he was complaining about having to pay too much tax, then he might be believable.

Deicer...

 

My comments are from the "Upper Deck" so to speak.....a little guy speaking in thousands and no more. I bought some land and did so in a corporation because I'm a "smart guy". That company put up a building. I incorporated another company to operate a restaurant. That company lost a LOT of money because I'm not REALLY a smart guy. And then I learned.....you don't use a company to operate the restaurant when you are running at a loss. On one hand, in my professional practice, I was paying LOTS of taxes. On the other hand, I was accruing losses that I was funding with NET dollars. Duh!!

Eventually, I was able to amalgamate companies and start generating net revenue and "consumed" those accrued losses. 

My point is simply that "every day" unsophisticated people who should perhaps know better engage in business that contributes to the economy but fails to generate net income. "You takes your chances and you rolls the dice". You do what you can to reduce taxable income elsewhere using those losses but if you can't.....too bad; bite the bullet.

By the way.....the biggest source of my losses? Employee theft. That's the primary reason that you can't run a restaurant/ bar without being on site AT ALL TIMES!!

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8 hours ago, Fido said:

Trumps losses came from investing in an airline.

We should all know that even smart people have lost money that way.

and a universtiy, and Trump Steaks, and ... It's a pretty long list of losses and Bankruptcies 

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You have to admire a guy that gets up, dusts himself off and keeps going after being knocked down.

I recall a motivational line that was used decades ago that went something like; 'the majority of millionaires go bankrupt an average of six times before they make it'.

If the claim was accurate, it would mean a determined man's tenacity to succeed can be expected to produce a pile of losses, read write-offs.

On balance, Trump's wins far exceed the losses and as a net generator of jobs, he's done a lot more than the politicians that would have us believe they are somehow responsible for creating those very same jobs.

 

 

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While the Democrats blow way out of proportion a harmless Trump comment about a beauty queen (who was under contract to keep in shape), the story behind this meme gets ignored by the press. Welcome to politicking in 2016.

IMG_3896.JPG

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No offence Boestar, but for years I've been listening to people bash others that have successfully pursued the so-called 'American Dream'. The line that goes something like; 'if my daddy gave me a million dollars, I'd be worth 300M too', which is complete horse-poop!

I could demonstrate how far short of reasonable that type of statement falls a hundred different ways, but suffice it to say; everybody's had a couple of grand available to them at one time or other and yet, they weren't ambitious enough, or lacked the necessary talent and or skill to make an investment bloom. That's one of the many reasons that explains why we're all not rich guys like Upper Deck for instance.

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Precisely.   He was given a wahack load of cash and made dozens of lousy investments in the hops that the TRUMP brand would be enough for it to be a success.  Well that didn't work did it?  The only place he ever made any money (and the amount of net worth is still a matter of debate) is in real estate. Which, when given enough initial capital, is pretty hard to lose money at these days.

But as I said.  Given the starting capital I would give it a shot win or lose it would be fun to play the game.

 

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http://usuncut.com/politics/revealed-trumps-lawyers-meet-pairs-lies-much/

Donald Trump’s own bankruptcy lawyers were forced to put in place a policy of meeting Trump in pairs to preemptively prepare for his steady stream of lies.

Buzzfeed published thousands of pages worth of court filings on Tuesday in connection with Trump’s bankruptcies from the 1990s. A New York City-based lawyer has since pointed out specific pages from the depositions which expose the highly unusual practices that Trump’s lawyers undertook to handle the real estate mogul’s fabrications.

Bankruptcy attorney George Miller states in these documents that for every meeting with Trump, “it’s always been our practice to make sure that two people are present, and we don’t have a problem with people lying.”

Miller somewhat carefully refers to Trump as “an expert at interpreting things. Let’s put it that way.”

“We tried to [meet in pairs] with Donald always if we could because Donald says certain things and then has a lack of memory,” he also says in the deposition.

Lying and twisting the truth has been a common staple to the Trump campaign since it began. In a Politico analysis of 4.6 hours of the GOP nominee’s speeches and press conferences, reporters found that the real estate magnate told a lie once every five minutes, on average.

