Da Kine 17, Garbage. All part of the decades long conservative smear of the Clintons. Nothing new on the Clintons. Much new to come on your crim-racist hero who, with his father, was prosecuted for housing discrimination in NY.
Trump lives in a morally and ethically-free zone. Always has. I'll never fully understand how anyone could see him as worthy of anything but disdain.
A weak hack piece. If you want some actual prosecution of charity fraud, the poster group for that is the shitgibbons. Those he ripped off and got caught and settled with include Army Emergency Relief, the Children’s Aid Society, Citymeals on Wheels, Give an Hour, Martha’s Table, the United Negro College Fund, the United Way of the National Capital Area, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We deal in factual information here, not your shit hit pieces.
Trump Pays $2 Million to 8 Charities for Misuse of Foundation
Under a settlement, the president admitted he had used his charity to bolster his campaign and settle business debts.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní
Dec. 10, 2019
President Trump has paid $2 million to eight charities as part of a settlement in which the president admitted he misused funds raised by the Donald J. Trump Foundation to promote his presidential bid and pay off business debts, the New York State attorney general said on Tuesday.
The foundation’s giving patterns and management came under scrutiny during Mr. Trump’s run for office, and last year the New York attorney general filed a lawsuit accusing the president and his family of using the foundation as an extension of their businesses and the campaign.
The payments were part of a settlement announced last month that capped a drawn-out legal battle. In the end, the president admitted in court documents that he had used the foundation to settle legal obligations of his businesses and even to purchase a portrait of himself.
“Charities are not a means to an end, which is why these damages speak to the president’s abuse of power and represent a victory for not-for-profits that follow the law,” the attorney general, Letitia James, said in a statement. “Funds have finally gone where they deserve — to eight credible charities.”
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Last month, a state judge ordered the president to give $2 million to the eight charities, or $250,000 per charity. Under the settlement, Mr. Trump’s lawyers also agreed to liquidate the Trump Foundation’s remaining assets of more than $1.7 million and disburse them to those same nonprofits, which have no connection to the president or his family.
Dig deeper into the moment. .
The president wired payments directly to the organizations a few weeks ago, but the payments were not made public until this week, an official in the attorney’s office said.
The nonprofit groups that received payments were the Army Emergency Relief, the Children’s Aid Society, Citymeals on Wheels, Give an Hour, Martha’s Table, the United Negro College Fund, the United Way of the National Capital Area, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Each received a total of $476,140.01. Sign up for the New York Today Newsletter: Each morning, get the latest on New York businesses, arts, sports, dining, style and more.
In a statement, Marc Mukasey and Alan Futerfas, the attorneys for the foundation, said the attorney general “doesn’t want the media to focus on the massive trial they lost today.”
“Our case was amicably resolved weeks ago,” the statement said. “The judge commended both parties for the resolution. The legacy of the Trump Foundation — which gave away many millions to those most in need at virtually no cost — is secure.”
In a mid-November filing, the attorney general’s office requested that the judge, Justice Saliann Scarpulla of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, order Mr. Trump not to write off the payments as charitable contributions in his tax filings, but the judge did not do so.
As part of the settlement, Mr. Trump, who at first dismissed the suit as a political attack, made 19 detailed admissions, acknowledging, for example, that the foundation had purchased the $10,000 portrait of himself that was ultimately displayed at one of his Florida hotels.
He admitted to using the foundation’s money to settle obligations of some of his for-profit companies, including a golf club in Westchester County, N.Y., and Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida which he frequently visits.
And he admitted that the foundation had given his presidential campaign control over about $2.8 million that the foundation had raised at a veterans fund-raiser in Iowa in January 2016. Mr. Trump acknowledged the fund-raiser was in fact a campaign event.
The Trump Foundation, which Mr. Trump founded in 1987, disbanded last December after an investigation by Barbara Underwood, then-acting attorney general of New York. Ms. Underwood’s office found “unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more.”
It is illegal for charitable foundations to advance the self-interests of their executives.
The investigation had been started by the former attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and was based on information first reported by The Washington Post during the presidential campaign. Ms. James took over the case when she was sworn into office in 2019.
As part of the settlement, Mr. Trump’s three children who were officers of the foundation — Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump — were ordered to undergo mandatory training to ensure they do not engage in similar misconduct in the future.
