How America Is Adopting The Russian System

Can anyone else see this administration getting their orders from a foreign enemy? That’s what appears to be going on. They don't wake up every morning thinking "How can I weaken America today?" but the orders they carry out do just that. Shutting down the foreign service leaves us blind and deaf and mute. What country would do that to itself? Alienating allies isn’t a wise policy. Doing the bidding of a foreign rival in key parts of the world is also unwise but that is what Trump is doing in Europe and the Mideast. The world that used to admire and work with us now distrusts us. (MinnPost's Eric Black writes about the sudden decline in America's standing in the world)

We base our policy on what we know and we secure our safety with intelligence gathering. What do the Republicans do? They shut that down. (Here is a POLITICO article about one piece of that shutting down of our intelligence gathering system) Partly because the intelligence agencies found out that Trump was working under the direction of a foreign enemy, that his national security advisor was on the payroll of that enemy and various other Trump officials were also employed by the Russian spy agencies. The solution, say the Republicans, is to shut down our spy agencies. Why have spy agencies when our orders are coming from the spy agencies of our enemy? OK, I exaggerate, but this year has unfolded in an exaggerated and unlikely fashion. This is the direction we are headed in.

But it isn’t as simple as that. The Republicans’ BIG IDEA has always been to privatize everything. Private schools, private healthcare, privately run roads and public lands and waterways owned and operated by rich corporations run by rich friends. Now the idea is privatized national security. Why have oversight by democratically elected officials when you can have the spies run by rich friends. You’re more likely to gain intelligence that matches your preconceptions and your delusions. Intelligence that you can weaponize without anyone stopping you.

The Intercept has a new article about how the Trump junta is seeking to create its own private spy service, under the direction of Erik Prince, one of the intermediaries who sought to create back channels between Trump and his masters in Moscow)

This extreme privatization of the public sector is the Russian model. After the collapse of Gorbachev the entire Soviet infrastructure was sold off cheap (or given outright) to the cronies of the new leaders. Putin’s oligarchs are the former mobsters who ran the criminal underworld and black market under the Soviet system. Everything now belongs to them, the water rights, the mineral rights, the forests, the land, the industry, the roads, the railroads, the workers, everything. The people are dependent on these things owned by the Putinists so they hear and obey what their new masters tell them. And the new masters hear and obey Putin who can jail and execute any oligarch who crosses him or fails to pay him his kickbacks. This is the new model being set up by the radical Republicans and Trump: a kleptocracy as ugly as any central African state where the oligarchs are obscenely rich and own everything. The biggest, baddest, richest autocrat of them all is now the boss of our president. In effect Vlad Putin is our leader now. Trump, by comparison, is a small time hoodlum and con artist. A petty criminal.

Is it any wonder millennials have doubts about capitalism? (Today's NYTimes column by Michelle Goldberg is about this) Weaponized capitalism is something that’s evolved in recent decades, after the Lewis Powell memo and the Reagan Revolution, as Americans stopped questioning the absolute unquestionable perfection of the capitalists. The Republican tax bill nails down the absolutism of the people who own for a living and the impoverishment and submission of the people who work.

If there were any question about Republicans’ contempt for working people it was clarified perfectly in the comments of Senator Grassley and Senator Hatch. We are now a divided people: a handful of extremely rich people on top and below them, far below them, a rabble of workers half of whom despise the system and half who worship and obey the capitalists without question.

Our history didn’t need to lead us here.

After capitalism failed in 1929-33, FDR saved it and put it on a fairer and stabler footing with the New Deal. Capitalism in this form created several decades of prosperity and contentedness from 1945 to 1980 or so.

Then Reagan began reconverting it into the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover model that triggered the 1929 collapse. This reconversion eventually led to inequality and unfairness and predatory fraud and instability and collapse in 2008, when Obama rescued it again.