According to Politifact’s analysis of statements made by Trump throughout his time as a political public figure, the fact-checking website determined that 69 percent of Trump’s statements were rated as “Mostly False,” “False,” and Pants on Fire.” When accounting for statements rated as “Half True,” the percentage of Trump’s non-truths jumps to 85 percent.

The Trump campaign has yet to respond to these revelations.

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https://www.buzzfeed.com/kendalltaggart/here-are-donald-trumps-full-bankruptcy-filings?bftwnews&utm_term=.tdq3EQXxE4#.bo4O1bZa12

On Saturday, the New York Times published portions of Donald Trump’s tax returns showing that he declared a $916 million loss in 1995. Declaring such a huge loss could have allowed him to legally avoid paying federal income taxes for a period of time, the Times reported.

But most of Trump’s finances are still shrouded in mystery. Unlike every other modern presidential candidate, he hasn’t released his tax returns. And his privately held companies aren’t compelled to release financial details.

One major exception to that veil of secrecy: In the early 1990s, Trump’s companies filed several major bankruptcies, and the massive court filings in those bankruptcies have been a key part of previous reporting on Trump’s finances.

But those files — totaling thousands of pages — have not been available online before today, though they have been pored over by reporters at a range of outlets. With Trump’s finances the source of intense speculation and interest a month before the election, BuzzFeed News is making them available in full for the first time.

(We are posting the most complete record available. A clerk at the bankruptcy court told us that some of the filings are missing from their records.)

The documents are, in particular, court filings from three of his bankruptcies in 1991 and 1992:

Those bankruptcies almost certainly contributed to the loss he reported in his 1995 taxes.

The documents provide a glimpse into Trump’s business tactics. “He was a brutal and ruthless negotiator,” Bryant Simon, professor at Temple University and author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America, told the Washington Post. “People paid the price.”

The Post reported that, in the Taj Mahal Casino bankruptcy, large institutions took the biggest losses, but “many small-time investors who had bought the bonds, directly or through retirement funds, also suffered losses … so did the small-business owners who sold Trump paint, equipment, food, limousine services, and much more. Many were eventually paid only a fraction of what they were due.”

A New York Times review of the court records, as well as other filings, found that despite his claims to the contrary, there is “little doubt that Mr. Trump’s casino business was a protracted failure.”

Trump has touted his bankruptcies as a savvy business move.

“Don’t forget, I’m the king of debt, I love debt,” he told Wolf Blitzer of CNN in May.

Tim L. O’Brien, executive editor at Bloomberg View and author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, reported that Trump had a very different view of bankruptcy a decade ago. He “told me that he wanted to avoid bankruptcy at all costs because he felt that it would permanently taint him as a failure or a quitter,” O’Brien wrote.

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Highlights for emphasis are mine...

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-its-stock-collapsed-trumps-firm-gave-him-huge-bonuses-and-paid-for-his-jet/2016/06/12/58458918-2766-11e6-b989-4e5479715b54_story.html

It was promoted as the chance of a lifetime: Mom-and-pop investors could buy shares in celebrity businessman Donald Trump’s first public company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts.

Their investments were quickly depleted. The company known by Trump’s initials, DJT, crumbled into a penny stock and filed for bankruptcy after less than a decade, costing shareholders millions of dollars, even as other casino companies soared.

In its short life, Trump the company greatly enriched Trump the businessman, paying to have his personal jet piloted and buying heaps of Trump-brand merchandise. Despite losing money every year under Trump’s leadership, the company paid Trump handsomely, including a $5 million bonus in the year the company’s stock plummeted 70 percent.

Many of those who lost money were Main Street shareholders who believed in the Trump brand, such as Sebastian Pignatello, a retired private investor in Queens. By the time of the 2004 bankruptcy, Pignatello’s 150,000 shares were worth pennies on the dollar.

He had been pillaging the company all along,” said Pignatello, who joined shareholders in a lawsuit against Trump that has since been settled. “Even his business allies, they were all fair game. He has no qualms about screwing anybody. That’s what he does.”

Trump’s bid for the White House relies heavily on his ability to sell himself as a master businessman, a standout performer in real estate and reality TV.

