by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
The United States is a country where Americans get to select their own news reality and, with that, their own reality of the gravest threats their country is facing. If you read the New York Times, you will clearly view the President of the United States, Donald Trump, as financially compromised and the gravest national security threat the nation faces. If you are a devotee of the Rupert Murdoch empire of right-wing news (Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Fox News) you are this morning lost in a world of empty baseball stadiums and Trump charges of “fake news.”
Yesterday, the New York Times’ digital page broke the story that it had obtained, from a source legally permitted to have the material, more than two decades of Donald Trump’s tax returns. According to the Times, the returns show that in 2016, the year Trump was running for President, and in 2017, his first year as President, the man claiming to be a billionaire paid $750 in federal income taxes each year. That’s far less than most blue collar workers pay. (Last night the pro-Republican Drudge Report led with a bold red headline, asking: “The Fake Billionaire?”)