“Do we look like the kind of people who would rip you off? Wait, don’t answer that.”
By George Pimentel/WireImage.
By now it’s practically a matter of public record that Donald Trump is a lifelong huckster who will do anything to make a buck. Days after the 2016 election he agreed to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits against Trump University, a smoke-and-mirrors operation that made University of Phoenix look like Stanford, where instructors were given a “playbook” that included the name of a TrumpU employee to call “if an Attorney General arrives on the scene.” Before that, the ex-beauty pageant owner was slapping his name on everything from steaks to mattresses to cologne to deodorant in exchange for lucrative licensing fees. In June, the New York attorney general sued him alleging “persistently illegal conduct” related to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, charging that the charity served as “little more than a checkbook for payments to not-for-profits from Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization,” a suit Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, called “politics at its very worst.”
In addition to a willingness to do anything to enrich himself—like, for instance, (allegedly) dodging taxes for decades—we’ve yet to see evidence that the president of the United States cares about anyone not related to him by blood or marriage, or possesses the sort of moral compass that would prevent normal people from engaging in activity that hurts others. (According to The New York Times, the Trump family created a company in 1992 that not only allowed the family to siphon millions to Trump, his siblings, and a cousin, but also let them pad invoices so they could raise the rent on low-income tenants who were supposed to be protected by rent regulations. In a statement, Charles Harder, a lawyer for Trump, told the Times: “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone” and that such affairs were “handled by other Trump family members.”) So, really, it shouldn’t come as a surprise in the slightest that the president and his three adult children have been accused of pushing investment scams on thousands of vulnerable Americans in exchange for “lavish” payments they conveniently failed to mention in their sales pitches.
Filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday . . . the 160-page complaint alleges that Mr. Trump and his family received secret payments from three business entities in exchange for promoting them as legitimate opportunities, when in reality they were get-rich-quick schemes that harmed investors, many of whom were unsophisticated and struggling financially.
Those business entities were ACN, a telecommunications marketing company that paid Mr. Trump millions of dollars to endorse its products; the Trump Network, a vitamin marketing enterprise; and the Trump Institute, which the suit said offered “extravagantly priced multiday training seminars” on Mr. Trump’s real estate “secrets.”
The four plaintiffs, who were identified only with pseudonyms like Jane Doe, depict the Trump Organization as a racketeering enterprise that defrauded thousands of people for years as the president turned from construction to licensing his name for profit. The suit also names Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump as defendants.
Back in 2011, New York’s Jessica Pressler wrote about the vitamin venture, which included products like “Prime Essentials” and “Custom Essentials,” a line of snacks for kids called “Snazzle Snaxxs,” a diet program called “Silhouette Solutions,” and a skincare line called “BioCé Cosmeceuticals.” Like Trump University, vitamin marketers were well-versed in what to do on the off-chance someone suggested Donald Trump would ever attach his name to something less than entirely legal:
The people at the Trump Network are trained to defend against allegations that it’s a pyramid scheme. Toward the end of Izzo’s seminar, we break into pairs to practice what to say when potential invitees suggest the business is a pyramid scheme. My partner is Billy, a former Wall Street trader who has worked his way up to “diamond director,” one of the highest levels in the company. The levels are determined by the number of people you recruit and the amount of products you and your downline purchase. “What’s a pyramid scheme?” he asks me. “Like the food pyramid? Like the Catholic Church? What about where you work? If you ask me, corporate America is a pyramid scheme. All the people on the top make all the money. The people at the bottom are spinning their wheels.” Then he plays his Trump card: “You think Donald Trump would involve himself in a pyramid scheme?”
In fact: yes! We do! We can also believe that Trump, a knownliar, allegedly told people they’d make so much money from these scams that they’d be able to quit their day jobs. Per the suit:
Trump doubled down on his claim during in-person endorsements, going so far as to suggest ACN was risk-free. Onstage at ACN’s International Convention in Barcelona, Spain, in March 2011, Trump explained to the auditorium that: “A lot of the [ACN] people that I’ve met had their job for two or three years, and all of a sudden they started leaving out of their job and going full-time at ACN because they’re making more money with ACN. So I like it because it really takes the risk out. It takes a lot of the risk out of the decision.”