After eight years spent blocking Obama’s efforts to restore the fairness and stability we enjoyed for those great decades the Republicans have regained power and are making the final draconian changes that will restore the bad old days. Perhaps they realize they’ll need to uphold this with a fascist government, full surveillance and a removal of free and fair and honest information. Their goal is to make our misery and deprivation and ignorance and deception as profitable as possible.

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

Friends of Trump. Friends of Putin.

The Dutch investigative reporting unit Zembla working with the American newspaper group McClatchy has been tracking the multi-billion dollar transfers of money from around the world into Trump properties, notably Trump Soho, which Trump built with Russian mob figure Felix Sater. This three part documentary follows the money.

The documentary that follows the money trail from central Asia into Trump Soho and other properties.

Trump warned this summer that special prosecutor Mueller had better not look into his financial history. It seems clear why Trump is afraid of this. Trump made loud assurances that he had no investments in Russia. (But did he have Russian millions invested in his properties here and elsewhere?) He said he had no loans IN Russia. (Did he get multi-million or multi-billion dollar loans FROM Russia?)

Trump’s financial history is a roller coaster of boom and bust. Fabulous accumulations of cash followed by spectacular collapses that ruined thousands of investors, but left Trump flush with money. This is how confidence schemes work: draw the money in, then loot the money out, hiding it via multiple shell companies and flipped transactions. In many cases the collapse is carefully planned (think Mel Brooks’s The Producers, minus the comedy.) Much of the cash that built and purchased various Trump properties, notably Trump Soho, is alleged to have been looted from Kazakhstan and other countries, then laundered through hundreds of shadowy companies in financial centers like the Netherlands and London and Cyprus. (One of the banks in Cyprus targeted by money-laundering investigations is co-owned by Trump’s Secretary of Commerce and a Russian oligarch closely allied with Putin.)

This is the pattern of international fraud which loots economies and impoverishes law abiding workers around the world. Trump himself has a long history of stiffing people and companies who do work for him, building and furnishing and servicing his properties, and daring them to sue. So Trump himself behaves like these international crooks by looting the legitimate earnings of working people and hiding those millions where they are hard to locate. One of Trump’s favorite counterarguments when the Russia investigation is raised is to say that we should quit targeting the fine people of Russia. But the investigations are not targeting the fine people of Russia, they are targeting the criminals who stole billions from the fine people of Russia, the working people of Russia and other countries. Trump may not be the biggest villain in the world of global kleptocracy, but he has been in bed with the kleptocrats for decades. The biggest global kleptocrat today appears to be Putin himself, Trump’s role model and possible sugar daddy. While Trump rubbishes the victims of mass theft and fraud in carefully looted and impoverished parts of the world, he praises and kneels to the billionaires who profited from looting them and admires their “leadership”.

Former FBI man Mark Felt gave Woodward and Bernstein some famous advice in 1972 when they were investigating the crimes of the Nixon White House: “Follow the Money.” Following the money has grown more complicated over recent decades as the looting and fraud and money laundering has grown more massive and sophisticated and compliant governments have made the legal system more hospitable to fraud and looting and money laundering. (One example being Trump's abrupt lifting of the financial regulations and safeguards put in place by Obama after the financial crisis of 2008-9.)

Follow the money to discover the crimes of people like Trump, but also examine the company they keep. Trump has been tight with unsavory characters for many years, both the famous and the infamous, shadowy mobsters and nasty celebrities as well as leaders of corrupt and brutal regimes.

What is it about Trump's and Putin's bromances with the ugliest kinds of celebrity, people like Steven Seagal and Gerard Depardieu.

Why does Trump never say a critical or unpleasant word to or about Putin? Maybe he just admires the guy. Or maybe he is afraid to. To paraphrase the saying Gordon Liddy had on the wall in his office “When you have them by their junk [their global investments] their hearts and minds will follow.” We’ve long suspected that Putin holds Trump hostage via money, and Sec. of State Tillerson too. It appears that Russians put Trump’s fortunes in order after at least one bankruptcy. Is he still on the hook to them, and for how much?