But interviews with former shareholders and analysts as well as years of financial filings reveal a striking characteristic of his business record: Even when his endeavors failed and other people lost money, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee found a way to make money for himself, to market his Trump-branded products and to pay for his expensive lifestyle.

Trump was the chairman of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts in Atlantic City from 1995 to 2009, his only outing as the head of a major public company. During that time, the company lost more than $1 billion, financial records show. He also was chief executive from 2000 to 2005, during which time share prices plunged from a high of $35 to as low as 17 cents.

Trump received more than $44 million in salary, bonuses and other compensation during his time at the company, filings show. He also benefited from tens of millions of dollars more in special deals, advisory fees and “service agreements” he negotiated with his company.

Trump’s campaign did not make him available to respond to specific questions about the company, but in a recent Washington Post interview, Trump said he “made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” adding, “I make great deals for myself.”

He expounded: “They say, ‘Why don’t you take the casinos public or something?’ You know, if you take them public, you make money on that. All I can say is I wasn’t representing the country. I wasn’t representing the banks. I wasn’t representing anybody but myself.”

Corporate governance experts say it’s rare for executives of public companies to suggest that they haven’t been looking out for the shareholders who financed them.

When companies go public, when they first invite investors in . . . they say: ‘I promise you, you will come first. We are here to create shareholder value, and that’s why you should trust us,’ ” said Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, which advises shareholders on corporate governance issues. “For them to say, ‘I don’t really care about you,’ it’s basically your [sell] signal. Who’s going to make sure my interests as a shareholder are going to be protected?”

Whatever price he wanted

Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts started out as a holding company that owned the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, and then it steadily added other Trump properties.

Because it was publicly traded, Trump could sell shares and quickly raise money while other corners of his empire were in distress. Virtually all of Trump’s other businesses are privately held, so key information about their performance is hidden from view.

The company began advertising its public offering of stock in 1995, saying shareholders would benefit from “the widespread recognition of the ‘Trump’ name and its association with high quality amenities and first class service.”

When it debuted that year on the New York Stock Exchange, Trump’s company raised $140 million from investors, at $14 a share, and said the money would go toward expanding the Plaza and developing a riverboat casino in Indiana.

But much of that money went to pay off tens of millions of dollars in loans Trump had personally guaranteed, filings show. Those loans were taken out before the company went public, but Trump’s private fortune could have been at risk if they went unpaid.

The company got off to an encouraging start. An improving national economy and an upturn in Atlantic City gambling helped shares soar to a peak of $35 in 1996. That boosted the value of Trump’s stake in the company and helped him return to the Forbes 400 list — the magazine’s ranking of America’s wealthiest people — for the first time since 1989.

The early success didn’t last long. In less than a year, the company paid premium prices for two of Trump’s deeply indebted, privately held casinos, the Trump Taj Mahal and the Trump Castle. In essence, he was both buyer and seller, able to set whatever price he wanted. The company bought his Castle for $100 million more than analysts said it was worth. Trump pocketed $880,000 in cash after arranging the deal, financial filings show.

Trump also steered the company toward deals with the rest of the Trump-brand empire. Between 2006 and 2009, the company bought $1.7 million of Trump-brand merchandise, including $1.2 million of Trump Ice bottled water, the analysis shows.

“If you’re chairman of the company, there have to be safeguards to avoid that kind of blatant self-dealing,” said Pignatello, who said he lost tens of thousands of dollars in the investment. “He was milking the company.”

A ‘basket of goodies’

The grand promises and boasting Trump had become famous for as a private businessman became a source of tension with public investors. Wall Street traders spoke of the “Donald discount” to highlight the gap between what Trump promised and what they believed his stock was actually worth.

Trump said in 1997 that he was “the biggest there is in the casino business.” But that March, when the stock was trading at a quarter of its price 10 months before, Chase bond analyst Steve Ruggiero said the company wasn’t “forthcoming” about its financial performance with analysts, which he said “raises suspicions.”

The company at times ran into trouble. In 1998, the U.S. Treasury fined one of the Trump casinos $477,000 for failing to file reports designed to help guard against money laundering. Trump did not comment then on the action. The company agreed last year to pay a $10 million civil penalty after regulators found that it had continued to violate the reporting and record-keeping requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act.

