Journalists From San Francisco

"[B]usiness has been regulated throughout history. ...[I]n the past four decades, we have forgotten the tried and tested (and therefore profoundly conservative) principles of business developed over thousands of years. ...[O]ur wealth... well being and... freedom are being diminished daily."

"Wyoming Corporate Services... for a fee, will create a company, set up a bank account, appoint officers and directors... provide a lawyer as a corporate director so the company can invoke attorney-client privilege... [and] make any required regulatory filings... without anyone being able to ascertain, without a court order, who is behind any corporation it creates."

"[L]imiting liability... has also obscured a corporation's responsibility to function for the benefit of society. The greater good is an idea that is thousands of years old, but in the recent past corporations have been permitted to lose site of that... notion."

"Workers may toil their entire lives, communities may tax themselves to create infrastructure a corporation needs, and vendors may invest their entire fortune to supply the corporation—but none of these parties, Friedman said, has significant legal rights or moral claims. [T]he idea... was not supported by the development of the law, the regulation of business and the advancement of civilization over thousands of years. But... Friedman's ahistorical thinking has come to dominate..."

"Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas insist that they are "originalists,"... interpreting our Constitution as a document fixed in time. No honest originalist could... have signed on to Citizens United, but intellectually corrupt justices who worship corporatism, disdain the poor and enjoy the perks of power..."

"Citizens United is to the expansion of corporate power what the big bang is to the beginning of existence..."

"[W]e've had this tremendous weakening of the news media, so that [many] large federal agencies... have no beat reporters... covering them. We have city councils and school boards all across America that get no coverage... and this is terrific for those people who are getting rich by exploiting the rules of the system for their benefit; and you're not hearing about that."

"The most important period determining your lifetime health and emotional well being, and therefore you ability to get along, is from conception to about the first 6 months of your life. We pay very little attention to that. We give women in this country 6 weeks of disability, and they may use several other at the end of their pregnancy, so little babies... are not getting enough nurturing. In some of the European countries you are required to take a year off, and it's a violation of the law... to hold a job when you have a small child, because these societies recognize that we have a long-term interest. So just as we're using up our infrastructure by not fixing up roads and bridges and dams and pipelines, we are also stealing from the future by not nurturing and providing proper care for small children. ...[T]here will be a price, and it will be very high."

"[W]e have the highest percentage of children who go to bed hungry of any modern country. You wouldn't know from reading the news or watching TV that America has a hunger problem, that all across America we have communities, in the country, in the suburbs, in the city, where volunteers send home backpacks full of food for families on the weekend, because otherwise these kids would not eat."

"When you and I were young and a company laid people off, you would see the president, not the CEO... in those days, say "...I'm gonna work for a dollar a year" or "I'm going to take no bonuses until everybody is rehired." Today it's... "Ooh, I fired 10,000 people. I'll get a bigger bonus!""

"There's a big attack going on in this country on public education. One of the Koch brothers... publicly advocated ending public education, because that's socialism. ...[I]n Wisconsin we saw people call kindergarten teachers thugs. Something I would never have imagined when I was young... [I]t's because we've gone through a fundamental change. We've been living under Reaganism now since 1981, and in Reaganism we worship money, and our measure of the country is money."

"We are mining the 90% to benefit the super rich."

"The purposes of our country were written down for us in the Preamble of the Constitution, the justice, the general Welfare with a capital "W", common defense, domestic tranquility, liberties... Nothing in the Preamble talks about getting rich. That's a byproduct of these other things. But we have gotten a distorted view of what's happening, and we also... are now at the point where we have 33 years of evidence that Reaganism produces actually exactly what Ronald Reagan said in 1980, if you listen carefully... It's made the rich richer. Now it's doing it at the expense of the 90%."

"Wilbur Ross goes with Donald Trump to , where Donald Trump praises the Saudis for leading the fight against terrorism. You know who the biggest funders of terrorism in the world are? He attacks ... an ally of the US that allows us to have our most important military base there. ...Wilbur Ross comes back from this trip, he goes on CNBC and he says, "...The Saudi people love us. ...There wasn't a single demonstrator, anywhere..." and Becky Quick ...says "...It's against the law to protest there. They arrest people. They whip them"..."