On Tuesday, the attorney general’s office confirmed the children had undergone the training. Trump Ordered to Pay $2 Million to Charities for Misuse of Foundation The Donald J. Trump Foundation, Explained New York Attorney General Sues Trump Foundation After 2-Year Investigation Correction: Dec. 10, 2019
An earlier version of this article said incorrectly that a judge ordered President Trump not to write off payments made to nonprofit groups as charitable donations in his tax filings. Although the attorney general's office requested that the judge make such a ruling, she did not.
Da Kine 17, To have some skepticism is healthy, eh. Blind trust can be as dangerous and damaging as no trust at all. But your position.. well... Some are able to crawl out of the mind-numbing conspiracy-ridden depths of your particular rabbit hole. Some escape to again lead more normal, more healthy and productive lives. You must have read some of their stories. I hope there is still hope for you.
That said, thanks to you just now i've gained some info on Zerohedge i don't recall seeing before. have added some spice to this article in places for you.
Why Did Financial Flamethrower Zero Hedge Go All in on Conspiracy Theories?
Illustration by Rob Dobi
To its fans it’s a top-notch financial analyst publisher. To its detractors it’s trash. But to many it’s an increasingly dark well of tinfoil-hat conjecture.
By Alicia McElhaney
September 28, 2020
Banks were overleveraged. House prices were plummeting. Stocks and bonds started to tank.
Then came March 2008.
After 84 years in operation, investment bank Bear Stearns nearly collapsed. The Federal Reserve bailed it out. JPMorgan Chase scooped up its assets. But days earlier, CNBC host Jim Cramer had recommended that the public buy the stock .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkytKDzCEeU .
Skepticism about traditional financial media was brewing. The public felt like bungled calls were par for the course in financial news.
“There was, during that time, a distrust of traditional financial media,” says Chris Roush, a journalism professor and the blogger behind Talking Biz News. “A lot of people were saying that places like The Wall StreetJournal and the Financial Times should have warned investors and consumers that we were heading toward the recession and that there was a real estate bubble.”
They did, of course: Roush rightly points out that there were dozens of stories that warned investors and consumers that there was a housing bubble ready to burst. “Investors didn’t heed it,” he notes. Meanwhile, online news readership eclipsed newspapers for the first time, according to a late-2008 study from the Pew Research Center .. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2008/12/23/internet-overtakes-newspapers-as-news-outlet/ .
In other words, the kindling for a renegade blog like Zero Hedge was piled high. All it needed was a match.
The site’s first post, published on January 9, 2009, and still visible online today, set the tone for a decade to come:
“Wall Street's diarrhea shi(f)ting to Park Street er . . . Avenue.”
The post garnered a single comment.
But Zero Hedge swiftly gained traction, beginning with a series of stories on Goldman Sachs claiming that the bank had used high-frequency trading to profit through the New York Stock Exchange, 2009 reporting .. https://nymag.com/guides/money/2009/59457/ .. by New York Magazine shows. In July of that year, an ex–Goldman Sachs computer programmer had been arrested for stealing computer code from the company. Soon after, Senator Chuck Schumer called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate high-frequency trading. The regulator complied.
Since then, Zero Hedge’s readership has skyrocketed. Google Trends .. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F07kf3pg , which tracks web search analytics, shows that searches peaked earlier this year when Twitter banned the site’s account for harassing a scientist who may have had information about the spread of the coronavirus, Buzzfeed reported .. [heading outed here ..
Zero Hedge now publishes dozens of articles each day, ranging from financial analysis to, increasingly, conspiracy theories, most of which are authored by “Tyler Durden.”
Durden is the fictional, nihilistic protagonist of the film Fight Club, which revolves around a man’s journey from white-collar worker to leader of an underground group of men who brawl for entertainment. The character’s iconography is the focus of Zero Hedge’s branding strategy: An image of a shirtless Brad Pitt, who stars as Durden in the 1999 movie, serves as an avatar on Twitter and Zero Hedge’s site. The company’s tagline is a quote from Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
This, in and of itself, encapsulates the Zero Hedge viewpoint. Oft described as a permabear, the site regularly heralds a doom-and-gloom narrative. Recent headlines include:
“‘We Are Headed For The Worst Of The Worst’ Week For Markets”
And:
“Rickards: The Layoffs Are Just Beginning.”
To be fair, 2020 has been . . . gloomy: A pandemic, massive market volatility, severe weather systems, police brutality, shootings, and an impending presidential election have dominated the news cycle. But for Zero Hedge this tone is nothing new.
Yet it’s unclear who, exactly, is using Durden as a nom de plume.
“The thing that actually bothers me most about Zero Hedge is that everything is under the same name,” Roush says. “To me it is very detrimental to people who read it. I don’t think the average consumer understands or knows how it was produced or created.”