In 2000, Trump and his partners paid $250,000 to settle a case brought by New York state alleging that they had secretly funded an ad blitz opposing the opening of competing casinos in the ­Catskill Mountains. “It’s been settled. We’re happy it all worked out nicely,” Trump said then.

In 2002, federal securities regulators issued a cease-and-desist order against the company, saying it had misled shareholders by publishing a news release with numbers “deceptively” skewed to appear more upbeat. The company said it quickly corrected the error and was not fined. Trump defended the release by saying it “was just a statement that was too verbose.”

The company lost money every year of Trump’s leadership, and its share price suffered. A shareholder who bought $100 of DJT shares in 1995 could sell them for about $4 in 2005. The same investment in MGM Resorts would have increased in value to about $600.

In 2004, the year Trump took home a $1.5 million salary, stock-exchange officials froze trading in the company — and, later, delisted it entirely — as word spread that it was filing for bankruptcy because of about $1.8 billion in debt.

Under the company’s Chapter 11 reorganization plan, shareholders’ stake in the company shrunk from roughly 40 percent to about 5 percent. Trump, meanwhile, would remain chairman – and receive a $2 million annual salary, a $7.5 million beachfront tract in Atlantic City and a personal stake in the company’s Miss Universe pageant.

“I don’t think it’s a failure. It’s a success,” Trump said in 2004 about the bankruptcy. “The future looks very good.”

Shareholders sued, saying in court filings that the “sweetheart deal” amounted to a “basket of goodies” for Trump. “Chairmen of public companies usually don’t celebrate when millions of dollars of shareholder equity are being wiped out,” attorneys wrote in a court filing that year. “Donald Trump apparently does.”

Trump settled, agreeing to give creditors $17.5 million in cash and the proceeds from an auction of the Atlantic City land.

Trump has said he had no regrets about the company’s performance. “Entrepreneurially speaking, not necessarily from the standpoint of running a company but from an entrepreneur’s standpoint, [the stock offering] was one of the great deals,” he told Fortune in 2004.

The ‘imperial CEO’

Company decisions were, as in most public companies, approved by a board of directors. None of the original directors responded to requests for comment. Trump wrote in his book “Trump: Surviving at the Top” that he “personally didn’t like answering to a board of directors.”

Charles Elson, the director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, said that Trump exemplified the ­corporate-American role once known as the “imperial CEO”: an unchallenged, dominant leader who singlehandedly steered the company.

“The CEO ran the show . . . and the board was the creature of the CEO,” Elson said. “These days, it’s very different,” he added, because of a shift toward greater oversight from company directors and the increasing presence of activist shareholders.

One later director was close to Trump: his daughter. Ivanka Trump was named to the board of directors in 2007, when she was 26 and had been working for two years at her father’s private company, the Trump Organization. The public company paid her $188,861 in cash and stock awards that year, filings show. Representatives for Ivanka Trump declined to comment.

Ivanka and Donald Trump both resigned from the company in 2009, after Trump declared in a statement that he strongly disagreed with bondholders who had been pushing the company to file again for bankruptcy.

“The company has represented for quite some time substantially less than 1 percent of my net worth, and my investment in it is worthless to me now,” Trump said at the time.

The company, now called Trump Entertainment Resorts, never escaped its crippling debt and filed for bankruptcy twice more, in 2009 and 2014. Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor Trump has called a friend, took control of the public company this year.

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I remind that Hilary & Bill left the White House broke, her words, but just a few short years of public service and a handful of speeches later and they're on their way to becoming billionaires ... the public trough apparently runs quite deep and through many beds, no pun intended.

It's not to say there isn't a book's worth of Clinton scams & deviances that could be listed, but for the moment let's discuss her most recent ego driven 'mistake'; Hilary ran a campaign ad of some sort today on the friggin Weather Channel of all things; talk about the capitalization of disaster ... sheesh. A well known political commentator just added his characterization to the mix when he said, 'there's nothing there, Hilary is pure ambition and nothing more'. I thought his sentiments were fitting.