Of course, for at least one plaintiff, that wasn’t the case at all:
Plaintiff Jane Doe is a resident of California who works as a hospice caregiver. In 2014, Doe attended a meeting for prospective ACN recruits. As she listened to the presentations, Doe was skeptical and unpersuaded. But then she saw a promotional video prominently featuring Trump. Trump’s endorsement was the turning point. . . . Doe had no idea Trump was being paid lavishly for his endorsement—the video made no mention of that. Doe joined ACN then and there. Despite her limited resources, Doe wrote a check for the $499 registration fee, in reliance on Trump’s endorsement. In the two years that followed, Doe paid thousands of dollars in fees and expenses to attend ACN events and host ACN meetings in an effort to succeed with the business. But, ultimately, she had extremely limited success—she earned a single check for $38.
In a statement, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said the allegations in the suit are meritless and should be paid no attention because the plaintiffs’ attorney fees are being funded by a nonprofit whose chairman is a Democratic donor. “This is clearly just another effort by opponents of the President to use the court system to advance a political agenda,” he told the Times. Roberta Kaplan and Andrew Celli Jr., two lawyers for the plaintiffs, said “the case is being brought now because it is ready now,” and, to be fair, this isn’t the first time Trump has been accused of fraud. “This case connects the dots at the Trump Organization and involves systematic fraud that spanned more than a decade, involved multiple Trump businesses and caused tremendous harm to thousands of hardworking Americans,” the attorneys said in a statement.
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If Elon Musk could turn back time . . .
He’d still send that tweet that got him sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission:
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said the tweet that cost him and the company $20 million in fines each by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was “worth it.” . . . The Securities and Exchange Commission in September charged Musk, 47, with misleading investors with tweets on August 7 that said he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share and had secured funding. The tweets had no basis in fact, and the ensuing market chaos hurt investors, regulators claimed.
The settlement also dictated that Musk must step down as chairman of the company he founded, but apparently you can’t put a price on weed jokes.
Trump is thinking his trade war could use some more tariffs
Next month, Donald Trump will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of a Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires, where they’ll discuss the escalating trade war started by Trump earlier this year. So far, neither side has backed down, and despite Trump’s insistence that trade wars are “good” and “easy to win,” thus far U.S. companies and consumers have paid a lopsided amount of the price, while the president’s “trade policies” might actually create jobs in China. So what President Jobs, Jobs, Jobs is thinking is this situation could be vastly improved by introducing more tariffs. Per Bloomberg:
The U.S. is preparing to announce by early December tariffs on all remaining Chinese imports if talks next month between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping fail to ease the trade war, three people familiar with the matter said.
An early December announcement of a new product list would mean the effective date—after a 60-day public-comment period—may coincide with China’s Lunar New Year holiday in early February. The list would apply to the imports from the Asian nation that aren’t already covered by previous rounds of tariffs—which may be $257 billion using last year’s import figures, according to two of the people.
Over the weekend, Trump told supporters in Indiana, “We’re in the middle of a pretty nasty dispute. . . . We’re in a trade dispute—I want to use that word because it’s a nice, soft word—but we’re going to win. You know why? ’Cause we always win.”
U.S. tax cuts working out exactly as corporate American said they would
Which is to say, they’ve had little to no effect on most companies’ investment and hiring plans, in spite of the promises made by Republicans and the White House, according to a survey released today:
The National Association for Business Economics found buoyant conditions in the third quarter of 2018, with its members reporting rising sales and improved profit margins, but reported that the Republican tax reform “has not broadly impacted hiring and investment plans.” The survey, conducted between September 26 and October 11, adds to a growing body of evidence that much of the windfall from tax reform has been spent on share buybacks rather than investment, jobs, or research and development. Republicans had predicted their changes to the tax code would trigger a boom in corporate investment and hiring, particularly in the U.S. On the day he signed the bill into law, Mr Trump said: “It’s going to be a tremendous thing for the American people. It’s going to be fantastic for the economy. It’s going to keep companies from leaving our shores and opening up in other countries.”
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan will no longer require interns to commit to a lifetime of servitude at age 8
Times, they are a-changin’:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. won’t interview or extend summer internship offers to college sophomores this year and will go back to recruiting students in the fall of their junior year, executives said. It is a nod to a softer Wall Street, eager to cast off its sweatbox image to compete with perk-happy Silicon Valley. It is also an acknowledgment that a push in recent years to move up application deadlines isn’t bringing in the kinds of candidates banks need as they try to diversify their overwhelmingly white and male ranks.
Earlier timetables and “exploding” job offers that expire within a few days have ramped up the pressure on students to commit, said Amy Donegan, an assistant dean at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. “These are 19-year-old kids,” she said. “It’s really hard to tell them, ‘You can say no to that.’”
It’s unclear what impact the new policy will have on current junior employees who, at Goldman Sachs, are said to be this close to storming the C-suite and rioting over inhuman working conditions, like only getting $25 to spend on dinner each night
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