Question: why appoint as Secretary of State an oil company CEO who organized the largest oil deal in history with Putin himself?

Big money deals buy a lot of boot-licking but it's not good for America when the licking is being done by our government, with foreign enemies praised and admired while traditional allies are insulted.

I like Gary Kasparov’s phrase “Reputation Laundering”, which describes what Trump is doing for Putin and what the GOP has done for Trump and Putin.

When our president lives off the profits of shady money and global criminality it quickly corrupts how we operate in the world. It stains our national reputation, our global standing.

F.O.P. “Friends of Putin” populate the world of big money. From the Financial Times.

It’s enlightening to look at the kind of scummy creatures who are friends of Putin’s, the kinds of things they do, the things they say, the scummy things they approve of and the decent things and people they ridicule.

It’s also worth looking at the list of Putin’s former friends. Many of them have died in unpleasant and sudden ways.

Reported in March by the Chicago Tribune.

A more recent article about Russian hits on Putin critics––from the New Yorker.

From Vox, a list of the dead.

Fascists And Republicans Have Colluded Before––Are They The Same?

I keep asking: when are the stories about the Russian attack on our election and infiltration of our politics going to make the necessary comparison with the German American Bund, a fascist infiltration run by and from a foreign enemy, designed to turn America into a lesser power unlikely to challenge the Nazis' global ambitions?

The Nazis organized the Bund to neutralize America’s traditional friendship with Britain and other European democracies, to make America neutral and isolationist. Russia used Trump to neutralize and isolate American power in the world, to split up the western alliance, NATO, and similar alliances we had around the world, to bust up trade agreements, to sow discord within the United States itself. They achieved this goal far beyond any rational expectation. Trump, by his appointments to key posts and non-appointments, has also achieved a overall degradation of our democratic institutions and systems of government: the State Department, the EPA, the FCC (the agency that is supposed to keep foreign bots and trolls from dominating our public communications), the various bureaus and departments tasked with making our systems function properly and fairly. The Trump/Putin win in this election has also turned the Department of Justice from a department focused on protecting Americans’ rights into a tool for white supremacy and white minority rule, a deportation machine, a device for making America less attractive and less admired in the world.

The German goals with the Bund dovetailed neatly with Republican goals in the 1930s, so there were two machines working to derail FDR’s New Deal and America’s alliance with Europe’s democracies. As this short BBC documentary describes, in 1933 and 34, just after FDR began his first term, groups funded by Wall Street began organizing a coup. The coup failed, but the movement continued, calling itself The Liberty League, championing corporate power and opposing workers’ rights and efforts to rebuild our infrastructure by putting Americans back to work with government spending. So this neat alliance between foreign fascists and American Republicans is not new.

The new Russian strategy sold via bots and trolls and agent provocateurs fits neatly with decades-old Republican strategies of divide and rule. Divide white workers from black and Latino workers. Divide men from women. Divide by religious belief. Divide the religious from the non-religious. Divide regions against each other (note how Republicans opposed relief after Hurricane Sandy…of course they now demand relief for their own disasters.) The motives and sentiments expressed by the Russians in their global mischief probably appeared very familiar to Republicans who were targeted. So familiar it didn’t seem foreign or wrong. It fit previous Republican instructions. Ingredients in the Russian playbook include race resentment, global grievances and feelings of unjust decline in status, hatred of more successful and prosperous countries and groups, fierce religious prejudices, and overall an almost medieval tribalism. So it may be hard to sort the con game from a free choice made by Republicans and independents susceptible to the Russian/Republican pitches.

Bill Moyers has this helpful, factual, timeline of the Trump/Putin relationship and how the Republicans were cool with it.

This reporting from McClatchy and the New York Times explores how the Russians did it and might help explain why Republicans were so comfortable going along with it.

The Steele Dossier, which is being proven out in many of its concerns and suspicions, reminds us of how the Russians also used political blackmail to enforce Trump's compliance with their plan.