But by all means, lets go on examining thirty year old legal documents that prove Trump's bankruptcy claims were lawful & legitimate, or allegations that he called a beauty queen out for being fat when she was apparently / likely bound by her word, and a contract, to keep her weight in check. So why then would the guy that's got a lot at stake financially and a contract in hand care because after all, no one should have ever been allowed to comment / shame the woman for adding another 50% to her body mass?

 

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.

There's something going on....

America’s quiet catastrophe: men who are choosing not to seek work

Thu Oct 6, 2016 - Washington Post
by George F. Will

The “quiet catastrophe” impacting the United States is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: after 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14 per cent. If the labour force participation rate were as high today as it was as recently as 2000, nearly 10 million more Americans would have jobs.

The work rate for adult men has plunged 13 percentage points in a half-century. This “work deficit” of “Great Depression-scale underutilization” of male potential workers is the subject of Nicholas Eberstadt’s new monograph “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis,” which explores the economic and moral causes and consequences of this:

Since 1948, the proportion of men 20 and older without paid work has more than doubled, to almost 32 per cent. This “eerie and radical transformation” — men creating an “alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job” — is largely voluntary. Men who have chosen to not seek work are two and a half times more numerous than men that government statistics count as unemployed because they are seeking jobs.

What Eberstadt calls a “normative sea change” has made it a “viable option” for “sturdy men,” who are neither working nor looking for work, to choose “to sit on the economic sidelines, living off the toil or bounty of others.” Only about 15 per cent of men 25 to 54 who worked not at all in 2014 said they were unemployed because they could not find work.

For 50 years, the number of men in that age cohort who are neither working nor looking for work has grown nearly four times faster than the number who are working or seeking work. And the pace of this has been “almost totally uninfluenced by the business cycle.” The “economically inactive” have eclipsed the unemployed, as government statistics measure them, as “the main category of men without jobs.” Those statistics were created before government policy and social attitudes made it possible to be economically inactive.

Eberstadt does not say that government assistance causes this, but obviously it finances it. To some extent, however, this is a distinction without a difference. In a 2012 monograph, Eberstadt noted that in 1960 there were 134 workers for every one officially certified as disabled; by 2010 there were just over 16. Between January 2010 and December 2011, while the U.S. economy produced 1.73 million nonfarm jobs, almost half as many workers became disability recipients. This, even though work is less stressful and the workplace is safer than ever.

Largely because of government benefits and support by other family members, nonworking men 25 to 54 have household expenditures a third higher than the average of those in the bottom income quintile. Hence, Eberstadt says, they “appear to be better off than tens of millions of other Americans today, including the millions of single mothers who are either working or seeking work.”

'Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness.'

.

 

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Where have I been? Hilary is now known to be employing the scandalous, almost pathetic tactic she previously utilized during her run for the senate. Her campaign spokeswoman admitted the allegations were factual, but went on to claim that 'everyone knows' that campaigns are carefully staged events ...

The scam; the Clinton campaign plants people in 'townhall' audiences who come armed with prepared questions. Both the questions and answers have been carefully crafted by staffers and rehearsed by Mrs. Clinton. Next in the ruse; during the Q & A segment of the show we see Hilary randomly selecting members of the audience, the preselected plants, and the rest is pure theatre. I really appreciate her acting skills when she responds with a 'I'm so amazed and pleased to receive such a thoughtful, relevant and important question' reaction to a plant's query.

Her antics aren't limited to town-hall style events either. She was recently interviewed by Steve Harvey. Her campaign staffer again acknowledged the interviewer had been given the questions to be asked in advance for which Hilary had rehearsed answers.

When this rendition of the recurring sham was exposed it became clear that the Clinton's never intended to disclose the fact that Hilary was a scripted actor in a choreographed play, a political charlatan if you will.

 

 

  

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I know they're not known for being trust worthy as a group, but it's probably not fair to suggest all politicians engage in Clinton antics as they pursue their ambition either.

Regardless, there's nothing to worry yourself over Rich, President Trump will do a fine job keeping the people warm, fed & safe.

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Great. I have to clean coffee off my iPad screen. What evidence beyond his wildly variable pronouncements do you have of that? Trump only cares about Trump. He's proven that for decades. Just ask his ex-wives and a great many people who've done business with him.

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