Wilbur Ross Says Syria Missile Strike Was 'After-Dinner Entertainment' at Mar-a-Lago

[DonViejo]

Source: Variety



MAY 1, 2017 | 02:03PM PT

Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recalled the scene at Mar-a-Lago on April 6, when the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping was interrupted by the strike on Syria.

“Just as dessert was being served, the president explained to Mr. Xi he had something he wanted to tell him, which was the launching of 59 missiles into Syria,” Ross said. “It was in lieu of after-dinner entertainment.” As the crowd laughed, Ross added: “The thing was, it didn’t cost the president anything to have that entertainment.”

Ross, a billionaire financier, is new to government service. In the lunchtime conversation with David Rubenstein, co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, Ross reflected on his first impressions of public service.

“I’ve been heartened,” he said. “I thought the quality of people in the government was not as high as it has turned out to be. There are actually quite a lot of very good, very serious, very intelligent people wanting to do their best. It’s just they’ve been trapped in a fundamentally dysfunctional system.”

Read more: http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/wilbur-ross-commerce-secretary-syria-missile-strike-tax-cuts-1202405269/

[JI7]

1. this guy is fucked up

[pat_k]

33. Wilbur Ross: inhumane, greedy, and corrupt. Perfect for DT.

1990 Wilbur Ross bails Trumps Atlantic City Casino out of bankruptcy. (link)

This callous bastard is the vulture who swooped in to take over American Home Mortgage (AHM) and American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. (AHMSI). (AHMSI was the second-largest servicer of subprime loans in America. AHM was the first giant mortgage broker to go belly up.)

Under Wilbur "fuck loss mitigation" Ross, AHMSI was responsible for foreclosing on about 100 billion in loans -- a vast majority of which were conducted unlawfully. And, to add insult to injury, a substantial proportion of those foreclosures could easily have been avoided through modification. or by granting the homeowner a short term forbearance to enable them to stay out of default, give them time to sell the property at full value, and maximize return for the mortgage trust bond holders.

The minute default and intent to foreclose are filed a property loses 30 to 40 percent of it's value -- value forever lost to homeowners and bondholders. The servicer does great though. They get the bonus of "special servicing" fees for orchestrating the foreclosure, kickbacks on obscenely priced on forced-placed homeowner's insurance (utterly unnecessary, and often illegally placed), and are the first in line to get paid out of whatever pittance is netted at sheriff sale.

Classic DT cabinet pick: A commerce secretary who engaged in the practices that brought down the world economy.



Lynn Szymoniak, a whistle-blower who fought AHMSI in court and who won a $95 million case against several servicers on behalf of the federal government in 2012, explains that Ross’s company outsourced its mortgage-document operations. They used a company called DocX, which forged millions of mortgage assignments, claiming to be the officers of dozens of different banks. These documents were fraudulently signed after the fact to recreate a chain of title that lenders broke; they were a document clean-up shop. Lorraine Brown, the CEO of DocX, went to prison for five years for this activity, making her the only person to be jailed for foreclosure fraud.

After entrusting its mortgage operation to fraudsters, AHMSI eventually changed its name to Homeward Residential, and got bought out by Ocwen. Wilbur Ross stayed involved in Ocwen, serving on the board of directors. If anything, Ocwen was worse than AHMSI. It routinely broke the law, with “systematic misconduct at every stage of the mortgage process,” according to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray. In 2013, CFPB fined Ocwen $2.1 billion for, among other things: charging borrowers unauthorized fees, failing to apply borrower payments to loans, failing to maintain accurate accounting statements, imposing insurance policies on borrowers who already had them, deceiving borrowers about loan modifications, and robo-signing foreclosure documents in fraud upon state courts.

One of my favorite Ocwen stories is the backdating scandal. Under the law, servicers must inform borrowers of why they were denied a loan modification and give them 30 days to appeal. Ocwen sent thousands of these letters backdated 30 days from the sending, giving borrowers no time to act. (link)

[joshdawg]

42. Of course he is.

He's a republican.

[Me.]

2. No Words Of My Own

But maybe his will come back to bite him

[dchill]

3. "...didnt cost the president anything..."

In fact, as a shareholder in Raytheon (maker of Tomahawk missiles) - it made him money! It's GREAT to be an ethics-free President.

[rurallib]

30. another republican 'win-win'

[dchill]

34. What I'm sayin'!

[BeyondGeography]

4. Creepy Americans are creepy

[PatSeg]

5. "Didn't cost the president anything

to have that entertainment"??? It certainly cost someone.

[erronis]

6. I really don't want to recommend this thread since it is one of the best examples of venality.

Governments over the years have been owned/pwned/usurped.

Having a monkey in the position of impressing guests by pushing a button and saying "see what a big boy a am?" is below humanity.

Of course, the Carlyle Group (what a high-sounding name, sorta like Blackwater) is a septic tank full of offshits from various administrations. The types of folks who would happily do damage to countries and peoples just to deposit a few more $s/Euros/shekels into their hidey-holes.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

9. Know the feeling, but purpose of recommend is for reading. It is not a "like". . . . nt

[Sculpin Beauregard]

27. Human filth

[DeminPennswoods]

7. We need new words...

because, honestly, there aren't any to describe Ross' comment.

The part about not costing anything is amazing, it'll cost us taxpayers $Ms to replace those missiles and it cost plenty to send the Navy out to fire them.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. Brown lives don't matter to old white male bankers. . . . nt

[calimary]

12. ...and Russian money-launderers. Don't forget that.