According to Zero Hedge, that’s not the point. Author anonymity is driven by the site’s crusader complex: The Zero Hedge manifesto says that that anonymity shields the public from a tyranny of the majority. “We believe not only that you should be comfortable with anonymous speech in such an environment, but that you should be suspicious of any speech that isn’t,” it says.
[WTF?? They are kidding, right. Oh, they aren't. Ok. I'll just suggest their philosophy of misplaced suspicion is misguided and sucks.]
In addition to publishing under the name Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge aggregates content from all manner of blogs.
One writer, Tuomas Malinen, spoke with Institutional Investor about publishing on the site. Malinen, founder of a Helsinki-based macroeconomic consulting firm .. https://gnseconomics.com/contact/ , says he has been reading Zero Hedge for nearly ten years, ever since the euro crisis. He adds that “the financial market analysis of Zero Hedge is top-of-the-line.”
Malinen has had some of his own content published by Zero Hedge. “It has increased our visibility, especially in the U.S.,” he says. “Zero Hedge is read quite widely among the financial market specialists. We consider it to be very beneficial for us.” This visibility has kept Malinen, and his business, coming back with more content.
He says he’s not concerned about the types of stories Zero Hedge posts, noting that though they are controversial, reader discretion for all news sites is required nowadays.
Ivandjiiski is hard to get in touch with. The only contact information available on Zero Hedge’s website is an email address for interested advertisers. At the time of publication, Institutional Investor had not received a response from the address.
“He’s a cynical, nihilistic person who thinks the world has exploded,” says author Seth Hettena of Ivandjiiski. “The markets are always exploding on Zero Hedge.”
Hettena has written about Zero Hedge for The New Republic and his personal blog .. https://trump-russia.com/2020/01/10/zero-hedge-bulgaria-and-me/, tying the site to pro-Russian messaging that litters alt-right websites. “Over time they’ve been slipping in, increasingly, the alt-right, pro-Russia view of the world,” Hettena says. “That has brought in a second audience.”
-- [Some, DragonBear, could be insightful opinion on Da Kine 17: This is what an illegitimate government looks like-stale I'm surprised Comrade Stroganoff Da Kine your GRU handlers are feeding you stale bullshit. They really need to push FUD about the vaccines. How else to up the world marketability of the Sputnik Covid vaccine? May I suggest you send back to the Russian GRU their instructions were garbled in transmission, and they need to transmit new instructions to you. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=162638774] --
In late 2019, Ivandjiiski’s father, Krassimir Ivandjiiski, filed a criminal complaint in Bulgaria against Hettena, demanding that he take down his reporting on the company and reveal his sources. According to Hettena, his source was a google search, which led him to the company’s registration details. When reached by phone, Hettena told II that Bulgaria’s prosecutors have dropped the complaint.
He believes that Daniel Ivandjiiski is driven not by ideology, but by cash. “What I came away with is that they’re all about revenue,” Hettena says. “If what they’re doing is not going to drive revenue, they’re not going to do it. It’s just pure capitalism.”
[No doubt even those with some invested ideology are driven primarily by making money. And gaining power.]
But back to that second audience he mentions.
Over time, Zero Hedge has broadened its coverage, moving from strictly publishing financial analysis to also covering politics. Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Donald Trump frequently star on the site’s homepage.
Under the political veneer, though, lurks conspiracy.
In January, Zero Hedge republished a blog post from American Thinker entitled “An Introduction to ‘Q.’ .. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/introduction-q ” The piece serves as a sympathetic primer on the QAnon conspiracy theory, calling it an “extraordinary phenomenon” and celebrating its purported “accuracy, breadth, and depth.” The post is one of many on the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Just one month later, Twitter banned Zero Hedge’s account for sharing misinformation in a separate story about the coronavirus pandemic. Zero Hedge is “a giant megaphone for the conspiracy world,” Hettena asserts.
He notes that this dual-audience strategy is a smart one: There are few, if any, other websites that meld financial analysis and conspiracy thought. “I think they have a niche that they’ve carved out that nobody else can touch,” Hettena says.
“It’s just not a site that I would go to if I was looking for advice on where to put my money,” Roush says. “When I read stuff on the site, it’s just not journalism to me. And by that what I mean is that it’s not objective.”
But, as Roush points out, Zero Hedge does serve a purpose.
Much of financial media, including The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg — and even Institutional Investor — is either fully or partially behind a paywall. “The bulk of consumers and investors who need this news aren’t getting it because they can’t afford to pay for this high level of business news,” Roush explains.
