All For Show

This "presidency" is almost literally nothing but a dog-n-pony show for the purpose of distracting us, while the Rent-Seekers go from thinly-disguised embezzlement to looting the joint outright.

AP New York:

Tony Rankins, a formerly homeless, drug-addicted Army veteran, got a standing ovation at the State of the Union after President Donald Trump described how he turned his life around thanks to a construction job at a company using the administration’s “Opportunity Zone” tax breaks targeting poor neighborhoods.

But that’s not completely true.

Rankins, who indeed moved out of his car and into an apartment since landing a job refurbishing a Nashville hotel two years ago, doesn’t work at a site taking advantage of the breaks and never has done so. In fact, he started that job four months before the Treasury Department published its final list of neighborhoods eligible for the breaks. And the hotel where he worked couldn’t benefit even now because it’s an area that didn’t make the cut.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Rankins said he always considered the job that launched him on his new life two years ago to be in an Opportunity Zone and was honored to be invited by the White House to the State of the Union, with a prime seat in the balcony next to Ivanka Trump.

“After struggling with drug addiction, Tony lost his job, his house and his family. He was homeless. But then Tony found a construction company that invests in Opportunity Zones,” the president said in his Feb. 4 speech. “He is now a top tradesman, drug-free, reunited with his family.”

Days later, Trump doubled down on the Rankins story in a speech on his economic initiatives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and invited him up to say a few words.

“First of all, I would like to thank the president for signing this bill, because without it I wouldn’t be standing here before you right now,” Rankins said.

Trump also praised Rankins’ employer, R Investments, for “working to help 200 people rise out of homelessness every year by investing in opportunity zones.”

That is also not quite true.

CEO Travis Steffens said he has hired hundreds of homeless to work at the 400 buildings the company has owned over the years, taking advantage of various tax breaks. But when it comes to Trump’s Opportunity Zone breaks, he said, the company has only one building tapping the program now, a warehouse in Cincinnati where no one seems to be working, homeless or otherwise.

“We’ve not really worked there,” Rankins said, “but we’ve stored things over there.”

Steffens suggested that when Trump said R Investments was helping 200 people rise out of homelessness he was referring to the number the company hopes to teach construction skills to at the warehouse once it has been converted to a training academy.

Blue sky bullshit. And it's a great illustration of the typical Trump-style scam. I take tax money and use it to train people in certain trades. I get paid, and it costs me practically nothing, and 45* can make a bogus claim that he's created jobs for some poor people.

Don't get me wrong, job training is a huge thing. Programs aimed at helping people out of the cycle of poverty are to be celebrated, and I'll sing their praises all day long. But at the end of that training, if there's no real job with no real bennies and no real security, what's the fuckin' point?

All we've got here is a phony "president" and his scammy daughter crowing about what an amazing thing they're doing for us when actually, they're siphoning tax dollars into the pockets of a few of their rich cronies.

This is not a government

This is a robbery