Keeping Our Eye On The Ball

While the Congress enacts mass transfers from working people to the very rich we can't let ourselves forget why this is happening and how it happened.

This kleptocratic government that's screwing us is set up along the lines of Russia's kleptocracy. The rubles that Putin is using to buy our government was first stolen from his own people. Now it's our turn.

Why does Trump defer to Putin and act like he’s Putin’s poodle?

From NYMagazine: Trump defers to Putin like he's his boss

How Putin got his hooks into Trump, explained by former intel director

John McClaughlin in Politico

How Trump walked into Putin's web.

The Long Read from the Guardian

How Trump is being played by Putin…

In Vanity Fair

When our leader is under the thumb of an enemy power, this stuff happens… His administration puts our Russian embassy in the control of the Russians.

From the BBC: How Trump gave our Moscow embassy security operations to Putin's former KGB boss

Putin's control over Trump via an army of trolls. From Bloomberg

Why are open democracy’s vulnerable? From the New Yorker

Trump has fascist tendencies, says Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in the Guardian.

Trump is corrupt, therefore his administration is corrupt. It does as he does. Reported by VOX

There is a new media model out there to enable and empower dictators and suppress and manipulate people. Trump loves it.

The global armies of fake news trolls being used to fuck with democracy, reported in the Guardian.

With Trump in the White House, the mob is in control. But the mob is under his control. And he is under Putin’s control. And the control of the billionaire class. Only they get real information, by sucking it up via our social media. What they force back out on us via social media is disinformation. Which is why they fear real journalists and real journals. From the NYTimes

The key to fascism is to routinely and vigorously poison the public discourse, make people fear and hate each other. Trump learned this trick from Putin.

In the New York Review of Books, the great Russia watcher Masha Gessen.

Why do Americans feel more stressed and afraid than ever? Because they can sense our democracy is in peril. Along with our entire planet. Reported out by APA

We Are All In Putin's Pocket Now

In the early 19th century, when Britain ruled much of the world, their king was cuckoo. Maybe it was because he’d lost the American colonies. He was nuts. And his young son was appointed Regent to handle the duties his incompetent father was unable to handle. The Prince Regent was not cuckoo but he was thick as two planks and very irresponsible.

We are in a similar situation now. Britain wasn’t actually ruled by their monarch even then; they had Parliament, and their Parliament was not a houseful of poodles. Our president has awesome powers and an obedient Congress, and he is still not in control. He is cuckoo and irresponsible and impulsive and delusional and corrupt and a liar.

Weirder still: the oddball scenario of Trump huddling with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador (spy master really) in the Oval Office, with the American press barred but the Russian press invited. If it sounded like a script written in Moscow it’s because it was. It was Putin who demanded the press exclusive at the high level meeting. Putin set the guidelines. Trump is not in control. Putin is. I was joking yesterday about how this is all completely normal, how it’s routine for Russian assets to have regular sit downs with their Russian spymasters. Joke, no joke. Our president is being operate by remote control from Moscow. Persuade me this isn’t true. Since we don’t have any American press coverage of the meeting we will not be able to observe the Russian technicians installing the listening devices.

How did we get here? The Washington Post gives us a picture of the president’s latest temper tantrum. How it happened and what it means.

The only thing that Russia’s press exclusive with Trump did not publish was the photo of Trump kneeling to receive commands from his master.

Politico describes the Russian tete a tete yesterday as a Russian victory dance. The Comey firing is only part of this Russian operation. Previous to this president the Russian prpresident did not have the power to fire American FBI directors.

Do we feel diminished yet? Do we feel like a Russian satellite yet? Do we feel as stupid as we look to the rest of the world? A new Quinnipiac poll asked respondents what word they would use to describe President Trump. (Via NY Magazine.)

The number one response by 8 percentage points was IDIOT.

Next in line: INCOMPETENT.

Next: LIAR.

Fourth place was a tie: 25% are still brainwashed and responded with LEADER. But 25% also responded with UNQUALIFIED.

The White House is lying about the Comey firing. Slate counts the ways.

Via Business Insider: A former CIA deputy director explains why it was dangerous to let the Russians bring their news [sic] crew into the Oval Office.

Constitutional Crisis? The New York Review of Books thinks it is.

Charlie Pierce: "Really, unless a fresh crop of spines suddenly sprouts within the Republican congressional majorities, nothing is going to happen. Unless a fresh crop of balls suddenly sprouts within the federal bureaucracy—hey, there are even more parking garages in D.C. now than there were in 1973—the odds are that the White House is going to skate on this.” Pierce also draws parallels with Watergate. But as I've been saying: Nixon at least hired domestic spooks. He didn't hire the KGB to secure power.

From Rolling Stone: Trump’s few Republican critics are not confronting him. Why?

Michael Tomasky goes through the five key players who might checkmate the Russian puppet in the White House

The Republicans are acting strangely. Like a police chief holding back to make sure the bank robbers finish looting the bank and put the money safely offshore before he does anything. As long as the Russians seem to be in control how much strategic information are they collecting? Which did they steal first, the keys to our nuclear arsenal or the keys to our economic infrastructure? Maybe the keys to the Federal Reserve. They may soon have our entire country in their pocket.

