Thursday, August 18, 2016

More than Six Decades Ago, Woody Guthrie Took On the Racist Real Estate Practices of Donald Trump’s Father



More than Six Decades Ago, Woody Guthrie Took On the Racist Real Estate Practices of Donald Trump’s Father

by Bill Berkowitz | August 16, 2016 - 6:43am



In 1950, Woody Guthrie signed a lease for an apartment in a Brooklyn building owned by Fred Trump (the father of Donald Trump). Earlier this year, Will Kaufman, a Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Central Lancashire, visited the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Woody Guthrie Archives (http://woodyguthriecenter.org/archives/), to do research.

Kaufman pointed out that “Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings.” Kaufman maintained that Guthrie’s writing -- which haven’t yet been published – “should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire.” Particularly in light of Donald Trump declaring last year that his “legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy.”

Guthrie had dealt with racism and inequality in several songs, recognizing that racism wasn’t only manifested in the South. According to Kaufman, “songs such as ‘The Ferguson Brothers Killing,’ … condemned the out-of-hand police killing of the unarmed Charles and Alfonso Ferguson in Freeport, Long Island, in 1946, after the two young black men had been refused service in a bus terminal cafe.”

The song “Buoy Bells from Trenton,” “denounced the miscarriage of justice in the case of the so-called ‘Trenton Six’ – black men convicted of murder in 1948 by an all-white jury in a trial marred by official perjury and manufactured evidence.”

Guthrie, a strong and active supporter of the great Paul Robeson – an underapreciated African American icon -- “stood shoulder to shoulder with Robeson, Howard Fast and Pete Seeger against the mobs of Peekskill, New York, where American racism at its ugliest had inspired 21 songs from his pen (one of which, ‘My Thirty Thousand,’ was recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco).”

Kaufman reported that “When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed ‘Beach Haven.’”

A few years later, “Trump would be investigated by a U.S. Senate committee … for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of US$3.7 million.”

Apparently, Trump “embrace[d] … the FHA’s guidelines for avoiding ‘inharmonious uses of housing’ – or as Trump biographer Gwenda Blair puts it, ‘a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.’ As Blair points out, such ‘restrictive covenants’ were common among FHA projects – a betrayal, if ever there was one, of the New Deal vision that had given birth to the agency.”

Guthrie may have been one of the first to write about Fred Trump’s bent toward racism. However, in 1979, twelve years after Guthrie’s untimely death from Huntington’s disease, the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire.

More recently, a chapter titled “The Making of Donald Trump,” in David Cay Johnston’s new book titled The Making of Donald Trump (Melville House, 2016), provides some of the seamy and unsavory details that underscored the building of the Trump real estate empire under Fred Trump. Johnston also notes that Fred Trump got “arrested at age twenty-one for his involvement in a battle between about a hundred New York City police officers and a thousand Ku Klux Klan members and supporters, many of them in white robes.”

According to Johnston, “Donald Trump has “tried to deny the whole thing.”

Johnston: “Fred Trump was known neither for quality buildings nor being a good landlord. He bought the cheapest materials to build more than 27,000 subsidized apartments and row houses, on many of which his family continues to collect rent decades later.”

Below are Guthrie’s lyrics to “Old Man Trump”:

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project
Beach Haven ain't my home!
No, I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain,
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no black folks come to roam,
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!
I'm calling out my welcome to you and your man both
Welcoming you here to Beach Haven
To love in any way you please and to have some kind of a decent place
To have your kids raised up in.
Beach Haven ain't my home!
No, I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain,
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no black folks come to roam,
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!


Although Guthrie never recorded “Old Man Trump,” Ryan Harvey, Ani DiFranco, and Tom Morello have.

Is Lynch's Justice Dept. covering up a Clinton Foundation bribery crime? By Wayne Madsen Report



 Is Lynch's Justice Dept. covering up a Clinton Foundation bribery crime?
By Wayne Madsen Report
The Department of Justice, which is normally quite detailed in its criminal indictments, left out some key information in the federal criminal charges brought against Samuel Mebiame, a political fixer whose father Leon Mebiame was once prime minister of natural resource-rich Gabon in Africa. Neither the hedge fund nor the offshore entity were named in the indictment issued by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn, a job held by Attorney General Loretta Lynch before President Obama named her as U.S. Attorney General last year.