If a majority chooses fascism in an election is it still democracy? Remember: Hitler was elected in a democracy, which enabled him to close it down and install a fascist autocracy.

Were Republicans duped or were they willing collaborators? You might point out that the Russians were spreading lies and fake news. It was a trick. The Trump answer to that is to say the news networks were fake news too. When it’s all lies the public tends to choose sides, revert to tribal loyalties.

There has been another Republican defense that says “All politicians lie.” This is a vast expansion of the fact that no politician is ever able to fulfill all of his or her promises. And political oppositions force compromises to achieve anything. Are compromises a lie? This is another familiar totalitarian smear against democracies, but Republicans have run on it for decades. The goal among antidemocratic politicians has been to degrade confidence in our system and our democratic norms, to degrade our institutions to make Americans frustrated and distrustful of them, to make Americans long for a strong man, a dictator. Dictators are so much more efficient because they order something and it gets done. The problem is totalitarians make decisions that benefit themselves, letting lesser benefits trickle down… and that pathetic promise is also familiar. It counts on Americans being so busy fighting amongst themselves for the diminished benefits that they don’t organize against the power that has diminished, actually stolen, those benefits.

In our recent fight over “entitlements” and prosperity the Republican strategy has been to say “some other group” has stolen your prosperity or feels falsely entitled to what you are legitimately entitled to, while the Republican machinery has actually been taking that prosperity and redistributing it upward. They’ve also distributed the tax burden downward, off of the wealthy classes and onto the working class. The enemy isn’t taxes, which pay for roads and schools and hospitals, it’s their redistribution. The dysfunction this unfair redistribution has caused has dried up the revenue that keeps our infrastructure functioning. There is another similarity here between Russia (a kleptocracy) and the Republican juggernaut. In Russia wealthy tax evaders have been laundering their stolen wealth abroad, apparently through people like Donald Trump and Paul Manafort and others, impoverishing their country, hollowing it out, lowering its GDP disastrously and lowering life expectancy dramatically. Will similar kleptocratic behaviors by the Republicans and their clients do the same here?

When the news becomes bad nobody wants to believe it. People tend to blame it on others. When systems fail we blame the people who have tried to keep those systems working, we don’t tend to blame the political party that degraded the tax revenue that kept the systems operative, that updated safeguards and installed backups. For three decades, if you listen to the Republican rhetoric, you can see how much they agree with the Russians: they want to hollow out America the same way Russia’s leadership and oligarchy has hollowed out Russia. The Republicans want a lower paid, obedient, servile working class, which is a basic fascist goal. They know this is unattractive, but they know that when things stop functioning that Americans will long for a strongman to make it run again, doing so by good old corporate dictatorial powers.

Strong men get into power by promising what they have no intention of delivering. Democrats, both small-d and capital-D, actually mean to deliver on their promises, sometimes they fail or succeed only partially. An unfulfilled promise is not a lie when the politician persists in trying to achieve what he or she promised. In a democracy, compromises are not lies, they are how democracy works. I suppose you could also say Trump was telling the truth when he promised to do harm to millions of Americans; he meant to do these things and will still try to do them if he can. He promised to shut down whole departments of government. Not a lie: he has installed department heads dedicated to making poisons flow into our water and air again, to re-accelerate climate change, to put the internet firmly into the hands of corporations and restrict its use by the rest of us, to keep poverty wages below the poverty line, to re-accelerate health insurance rate hikes and make it harder for sick people to get care. He’s honest about the things he plans to do, but he lies about how those things will affect us. He promises we will get tired of winning when he intends to restrict the winning to himself and his class of rich people, powerful people, the kinds of people his prosperity gospel preachers say are blessed by God because they are rich. Is that a lie? Most con games are lies sold with partial truths. The way the Nazis “persuaded" the German people. The way Putin manipulated his way into dictatorship. It’s a con game and one political party in America seems very adept at it and very comfortable with it. It’s exactly what the Republicans want. It's a con game. This is why they nominated a con man to run it for them.