Diagramming Trump's ties to the Kremlin

Remember, remember the Eighth of November
The Kremlingate Treason and Plot
I see no reason the Kremlingate Treason
Should Ever Be Forgot

We’ve never had to worry if an American president was actually a Russian puppet. This has never happened before. It has happened now with the full eager cooperation of the Republican Party.

Here are the Trump/Russia connections broken into understandable parts. From POLITICO

Keep an eye on Rep. Eric Swalwell (D/CA). He is demanding full independent investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia and how these ties corrupted our election. From the LATimes

Swalwell’s got his own diagrams of the Trump/Russia connections

Rachel Maddow has spent several of her evening programs detailing these links. The bank in Cyprus co-owned by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and a money-laundering Russian mobster who has also funneled tens of millions of dollars directly to Trump. The disturbing links with Trump’s deeply indebted businesses also lead to Azerbaijan and to the terrorist-funding, money-laundering Republican Guard in Iran. (Far more interesting than the 2 pages of Trump’s taxes, but those taxes shown in full may disclose how corrupt this man is.)

I recommend watching Rachel's programs on Kremlingate

Benedict Arnold’s name is trending.

Malcom Nance calls Trump a B.A. at Salon

I urge Congress to hurry because the witnesses who might shed light on the Russian scheme keep dying mysteriously. This is from the Independent.

Now there's this story from Reuters news service about how Russians oligarchs close to Putin have invested $100 million in Trump real estate.

How Trump Was Purchased By Putin

Reporting from the Financial Times explains how financial ruin put Donald Trump in the pocket of Russian crime bosses. (The only Russian criminals not in prison or dead are those who are close to Putin.) They put Trump back on his feet with laundered money looted from the Russian economy.

Following the money makes it very clear that Trump is not a business operator at all, not since his bankruptcy in the 1990s. He is instead a front man for shadowy Russian mobsters who are proxies for the Russian dictator.

Trump is their spokesmodel, selling and advertising their properties around the world, which they have stuck Trump’s name on. Trump is their prize poodle. Putin’s prize poodle.

The money comes from the Russian kleptocracy, which stole it from ordinary Russian citizens. It’s been looted from the Russian economy. While Russians live in squalid cold cramped apartments and drink themselves to early death, their national wealth has been laundered and invested in luxury towers in other parts of the world. That is Trump’s business model. Trump’s nominees to head various departments of our government share this kind of mindset: the selfish belief that the economy––which ought to work for all the citizens who work in it ––is there to be looted and pocketed by the people in positions of power. A kleptocracy. Trump and his mob seek to refashion America on the sad Russian model.

Daily Kos has this useful summary of the Financial Times series.

Scott Horton’s close analysis of the Financial Times story says this:

Among the powerful facts that DNI missed were a series of very deep studies published in the [Financial Times] that examined the structure and history of several major Trump real estate projects from the last decade—the period after his seventh bankruptcy and the cancellation of all his bank lines of credit. ...

The money to build these projects flowed almost entirely from Russian sources. In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources.

He was their man.

How Comfortable Are Americans That Vladimir Putin Has Appointed Our Next President?

"The situation is the most stark challenge to a free people that has arisen in my lifetime. We have political and democratic muscles that have atrophied from disuse that now have to be called upon immediately to rescue the republic no matter how many people find that to be too rowdy and inconvenient for their refined political tempers. We have institutional safeguards that have rusted from neglect, but which still work if we're strong enough to turn the handles. We are in the deep, dark woods now. We all are, in a very real sense, survivalists.”

~Charles Pierce, the most astute political commentator of the day, in Esquire

Read Pierce's whole column here

In 2000 we allowed the Supreme Court to overrule the voters and install a president who was inadequate. At least three major catastrophes came about during his presidency, which a competent president probably would have avoided, and a fourth, climate change, which the president the voters elected, Al Gore, would definitely have confronted head on.

This year we have watched helplessly as fake news stories, armies of angry bigots and, not least, the dictator of Russia have installed a corrupt, dishonest, ignorant and downright dangerous incompetent as our president elect.

Will we do something now?

It was also announced today that President Trump will not be interested in daily intelligence briefings.

If Trump becomes our next president, if the Electoral College fails in its sole constitutional job, to prevent unfit men from occupying our highest office, The White House will have been occupied by these three figures:

2001-2009, NINCOMPOOP (Republican)

2009-2017 SKILLED, WISE LEADER (Democrat)

2017- NINCOMPOOP (Republican)

Oil Exec With Close Ties To Putin Floated As Secretary Of State Candidate

It is understandable that President Putin wants a Secretary of State he is comfortable with.

It is his choice to make, as was the selection of our president.

From the notoriously left wing Wall Street Journal: Rex Tillerson, a Candidate for Secretary of State, Has Ties to Vladimir Putin/ Exxon Mobil CEO could redefine U.S. interests abroad