Trump almost never forgets 9/11

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 3 Comments
Donald Trump reports for jury duty in August 2015. Photo by Andrew Burton

Donald Trump reports for jury duty in August 2015. Photo by Andrew Burton

It’s callow to laugh at Donald Trump for misspeaking, especially when he says so much risible shit on purpose. But there’s something pleasing about this flub:

I think what I want to do is I want to talk just for a second. I wrote this out, and it’s very close to my heart because I was down there. And I watched our police and our firemen down on 7/11, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down. And I saw the greatest people I’ve ever seen in action. I saw the greatest people I’ve ever seen including the construction workers, including every person down there. That’s what New York values is about.

As Rudy Giuliani will tell you, New York values are about running for president of September 11. Trump almost does that competently here. He declares police and fire fighters the bravest people on earth, and then expands that superlative to everyone in his field of vision. He makes heroes of us all. He almost never forgets. But then he says that thing about 7/11 and the whole edifice comes crashing down. Questions:

  1. Is this the first time America laughed at 9/11?
  2. Is this the first time Trump admitted to writing down a speech?

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The tomatoes in the word salad of Palin’s Trump endorsement speech

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 2 Comments
Sarah Palin endorses Donald Trump in Ames, Iowa.

Sarah Palin endorses Donald Trump in Ames, Iowa.

Do not read it aloud or you will summon her, but the full text of Sarah Palin’s endorsement speech for Donald Trump is here. Props to Smick for the link. Palin’s style has always worked better in speech than it does in print. More than one journalist has complained that the hardest part of transcribing her is knowing where to put the periods. She hews to a verbless, pastiche style reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg, if Ginsberg worked primarily in cliché. What is most striking about Palin’s speech from last night is the way it swings from phrase to ready phrase—in it to win it, drill baby drill, failed agenda, lead from behind, we the people and, now, make America great again—much as Tarzan swings from vine to vine. She’s just hollering in the spaces between. Still, certain themes emerge. Video after the jump.

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Citigroup’s disappearing plutonomy report

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 8 Comments

Former Citigroup CFA and coiner of "plutonomy" Ajay Kapur

In my surprisingly arduous attempt to find 2007 revenue figures for Citigroup yesterday, I ran across something called the plutonomy report. Back in 2005, Ajay Kapur—then CFA of Citigroup—produced this industry note describing investor and consumer behavior in economies where a very small portion of the population controls a very large portion of national wealth. He called such economies plutonomies. “The world is dividing into two blocs,” Kapur writes—“the plutonomy and the rest.” He lists the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK among the plutonomy nations and puts continental Europe and Japan “in the egalitarian bloc.” Here in plutonomy country, “the rich absorb a disproportionate chunk of the economy” and therefore hold primary influence over aggregate indicators like savings rates, account deficits, consumer spending, et cetera. In 2006, Kapur produced a follow-up to the first plutonomy report, in which he argues that plutonomy countries,

have seen the rich take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years, to the extent that the rich now dominate income, wealth and spending in these countries…the tech whizzes who own the pipes and distribution, the lawyers and bankers who intermediate globalization and productivity, the CEOs who lead the charge in converting globalization and technology to increase the profit share of the economy at the expense of labor, all contribute to plutonomy.

It’s a controversial argument, especially from a bank that defrauded consumer investors to enrich itself and a billionaire hedge fund manager the following year. People would probably get angry about it, except the second plutonomy report has been steadily disappearing from the interent since it leaked.

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