No political party or movement or figure has lied so massively and so constantly as this Republican president and this Republican Party. It’s as if the Russians had grafted their fascist DNA onto the Republican Party, along with their aggressive use of lies and wholehearted willingness to believe lies and rationalize them. As Republican Duncan Hunter said about Trump: “He’s an asshole but he’s our asshole.” This is tribalism. This is an absence of values. This is what Orwell wrote about in 1984, a system turned upside down and inside out. This is what Sinclair Lewis wrote about in It Can’t Happen Here. It didn’t happen in the 1930s, but it appears to have succeeded in this decade.

Russiagate: Do We Follow the Money or Follow the Dead Bodies?

Follow the Money:

From USAToday (middle America's newspaper) there's this story about Trump's fear that his finances will be looked into. It's a rational fear, but it's making him irrational.

"The [Mueller] investigation could shine renewed light on eyebrow-raising deals from Trump’s past, such as his 2008 sale of a South Florida mansion to Russian tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million or the international financing behind a condo-hotel he developed with foreign partners in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.

"It could also pierce the increasing secrecy around who is buying real estate from Trump. A USA TODAY investigation last month revealed that 70% of Trump real estate sales since he won the GOP nomination were to secretive shell companies, compared to 4% in the two years before that. The clear shift to those kinds of purchases, which help obscure the identities of the buyers, raise questions about the source of profits that ultimately flow to the President because he has not fully divested from his companies."

There's also this USAToday story about Trump's financial dealings and the cookie crumbs leading to Moscow.

Follow the Dead Bodies:

From BuzzFeed, there is this story about the latest murder of a witness before he could testify in the Russia investigation.

"Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was murdered in Washington, DC, on the eve of a planned meeting with the US Justice Department, according to two FBI agents whose assertions cast new doubts on the US government’s official explanation of his death.

"Mikhail Lesin’s battered body was discovered in his Dupont Circle hotel room on the morning of Nov. 5, 2015, with blunt-force injuries to the head, neck, and torso. After an almost yearlong "comprehensive investigation," a federal prosecutor announced last October that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls “after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.” His death was ruled an "accident," and prosecutors closed the case.

"But the two FBI agents — as well as a third agent and a serving US intelligence officer — said Lesin was actually bludgeoned to death. None of these officials were directly involved in the government’s investigation, but they said they learned about it from colleagues who were.

"“Lesin was beaten to death,” one of the FBI agents said. “I would implore you to say as much. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can't get into.”"

This article from The Atlantic covers the testimony of William Browder regarding the murder-in-custody of his lawyer, which prompted the Magnitsky Act sanctions in the first place.

"There are approximately ten thousand officials in Russia working for Putin who are given instructions to kill, torture, kidnap, extort money from people, and seize their property. Before the Magnitsky Act, Putin could guarantee them impunity and this system of illegal wealth accumulation worked smoothly. However, after the passage of the Magnitsky Act, Putin’s guarantee disappeared. The Magnitsky Act created real consequences outside of Russia and this created a real problem for Putin and his system of kleptocracy.

"For these reasons, Putin has stated publicly that it was among his top foreign policy priorities to repeal the Magnitsky Act and to prevent it from spreading to other countries. Since its passage in 2012, the Putin regime has gone after everybody who has been advocating for the Magnitsky Act.

"One of my main partners in this effort was Boris Nemtsov. Boris testified in front of the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, the Canadian Parliament, and others to make the point that the Magnitsky Act was a “pro-Russian” piece of legislation because it narrowly targeted corrupt officials and not the Russian people. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov was murdered on the bridge in front of the Kremlin.

"Boris Nemtsov’s protégé, Vladimir Kara-Murza, also traveled to law-making bodies around the world to make a similar case. After Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, was added to the Magnitsky List in December of 2016, Vladimir was poisoned. He suffered multiple organ failure, went into a coma and barely survived.

