Carr: Liz Warren knows biz of sweetheart real estate deal
Howie Carr Sunday, May 29, 2016
bostonherald.com
“Buy low, sell high” is the real estate philosophy of both Donald Trump and the fake Indian — but never confuse the nature of their investments. The difference is fundamental: Trump is a greedy evil Republican, and Elizabeth Warren is a warmhearted, selfless Democrat.
Trump avariciously acquires property because he’s a “small, insecure money-grabber,” as Fauxcahontas called him this week. On the other hand, she and her husband are humanitarians, “fortunate to be in a position where they have been able to help relatives buy their homes ... to support their efforts to make a living.”
Not by giving the kinsmen money, you see, but by writing them mortgages. When Wall Street loans money, it’s usury, loansharking, bloodsucking. When Granny Warren does it, it’s charity, the milk of human kindness.
Donald Trump “flips” properties for a quick profit. When Warren does exactly the same thing, her aides assure her hagiographers at the Globe that she “didn’t profit from the arrangement or intend to.”
Donald Trump’s quick turnarounds are “windfalls,” but Lieawatha only receives “on-paper returns.”
Donald Trump records “quick killings,” but when Chief Spreading Bull does exactly the same thing, “the profit on it was negligible, records show ... (and) it does not include the raw materials or labor that went into renovations.”
I guess Trump never renovates anything. He’s a Republican, after all, a slumlord. Warren is charitably scouring the legal notices for foreclosures on behalf of her family “to either subsidize their home ownership or support their efforts to make a living.”
Trump uses his windfalls to fuel still more dangerous bubbles, but when Warren turns a profit it is prudently “reinvested in new properties.”
Warren lives in a mansion she owns in Cambridge that she bought with what the Harvard Crimson described as “a faculty mortgage subsidy,” also known as a no-interest loan. If Trump had one of those, she’d denounce it as a sweetheart deal from his Wall Street cronies, but the Harvard website describes the plutocrats’ perk as “discounted interest rates.”
This week the faux-Cherokee’s outbursts against Trump’s real estate dealings ended quickly, for obvious reasons. Pot, meet kettle.
Granny’s greatest speculative binge came in Oklahoma in the 1990s. In 1977, the Democrats in D.C. had passed something called the Community Reinvestment Act, which was supposed to stop banks from “redlining” — you know, not making loans to the indigent who couldn’t pay the money back because they were on the dole.
After the feds compelled banks to start handing out loans with no down payments to wards of the state, the community activists who had been demanding a halt to redlining denounced the same banks for “predatory lending” to poor people.
Soon, as Granny recalled in her 2014 autobiography, “Everyone seemed to have a story about someone they knew who was getting rich by flipping houses.”
Here’s mine. This rich white professor who’d been going nowhere in her professional career until she started “checking the box” to claim she was a minority was suddenly flush with Ivy League cash. She started buying foreclosed property that the banks had taken back from poor “folks.” Between 1991 and 1998 she and her husband pocketed $241,000 on just four properties around Oklahoma City.
Take 200 NW 16th Street, Oklahoma City — Granny picked it up for a song Aug. 12, 1993, for $30,000 from the estate of Veo Turner Vessels. Five months later, she flipped the property for ... $145,000.
Not bad — a 500 percent return over five months for a net profit of $115,000. That’s a return on investment that would leave Trump “drooling,” to say one of Granny’s favorite descriptions of him.
All of her hypocritical machinations have been laid out, but only in what the Globe calls “the right-wing media.” As opposed to, say, left-wing media like the Globe, which exhibited zero interest in 200 NW 16th Street — or anything else even remotely critical of their heroine.
But the left-wing media did report this week that the fake Indian’s final Oklahoma transaction came in 2007 — “a squat, one-story brick home.”
Squat? Surely the left-wing media meant to say, squaw.
Go to howiecarrshow.com to order a “Fauxcahontas” T-shirt.
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