The failure to provide details about the corporate entities involved in the bribery of African officials, including those in Gabon, in exchange for lucrative mineral rights for Western corporations may very well be an attempt by Lynch to stymie any ties to the Clinton Foundation's "pay-to-play" extortion, kickbacks, and bribery racket.

The hedge fund named in the indictment of Mebiame is, in fact, the large Och-Ziff Management Capital Group LLC, formed by former Goldman Sachs executive Daniel Och and the heirs to the publishing fortune ofWilliam Bernard Ziff, Jr., and the offshore company is Palladino Holdings, Ltd. of the Turks and Caicos Islands. The two companies, along with Mvelaphanda Holdings of South Africa, formed a joint venture called Africa Management Ltd, on behalf of which Mebiame allegedly bribed officials in Chad, Niger, and Guinea for mining contracts. Curiously, Gabon, where Mebiame lives and which has a history of bribes for mining contracts, was not named in the indictment of Mebiame. The omission may be due to the fact that the Clinton Foundation received a $175,000 donation from the mining conglomerate BHP Billiton in return for Hillary Clinton's State Department ensuring the firm's continued mining contracts in Gabon and Guinea. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has seen lucrative donations from another mining company with operations in Guinea, Rio Tinto, Inc.

Mvelaphanda Holdings was founded by former African National Congress government minister Tokyo Sexwale, who has been involved in negotiating a deal to take over mining operations in Guinea along with a Kazakhstan mining conglomerate headquartered in Luxembourg. Sexwale's hedge fund partner Och has contributed to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are in negotiations with Och-Ziff to have its London office and its joint venture Africa Management Ltd. plead guilty to bribery charges, that, in addition to Guinea, Chad, and Niger, involve contracts in Libya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ever since his days as governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton has benefited from firms that held lucrative mining contracts in the DRC, previously known as Zaire. One DRC mining firm, America Mineral Fields, owned by a national of Mauritius, located its global headquarters in Bill Clinton's birthplace of Hope, Arkansas, in order to curry favor with the Clintons.


Secretary of State Clinton's March 2010 meeting with Gabon President Omar Bongo involved more than talking about the weather. Mining companies in Gabon kicked in big to her campaign coffers and the "pay-to-play" Clinton Foundation racket.

Mebiame refused to enter a plea when he was arraigned at the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Brooklyn on August 16. None of the corporate entities were charged in the bribery scandal with only Mebiame named as a defendant in the case U.S. v. Mebiame. Government officials accepting bribes from Mebiame in Chad, Niger, and Guinea -- all part of Obama's military coalition against terrorism in West Africa -- were not named in the indictment nor were they charged with any crimes. The officials included Mohammed Conde, the son of Guinean president Alpha Conde. Sexwale and his corporate partners have tried to negotiate a takeover of BHP Billiton's mining concessions in Guinea. Sexwale's other partner was theEurasian National Resources Corporation (ENRC) of Kazakhstan, a country where Bill Clinton and his Canadian mining donor Frank Giustra have significant mining business connections with the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev.


South African mining billionaire Tokyo Sexwale, then South Africa's Minister of Human Settlements (with microphone), visits Bill Clinton's New York office on February 23, 2012. The indictment of the son of a former Gabon prime minister by Loretta Lynch's successor in Brooklyn curiously avoided naming Sexwale's company in African bribery scandal. Reason: Sexwale is too close to "Slick Willy" and "Slick Hilly."

Part of the reason for BHP Billiton's $175,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation was to offset the influence with Clinton already "bought" by Giustra, Kazakhstan, and indirectly by Sexwale and his partners. The U.S. owes Sexwale some favors. A December 15, 2009 Confidential U.S. embassy Pretoria cable to Secretary of State Clinton paints Sexwale as not only one of South Africa's wealthiest businessman but someone who served as the eyes and ears for U.S. embassy "political officers," i.e., Central Intelligence Agency spooks, when he attended the special congress of the South African Communist Party.

The BHP Billiton donation to the Clinton Foundation was purely "protection insurance" for the firm's large mining operations in Guinea and Gabon. Apparently, Samuel Mediame's crime was not to kick in some of his bribery profits to the Clinton Foundation and Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign as did the other players in the bribery scheme. When the Cosa Nostra engaged in such protection rackets, its crime bosses were sent away to federal prison. When the Clintons engage in them, they are rewarded not with the "Big House" but the White House.