"The lawyer who represented Sergei Magnitsky’s mother, Nikolai Gorokhov, has spent the last six years fighting for justice. This spring, the night before he was due in court to testify about the state cover up of Sergei Magnitsky’s murder, he was thrown off the fourth floor of his apartment building. Thankfully he survived and has carried on in the fight for justice."

And while Putin is whacking witnesses and Trump is trying to kill investigations, the Republican apparatus is busy cooking up bogus stories like the one Seth Rich's family is filing suit over. Any time there is a murder the Right will seek to pin it on Democrats.

Trump admires Putin. Trump envies Putin for his ability to assert power however he wishes. Putin is Trump’s role model. Trump would like to change America to make it more like Russia, more of a brutal autocracy in which the elite loots the nation’s wealth and evades the taxes everyone else pays. So what else is new? We already knew all this. Trump has planned all along to turn the United States into a kleptocracy.

A new piece from VOX about Trump's plans for American kleptocracy.

Putin’s Russia is not a free market economy but a kleptocracy, in which Putin skims billions off of every transaction and every deal, in which nobody has wealth or power without Putin taking his cut. What happens to this massive wealth is not good for Russians because it is parked offshore. A lot of it appears to have been laundered through high end real estate transactions here in the U.S., some of them via Trump and Kushner and their associates. (Trumps Commerce Secretary owned and ran a Cypriot bank that was one of the favorite money-laundries used by Putin’s oligarch cronies.) Think of these helpful real estate tycoons as fences receiving stolen goods, in this case those goods are the wealth of an entire country. You might say this isn’t important to Americans, that it may even be good for Americans because they are parking their billions here. The danger is the corruption of our economy, and the corruption of our democracy if our president is a willing money launderer and a co-conspirator with a global criminal gang.

Is it safe for us to think of all these billions being invested in U.S. real estate as a good thing with no down side? The wealth that the Nazis stole from the Jews of Germany and Europe was rationalized to the German people as a confiscation that would benefit them, but it corrupted them and it murdered six million Jews/liberals/gays/minorities; millions of German gentiles also died in the catastrophe that ensued.

Our New Kleptocracy

The Guardian has a more detailed picture of how millions looted by Russian oligarchs (mobsters) has been laundered through high end real estate in the U.S.

"The ties between Trump family real estate deals and Russian money interests are attracting growing interest from the justice department’s special counsel, Robert Mueller, as he seeks to determine whether the Trump campaign collaborated with Russia to distort the outcome of the 2016 race. Mueller has reportedly expanded his inquiry to look at real estate deals involving the Trump Organization, as well as Kushner’s financing.

"Leviev, a global tycoon known as the “king of diamonds”, was a business partner of the Russian-owned company Prevezon Holdings that was at the center of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit launched in New York. Under the leadership of US attorney Preet Bharara, who was fired by Trump in March, prosecutors pursued Prevezon for allegedly attempting to use Manhattan real estate deals to launder money stolen from the Russian treasury.

"The scam had been uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, an accountant who died in 2009 in a Moscow jail in suspicious circumstances. US sanctions against Russia imposed after Magnitsky’s death were a central topic of conversation at the notorious Trump Tower meeting last June between Kushner, Donald Trump Jr, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin."

Con men use a trick called the three card monte or the bait and switch. One hand distracts the eye while the theft is accomplished by the other. Trump isn’t the only con man in this story. Putin is a thief of monumental proportions. He’s been looting his country for decades, laundering the money he’s stolen through high end real estate worldwide. Trump and Kushner are either happy collaborators or well-paid stooges. Are the Russians invading our country? Not in the strictest sense, but they are attacking it, with help.

They, Trump and his Russian friends, stole our election, or helped steal it, which seems less damaging than, say, invading us bodily. But how many die in an invasion? We’ve never been invaded so we don’t know. But Russia has been invaded a few times. The last time was World War II. Millions of Russians died. Russian casualties in WWII are hard to pin down. Estimates say around 9 million dead and 23 million wounded or wasted by disease brought on by war and deprivation. Big numbers.

