Your Daily Trump––The Corruption The Media Doesn't Bother To Report On

Trump’s long history of corruption is well documented. Why do voters not care about this? Why do news organizations ignore this?

From the Washington Post Plum Line column. Their headline tells the story: "Trumps history of corruption is mind-boggling, so why is clinton supposedly the corrupt one/?" In Trump's "bible" the proverb is "he who throws the first stone is usually believed."

Faced with lawsuits over his Trump University [sic], which was a scheme to defraud students, Trump bribes Florida and Texas AG’s to back off.

The Orlando Sentinel Broke this story last week.

In Texas a former staffer in the Attorney General's office says Trump got them to back off in the same way. CBS reports.

James Fallows reports on the Trump Florida bribery case in the Atlantic.

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall gives his analysis, calling it about as clear cut a case of corruption as you can find.

If you watch the news you have sat through endless stories about empty and disproven allegations against the Clinton Foundation. But you have not seen much about Trump’s Foundation, which doesn’t deserve the name, barely giving any money to any worthwhile cause. Trump did use large checks from his foundation to persuade the attorney general of Florida to back off on the lawsuit over the Trump University fraud scheme.

The media is focused on pulling down the decent and honest candidate and covering up for the corrupt and dishonest one.

Fraud is an Old Old Story

A few years ago PBS's Masterpiece Theatre gave us Trollope's THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. Most people tuned in for the Victorian costumes and interiors. I remember shaking my head at how modern and up-to-the-minute the story was. A shrewd financier promises astonishing returns on investments and all of prosperous London rushes to give him their money. You know what happens next. It's an old story. Why are we continually surprised?

A French philosopher once wrote "Property is theft." That might be a bit extreme. Closer to the mark is Balzac's famous line "Behind every great fortune is a crime." Actually, the precise quote is "Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oubli , parce qu' il a t proprement fait." ("The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.") We should remember that Washington's Mount Vernon and Jefferson's Monticello were built by slaves on fortunes created by slave labor. Sometimes the great crime isn't theft, but kidnapping and murder. Ordinary fraud seems almost tame.

Every generation produces its naive idealists (let's call them pure free-market economists) who think Capitalism is a religion whose operations are regulated by God. God being the Capitalist himself, who can do no wrong. And every generation relearns the same sorry lesson. The perfect Capitalist we thought was God is often a flim-flam artist.

The trick for the non-economist is being skeptical without growing cynical. But it is hard to be uncynical when the people who run things are such credulous boobs, when the policemen we employ think the crooks will police themselves.