"The number one driver of this is campaign finance. The reality is, if you or I got elected to Congress, we would have to spend our time dealing with wealthy people who want favors from the government. There are over 100,000 people in America who's job is to mine the public treasury, or the rules, for their benefit. ...So we've got to change campaign finance... in a way that this Supreme Court, with the radicals on it, can't knock down."

"Adam Smith, in his lessor known book, ', says that the greatest corruption of our moral sentiments is a tendency to almost worship the rich, and to hold in bad regard people who are poor. ...[O]ur politicians reflect this, even though many of them will tell you... how religious they are. ...[T]hey obviously have not studied their religious texts because, if they did, they would know that (in the case of the Christians, for example) you are supposed to give all that thou hast to the poor. That's a standard I'm not willing to meet, but that's the standard that you are supposed to meet... It's certainly not to be mean and literally deny hungry children food."

"John Adams... wrote that his fear... of what would destroy America was a business aristocracy would arise. Instead of people being yeomen farmers who owned their own land, or workers who owned their own tools... workers would be mere wage earners, and... not being truly independent, would vote for the policies that benefit the business aristocracy, and we would lose both our liberties and our democracy... a good indicator of what's going on right now."

"I have this vague recollection of Republican leaders talking about their concerns about immorality, especially women and wanting to make sure we can't have access to things like birth control... and talking about family values. So out comes the Wall Street Journal on the playmate of the year who got paid $150 grand to not talk, and now the porn star and, trust me, to quote Donald, "Believe me..." there's more like this out there. Where are the moralists about Donald Trump's behavior? ...His conduct is outrageous."

"[I]f Reaganism worked, if Bush's tax cuts worked, America today would be swimming in jobs. That's what we were promised. It would lead to all this investment and all these jobs. Instead, it's led to this enormous concentration of wealth among people who could never consume that much wealth, and who now increasingly are putting it into financial products, rather than investing it in ways that will grow the economy. ...[W]e're socking it away ...American corporations, under a rule almost nobody knows about ...are limited in how much cash they can hold, unless they move it overseas. ...[O]nce you move if overseas they can have ...unlimited amounts of cash, and what have we seen happen? ...Corporations have almost 3 times as much cash overseas as they have at home, and they then take that cash and buy US treasuries. So we pay big corporations to not pay their taxes. ...The interest they will earn from the treasury will exceed the value of the tax, and we will collect 40 cents on the dollar or less of the actual tax. ...Literally it has become a profit center ..."

"When this country was founded, there had only been 7 corporations... in the... old British colonial United States, at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Six of them were what today we would either call a charity or a utility. ...One corporation, created in the colony of New Haven, was set up solely to make profit. It was such a scandal they had to shut it down within a year and it took 10 years to clean up the mess. The Founders disliked and distrusted corporations. But they believed in collective bargaining, and I can prove that because in 1792 Congress passed the first significant labor law and subsidy law. It was to benefit the cod fishing industry. We got a quarter of our foreign earnings from cod and we were deeply in debt from... the Revolutionary War. So it was important we had foreign earnings. ...[T]o address ...harassment by the British Navy the cod fishing industry wanted a subsidy, and Thomas Jefferson ...ordered a study and concluded that those ships that only paid wages to their fishermen should be excluded. But if... the workers were paid partly in the share of the profits... then you got the subsidy, and 5/8 of the subsidy went to the workers and 3/8 to the company. ...[T]hat sounds a lot like collective bargaining."

"There is a movement to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment. When the US Supreme Court clerk, who was the former president of a railroad, announced that the corporations are people for purposes of defending their property... That makes sense, because a corporation is property. But Chief Justice Rehnquist, in a dissent in a case called Bellotti vs. ...Bank of Boston, was clearly opposed to the idea of giving political rights to corporations. We are now on the verge, in the Hobby Lobby case, of giving religious rights to corporations. Who's a corporation prey to, Mammon? So we've very much veered off from what was intended."

"I said back in 2012, a year when the average income of the bottom 90% of Americans was lower, adjusted for inflation... than in 1967... that if you ran for president on the economics in my books you would win, because it champions the 90%, in fact it champions... the 99.5%; and that's what Donald did, and I know he watched me on television because he talked to other people about it, who told me..."