This utterly wretched small sour prune of a man was vice chair of the Bank of Cypress, the go-to "laundromat" for Russian mobsters and oligarchs.

[NastyRiffraff]

10. Every time I think it can get no worse

along comes this asshole. Like others on this thread, I don't have words to describe this. I don't think the English language has any.

[Blue_Tires]

16. +1

[Bernardo de La Paz]

11. Beware: "trapped in a fundamentally dysfunctional system" is the new anti-Constitutional line.

Be prepared. It's a test, as I write about in commentary on Snyder's thesis:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029001071#post28

[Blue_Tires]

17. Good catch...

[JDC]

20. Hmm. Thx

[not fooled]

41. Oh, and also to

demonize the Civil Service and hapless Federal employees. Blame "bureaucracy" for the fact that they can't just ram through their crackpot ideas re wrecking the government.

A strong Civil Service is a bulwark against corruption and oligarchy. That's why the dumpsters whine about it.


This man is the scum of the earth. No wonder he finds the dump admin a good fit.

[Tanuki]

13. It cost the U.S. taxpayers $60 million, but since Trump is a tax cheat,

I suppose it's correct to say it didn't cost him anything. That said, to treat an act of war as "entertainment" is so loathesome that I am at a loss for words to express my revulsion.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/7F7946E0-1BA4-11E7-8755-9AB7B5C1C318
"It could cost about $60 million to replace the cruise missiles that the U.S. military rained on Syrian targets Thursday night.

Each Tomahawk missile, made by Raytheon Co. RTN-0.73% likely cost $1 million, according to experts."....

[DFW]

14. Just wait for the first state dinner honoring Putin

He'll nuke Berlin as a kick to the after-dinner espresso.

[d_r]

15. This is fuxjed up

[Blue_Tires]

18. It's okay, Greenwald said Trump was anti-interventionist

[bora13]

19. "theyve been trapped in a fundamentally dysfunctional system"

Now your free! Free! Go on, your free! Now more bad govt. to hold you down any longer. Free I tell you!
Go home. Your not needed here. Isn't that amazing?

[MedusaX]

21. Devil's Advocate interpretation of Komrade Ross' observation...

Notice that he framed the strike as having been "...in lieu of after-dinner entertainment"

And then states
"The thing was, it did not cost the president anything to have that entertainment."


On the surface, it appears "that entertainment" is referring to the Syria strike...

But, by using "in lieu of" he is not equating the strike to after-dinner entertainment
He is actually establishing that the strike announcement took place instead of the regularly scheduled after-dinner entertainment/ performance ...


If Ross' intent was simply to pander to the base by making a joke about a missile strike being entertainment...
he would not have needed to add the comment about entertainment not costing anything...

Instead, amidst the laughter, Ross makes an observation that can be taken two ways....

1. Ross was questioning why Trump would announce the strike to Xi at that time rather than waiting until later....
or at least until
after the scheduled entertainment had taken place....
since there was no urgency associated with the announcement
nor was there any monetary savings realized by skipping "that (scheduled) entertainment "

2. Or Ross was expressing disbelief that Trump got away with both the strike itself and announcing it to Xi while eating dessert at Mar-a- Lago...

And that there was no effort made to address the inappropriateness of the strike "order" process nor any consequences/penalties for any of Trumps actions whereby he effectively treated the strike as common entertainment.

Disclaimer:
I have no fucking idea what Ross' intended message was...
nor does it make a rat's ass what he meant or what I think ...

[sinkingfeeling]

22. May not have cost 45 anything, yet many civilians died. The crowd 'laughed'. Just

like the rich Roman's watching gladiators.

[Hekate]

38. Actually, the Roman Coliseum hosted mass entertainment. Think of the gladiators as...

...professional wrestlers with higher stakes. People of all classes just loved the spectacle.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. For a certain level of society, we have not advanced at all.

[notdarkyet]

23. So all you commentators, newspeople, politicians, generals and sycophants

That raved and hurrahed when trump bombed Syria..are you rethinking your attitudes about it now that you know it wasn't done for strategic purposes, but for after dinner entertainment. Feel like fools yet?

[procon]

24. Missiles were his third choice behind cock fighting and a gladiatorial death match. nt

[Motley13]

25. "most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you've ever seen."

& he forgot what country he was bombing

[iluvtennis]

26. I'm speechless and can't even comment on this asinine statement

[WhiteTara]

28. it didnt cost the president anything to have that entertainment

It cost blood and treasure of others. These monsters need to be removed from our government.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

29. "Truly I tell you,..."

Last edited Tue May 2, 2017, 08:51 AM - Edit history (1)

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A40-45&version=NIV;KJV

Matthew 25:40, NIV:

"The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'"

Matthew 25:40, KJV:

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

[colorado_ufo]

31. WTF?

[The Blue Flower]

32. Most obscene statement made by a US official in history

In its own category. Is the military finally catching on that this administration cares not a whit for them?

[Tanuki]

43. It should end his career.

[Norbert]

35. This asshole must have had an orgasm when the A-bombs were dropped.

Let me guess. He was never in the military.

[Beacool]

36. Caligula and his minions laughing in the Coliseum as people died in the arena.

Has there ever been a more vile president and administration?

[rug]

37. Disgusting pigs.

[Hekate]

39. Sick. Twisted. Evil.

[riderinthestorm]

40. Sociopathic monsters. SMDH nt

[Vinca]

44. Enjoy your Germy Chocolate Cake while we slaughter some Syrians??? WTF???

[Bayard]

45. I have no words............

I hope the media is all over this.

[GeorgeGist]

46. He should have listened to Mr. Ed.