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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1012415)4/20/2017 10:46:38 PM
From: James Seagrove  Respond to of 1572777
 



To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1012415)4/20/2017 11:14:11 PM
From: puborectalis  Respond to of 1572777
 
Donald Trump says his bestselling 1987 business book, " The Art of the Deal," is his second-favorite book in the world, after the Bible.

I wrote two columns about the book for The New York Times back in 2015, and I highlighted one quote from the book that keeps haunting me during Trump's presidency.

"What the bulldozers and dump trucks did wasn’t important, I said, so long as they did a lot of it."

Trump was talking about a stunt he pulled in 1982, when he owned a piece of land along the Atlantic City boardwalk and wanted Holiday Inn to partner with him on the construction of a casino.

Contrary to his representations to Holiday Inn, hardly any construction had taken place on the site, and he was concerned the company would decline to invest once they saw what was basically a plot of empty land.

So in advance of a site visit by Holiday Inn executives, he directed his construction manager to hire dozens of pieces of heavy equipment to move dirt around on the site, digging holes and filling them back up if necessary.

We see this strategy repeated over and over in Trump's presidency. Trump signs executive orders to great fanfare, even if they have no effect beyond instructing his cabinet secretaries to prepare reports months from now. He demands that Congress pass a healthcare bill, with no particular concern for what's actually in the bill.

Trump aims to generate the appearance of activity, to do noisy things that demonstrate that he is a do-something president.

Trump believes this strategy served him well in business. Indeed, Holiday Inn agreed to partner with him on the construction of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino.

But less than 18 months after the Trump Plaza opened, the partnership with Holiday Inn had deteriorated to the point that Holiday Inn was suing him. In 1992, the Trump Plaza went bankrupt.

In the long run, it matters what the bulldozers and the dump trucks do.

The Republican healthcare bill grows more and more unpopular over time, as people learn more about what it would do to health insurance (that is, take it away from tens of millions of people and make coverage for preexisting conditions very expensive or impossible to obtain, in order to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans.)

In business, Trump's strategy for when his counterparties figured out he was screwing them was to tie them up in litigation, get paid to go away, and then find new marks. He could find somebody else to fool with a bunch of useless bulldozers: new investors, new lenders, new customers.

In politics, as he is learning, there is no new set of marks. He has to face the same Congress and the same voters over and over. This is not a fact he could prepare for by reading "The Art of the Deal."



To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1012415)4/21/2017 2:34:20 AM
From: James Seagrove1 Recommendation

Recommended By
POKERSAM

  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 1572777
 
The Most Evil Man on Earth - Robin Hood

“It is said that [Robin Hood] fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures — the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich — whom men have come to regard as a moral ideal. And this has brought us to a world where the more a man produces, the closer he comes to the loss of all his rights, until, if his ability is great enough, he becomes a rightless creature delivered as prey to any claimant — while in order to be placed above rights, above principles, above morality, placed where anything is permitted to him, even plunder and murder, all a man has to do is be in need. Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting… Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.”

— Ragnar Danneskjöld in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Part II, Chapter V