"The Attorney General, Eric Holder testified, in March of 2013, to Congress that he was afraid to prosecute the banks because it would cause economic disruption. ...I've been going after him in Newsweek for that and he has backtracked, but for months, an Inspector General's report shows, he claimed that they had gone after more than a billion dollars and over 500 people involved in mortgage fraud... still... a drop in the bucket. ...In fact, there were less than a hundred cases involving $95 million ...a drop in a drop ...and he kept telling this lie. So we... now have a government that does not go after people who are engaged in criminal frauds because they are considered so powerful, that if they were prosecuted it would damage the economy. My God!"

"We decided in 1980 to go down a different path when we elected Ronald Reagan. We have gotten the results that Mr. Reagan said, if you listen to him carefully in 1980, we would get, which is that those people that are wealth holders would realize the income from that wealth, and they have. Their actual tax rates, for people at the very top, are 60% lower than what they paid in the 1960s. But at the same time, by getting rid of unions... by having these "free trade deals," which are really deals to drive down the cost of labor; we have driven down the wages and the salaries of the vast majority of Americans... We have also weakened these environmental laws... that were pretty good. So we've put in place a whole mechanism in which we favor profit over labor. ...When you look at the data you can see it ...Returns to labor in the Federal Reserve data go [down with time] and returns to capital have been rising, and since 2009 it's like looking at one of those jet fighters going straight up."

"George Will had a column in The Washington Post this week in which he said that the proof that the failed after 50 years was people trusted the government under LBJ and now they don't any more. ... [I] would argue... the facts show just the opposite. People don't trust the government anymore because they recognize it does not work in their interest, it works against their interest..."

"Trump has worked hard to make sure few... know about his lifelong entanglements with a major cocaine trafficker [Joseph Weichselbaum].., with American and Russian mobsters and many mob associates, and with various con artists and swindlers."

"[B]ecause labor returns have gone down there's not enough ... to buy goods and services. ...The next thought should be ...capitalists will change because people have to buy their products. No, if your a global level capitalist, it doesn't matter. As long as there aren't riots in the streets, you can sell your goods in other countries."

"In 1990, I broke the story that, instead of being worth billions, as he'd claimed, Trump actually had a negative and escaped a chaotic collapse into personal bankruptcy only when the government took his side over the banks..."

"While at my last paper, I won a for exposing so many tax dodges and loopholes that a prominent tax lawyer called me the "de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States.""

"[T]he Democrats, who have not paid attention to their knitting for 40 years, while the Republicans have been building bench strength, passing laws to suppress votes, coming up with laws to throw out votes after they're cast, as we saw in Michigan. The Democrats have to run candidates who are viable. I was sent a news clip by a friend... a couple of interviews of people who want to run for office as Democrats... they were young and they were earnest and... then they got asked questions... [T]hey immediately fell apart because they didn't know anything. They were just like Donald Trump. ...You've got to find and develop real candidates."

"Trump doesn't know anything. ...Trump's own words and conduct ...and his comments on many issues ...show how appallingly ignorant he is."

"Trump never faced tough questions as a candidate where he could not walk away or give nonsense answers without repeated follow-up. This is a serious problem for the future of American democracy in the television era, when appearances matter more than reality."

"[H]e does not have a clue about the Constitution's system of checks and balances."

"Viewed properly in the context of their times, the last forty-four presidents all pursued policies that they believed would make for a better America tomorrow."

"He appointed as chief executive of his campaign, and, later, White House strategy chief, Steve Bannon, a known anti-Semite who, in his time at Network, published racist articles and bizarre conspiracy theories..."

"The hiring of Manafort and others, specifically , a Russian-born real estate mogul with mob ties whose 2015 emails indicate that he hoped to help secure both a Moscow-based real estate deal and the American presidency for Trump—showed a disturbing pattern of associations with those around Vladimir Putin, head of the in Moscow..."

"For five months, Trump's campaign manager was Paul Manafort, advisor to dictators and near dictators including a pro-Moscow regime in Ukraine that was ousted by a popular uprising."

"Instead of a president of specific duties and constitutionally limited authority, Trump and his aides talk as if he is an absolute ruler, or should be, to whom all must bend the knee."

"[C]rowds of young people... filled the Trump Tower auditorium in June 2015, interrupting with applause forty-three times as Trump announced his campaign with vicious s of Mexicans, Muslims, and the media. ...A day later news broke that the crowd was not ...voluntary ...Many ...were actors paid fifty bucks apiece. ...[S]uch dishonesty continues a pattern that traces back throughout the life and career of Donald Trump."