And when typical consumers can’t afford to pay high prices for financial news, they go for the low-hanging fruit: free content.
One of Zero Hedge’s main tenets .. https://www.zerohedge.com/about .. is exactly that: “to widen the scope of financial, economic and political information available to the professional investing public.” Zero Hedge also aims to “attack the flaccid institution that financial journalism has become,” according to its mission statement.
Zero Hedge often reposts entire chunks of articles written by reporters for mainstream outlets, giving readers an opportunity to get at least some of the news they may not otherwise be able to afford. The site has also, as Malinen mentions, amplified small bloggers.
Although there is no other site like it, several alternative financial media sites have popped up since the Global Financial Crisis.
Newsletters have blown up: Nathan Tankus’s Substack Notes on the Crises, for instance, exploded in popularity this year, garnering Tankus, a 28-year-old college dropout, a Bloomberg profile .. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-02/nathan-tankus-s-newsletter-subscribers-don-t-care-about-diplomas . Alternative financial analysis sites like Hedgeye and Real Vision are taking off. Even Barstool Sports founder David Portnoy has become a finance content creator.
This is all evidence that the story of Zero Hedge is not one about the investment industry. Instead, it’s about American media — financial media, specifically — and the way consumers have grown increasingly skeptical of it.
To quote Fight Club: “Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.” Zero Hedge, though, is still hanging on.
The worst possible case for the worst possible idea, the gold standard
[...]
What does that matter? Well, think about it this way. Real rates are negative when nominal rates are high but inflation is higher still, or when inflation is low but nominal rates are lower still. Now in the first case, we'd want the Federal Reserve to raise rates to suffocate the economy until inflation is whipped. But in the second, we'd want it to keep rates as low as possible, and maybe even print money, to resuscitate growth. The gold standard, though, can't distinguish between this 1970s-style stagflation and 1930s-style collapse. It'd tell us to raise rates in both cases. And that's how you get a Great Depression instead of a Great Recession.
But libertarians of a certain bent, especially ones wearing bow ties, aren't worried about unemployment. They're worried about inflation. And, for all its flaws, the gold standard does have the very limited virtue of keeping the price level stable over the long, but not short, term. In other words, prices bounce around a lot from year to year—in fact, more than they do now .. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the-gold-standard-is-the-worlds-worst-economic-idea-in-2-charts/261552/ —but it all eventually balances out to zero. So that's why the usual suspects of charlatans, cranks, and Zerohedge readers think the gold standard is the answer now matter what the economic question.
But now Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of Paypal and the first investor in Facebook, has a new and incomprehensible defense of the gold standard. Just try to figure out what this means:
---- Where we’ve had progress in the world of bits but not in the world of atoms, and this world of bits, we’ve had progress in computers, Internet, mobile Internet. Technology just means information technology. It’s all about bits, but the world of atoms, space travel, energy like nuclear power, biotech, new medical devices, that’s been much slower, and there’s been much less progress in those areas in the last forty years. …
One’s been regulated, the other has not, but we’ve had this sort of dualistic world where the virtual world of bits has been growing very fast, but the real world of atoms has been kind of stagnant. And I think there’s a strange counterpoint where the same thing happened with our currency, where the real value of money became separate from the virtual in August of ’71 when we went off the gold standard. And so, you know, whatever you think of the gold standard, it had the virtue of connecting the real with the virtual. ----
This is some impressive gibberish, but I think I know what it means. Thiel might be saying that, under the gold standard, dollars and inflation-adjusted dollars used to be the same thing, but aren't anymore. If he is, he's wrong. Sure, the gold standard meant that inflation and deflation canceled each other out in the long run, but in the long run, you know, we're all dead. In the short run, meanwhile, the real value of the dollar could change a lot—which is why the Depression happened. Think about someone who borrowed money in, say, 1928. Well, five years later, wages had fallen so much that it was hard to pay back a loan that assumed wages would be flat. Or, in econospeak, the real value of money had increased, so the real value of debts had too. Mass bankruptcy was the result.
But there's an even more economically illiterate possibility here. Thiel might think that gold is the only "real" money, and everything else is just a representation of it. That's what Krugman calls the "Midas delusion .. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1996/11/the_gold_bug_variations.html ": the belief that the one true measure of money isn't how many goods and services it can buy, but rather how much gold. This is just as nutty as it sounds. It's saying that the only way to measure our standard of living is by the price of gold, not by the price of the things we need to actually, you know, live.
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