Originally published at: We Actually Know Exactly How We Can Address Trump’s Corruption Spree - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. For most of human history, trying to identify an oligarchy has been difficult. Part of that has to do with the definition of the term “oligarchy” in the first place. Aristotle first popularized the word thousands of years ago, pointing out that…
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The first order of business, once Trump is out of office and democrats are back in charge, must be legislation confiscating every dollar President Trump, his family and organizations made during both terms. (See the illegal IRS immunity deal for all 418 entities)
Such legislation should be based on the Emoluments Clauses in the constitution, and include a special non-reviewable by the Supreme Court rider.
This is the only way to prevent the ransacking of the public treasury by future administrations. Let them know that you can earn it, but we’ll take it back, even if you’ve pardoned yourself.
He can appeal it, but take the money away first and wait for a resolution before returning it.
(edited to fix typos)
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I’m with you on that, entirely.
However, the stollen [sic] funds are in off-shore accounts that are more likely entirely untraceable. The First Felon knows the new government will waste no time trying to do that re-capture, only to find out (like most extradition laws) that there is no mechanism available to do this, even if the money can be found.
I suspect the new government will need to perform a full audit on the Treasury and the result may end up being very close to the idea that there is no money anywhere - it’s all been absconded by this administration.
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Lots of good info in this chapter, and maddening, with the knowledge of how the election results of 2024 threw away all this progress.
I’ve seen descriptions / explanations of the 2024 election as the revenge of the oligarchs. Maybe that’s addressed elsewhere in the book. At any rate, it makes a lot of sense to me. Biden broke the bipartisan tolerance or encouragement of corruption, and the oligarchs came after him hard to preserve what they now had at risk.
Instead, we had an election about inflation and about women using women’s restrooms.
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I share your concern about there being nothing in the Treasury by 2028, but modified by my view of what money is.
The important thing about money in this context is that it’s a social arrangement, not a physical reality.
If you have, say, a petroleum reserve, you’re storing a physical thing. If you add oil to it, there’s more; if you take oil out, there’s less. You need oil to do all sorts of physical things, and if the oil you were counting on isn’t there, you can’t do those things.
Money is a set of social agreements that gives you command over physical things: oil, land, machines, and people’s time.
If someone steals oil and spirits it abroad, the oil is gone, and no change in the law can conjure it back.
If someone steals money and spirits it abroad, it is in principle possible to just create new money to replace what’s missing.
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“If someone steals money and spirits it abroad, it is in principle possible to just create new money to replace what’s missing.”
Isn’t that almost a definition of inflation"? Think it out, and you might see who gets hurt in this solution.
A fatal myocardial infarction would solve so many problems in this country.
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Thanks to TPM for articles like this. Capitalism is 9/10ths of Government, at least with Trump. Many of Trump’s corrupt acts are in Crypto. Paul Krugman’s opinion on Crypto is clear: “crypto has failed to become a viable medium of exchange, surviving instead on faith, ideology, and illicit transactions.”
Democrats need to establish a dedicated department of Forensic Accounting as part of GAO, Treasury, or reconstituted FBI just for Trump Accounting. Funding can easily come from reduced military and ICE spending. I nominate William K. Black or David Cay Johnston for the leadership.
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The International consortium of Investigative Journalists https://www.icij.org/ can help us there. The group that brought us the Panama Papers are probably well aware of where all the money is stored right now. Lets hire them for the next govt. admin.
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Creation of money is only half of the inflation puzzle (moving the aggregate demand curve to the right).
The other half is creation of goods and services (the aggregate supply curve).
If you have a situation where the economy’s productive potential is maxed out and you pump in a bunch of money, then you should absolutely expect inflation.
When you have idle productive inputs, things can be different. If you create money in ways that don’t stimulate productive activity, then again, you should expect inflation. But if the creation of money is part of putting unused productive potential to work, then inflation is much less of an issue.
The bottom line is to keep money in its proper place as a coordination mechanism, not a physical reality.
If a country has mines, farms, factories, roads, offices, and skilled labor, and yet can’t produce much because “all the money is gone,” that country suffers most of all from a lack of creativity.
On a scale of an entire society, the essence of wealth is the ability to produce, sensibly mobilized. If someone has stolen a society’s money but left intact the society’s productive capacity, the lack of money is an accounting problem to be solved, not a sentence of poverty.
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