"Business owners who are prudent about making promises and are known for honoring their word often go through life without a single lawsuit. Trump has been a party in more than 4,000 lawsuits, some of them accusing him of civil fraud..."

"A few years after the war ended, [] took on a partner... Willie Tomasello. When cash was short, Tomasello was able to provide Trump with operating capital on short notice. Tomasello also saw to it that there was no trouble from the unions... The New York State Organized Task Force identified Tomasello as an associate of the Genovese and Gambino Mafia families... turned to an organized crime associate as his long time partner... Decades later, Donald Trump would also do business with the heads of the same families, though at a remove, developing numerous business connections with an assortment of criminals, from con artists and a major drug trafficker to the heads of the two largest Mafia families in New York City..."

"When Donald Trump took the oath of office "to faithfully execute the laws" and to be "loyal to the United States of America", he then got in a motorcade to go to the White House. There's a TV camera... in the truck... that looks square down the middle ...The presidential limousine... stopped... the family got out... they spent two minutes walking around... in front of the Trump International Hotel, whose lease says "no federal employee can be involved in that lease" and... we have jointly an employee named Donald J. Trump. He's our employee. ...[T]he reason he did that was ...[I]f you are an emissary... seeking a favor from Donald Trump, if you're an oil baron, or a coal company, or anybody else who wants a favor from the Trump administration, you got the message."

"Trump has... been sued thousands of times for refusing to pay employees, vendors and others. Investors have sued him for fraud in a number of different cities. But among Trump’s most highly refined skills is his ability to deflect or shut down investigations. He also uses threats of litigation to deter news organizations from looking behind the curtains of the seemingly all-wise and all-powerful man they often refer to as The Donald."

"[I]f we're going to fix this, and if we're going to get this manifestly unqualified criminal out of the White House, we have to do some work. We've got to diagnose the real underlying problem."

"Our democracy is in very deep trouble. ...Donald Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom."

"The Trump administration deposited political termites throughout the structure of our government. Their task, in the words of Steve Bannon, is the "deconstruction of the administrative state." ...[H]e means to undo the tax, trade, regulatory, and other means... [T]he end game is... a government that looks first after the best-off... not those most in need of a helping hand in the form of a sound education, clean water, and other basics of a healthy society... These termites operate out of sight... to bully or scare scientists into leaving, remove from public access... public records... necessary to enforce environmental, worker safety, and other laws."

"But that's not what... effects your lives, your children's lives [etc.]... It is important that we understand what the Trump administration is doing. ...[I]t's not Donald personally doing this. Donald's a lazy guy. He works about 4 hours a day. ...[H]e spends one third of his time at his properties. It's the people he brought in."

"We have a president of the United States who is not a loyal citizen. ...[L]ook at the email that ... sent to Donald Trump Jr. ...[Y]ou want to read it carefully because the journalists... did not parse the sentences... the fourth sentence in this email makes it clear that there was an ongoing conspiracy. Collusion is not a crime. I don't care about collusion... There was an ongoing conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump administration. It says in the fourth line... "as part of Russia's efforts to help." That's not a "Hi, would you like to get together..?" That's "We're already sleeping together. You want to try something new?""

"Steve Bannon put it best. Steve Bannon said "I'm a Lennonist" that is, I'm someone who wants to destroy the existing order. Many of these people, although they... wouldn't put in these terms, hate the United States of America. ...They hate the fact that there are people of color... that there are people of a different religion in this country, that there are people who are not interested in worshiping the rich and trying to get rich, and certainly don't want to be taxed to subsidize the rich."

"Child poverty [has] increased in this country since 1980, even though we have had divorce rates fall. We have hundreds of thousands of young people who don't go to college because they can't afford it. ...[F]rom tax data, the average income of the bottom half of Americans is $15,000 per tax payer. ...It's right out of the IRS tables. Some people say it's unfair to use that because there's income that isn't counted, like Social Security payments, and it's taxpayers not households, but even if you go to households, the cost of going to state college now is about $10,000... If you go to household income, even at the typical median level, $50,000; how somebody making $50,000, with even two children, can afford $10,000 a year for college for kids is amazing. When you and I were kids college was paid for. It was free to us. Society paid for it because they were investing in the future. Now, we're putting road blocks in the way of the most valuable asset we have. We're subsidizing the owners of baseball teams and football teams, which is lots of fun, but it's trivia, and we're doing it, in part, by cutting money for this."