Estimates by our CBO indicate around 22 million Americans will lose their access to healthcare if Trumpcare becomes law and Obamacare goes away. They are slipping it to us three-card-monte-fashion, while we are distracted by mass rallies and daily revelations about Trump administration crimes and daily Twitter tantrums by the president. It’s estimated 45,000 more Americans will die if deprived of healthcare, so only a half million will die in the decade covered by the estimate, but millions would get sicker and stay sicker and die younger and probably die bankrupt in the process––the way our ancestors did. Prior to the New Deal and the Great Society of FDR and LBJ old people died poor and poor people died young. Democratic policies ended that, temporarily it seems, because the Republicans have fought back, making things more dysfunctional and more ruinously expensive for the least fortunate among us. This is the reality in Russia, where the vast majority are poorer every year and the life expectancy is 13 years less than here in the US––and ten years less than China. Trump role model as national leader is Putin, who has degraded life in Russia during his rule.

Don’t kid yourself: Trump would love to lower our life expectancy by war as well as by deprivation. He loves seeing things go boom but slow death also seems to please him. Judging by the first six months of his rule the goal is to do maximum harm to the maximum number by every means available. It might happen if the gang running this game are able to fire the investigators coming after them. And if they are able to screw 23 million Americans out of their healthcare. If they do they will call it a big win and hold rallies where we can all celebrate our degradation.

How Trump Makes Us More Like Russia (Poor Us)

Why are we focused on Russia? "Trump won, shut up." "Why does it matter if Russians helped him?” It matters because Trump’s financial and business history is deeply entangled with Russian criminality, and the criminals who have helped him preserve an appearance of wealth for three decades will demand something in return. Like anyone who gets in bed with mobsters, Trump is being forced to pay them back (to borrow his word) “hugely." He may be paying them with our money, or he may be paying them back by dismantling America's global superiority, enabling Russia to fill that vacuum. Or he may be paying them back by grafting the kleptocratic Russian model onto our economy. Putin the kleptocrat has plenty of admirers here, rich people who see our economy as something to be looted rather than run properly and fairly. Investigators are following the money.

This Bloomberg article follows the rubles down the years through Trump Inc.

"The Post noted that the investigation also includes "suspicious financial activity" involving "Russian operatives." The New York Times was more specific in its account, saying that Mueller is looking at whether Trump associates laundered financial payoffs from Russian officials by channeling them through offshore accounts."

Trump promises everything, but how much does he deliver? Ask the people who enrolled their futures in Trump University. Now he's taken that con game to new heights via the White House, where his promises affect Americans' trust in their democratic system and institutions. Money Magazine reports on the Trump jobs promises that were hollow.

"Since his election, Trump has frequently used broad claims to take credit for jobs, especially those for blue collar workers, that the numbers don't bear out."

The massive advantages of people at the top of the economy used to be tempered somewhat by our democratic traditions and norms. But what if those norms and regulations were removed? What if the whole point of the economy was to enrich the very rich and bugger the rest of us? What if working people were the only ones paying for the roads and the bridges and the systems that keep our economy running, leaving the 1% off the hook? The money managers for the rich do a very good job of helping their clients avoid obligations the rest of us have to shoulder. Like those Russian oligarchs who operate as global free agents with no obligations and no restrictions.

The Nation reports on how this scam is operated.

" Part of the inequality problem, however, is that trillions of dollars are being shifted off the ledger, hidden from measurement and taxation. Some of this “hidden wealth of nations,” as Gabriel Zucman calls it, is kept in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Panama that function as secrecy jurisdictions with minimal transparency or reporting requirements. Trillions more has been hidden in trusts and other complex financial arrangements available only to the very wealthy. New research suggests that households in the top 0.01 percent, those with wealth over $40 million, evade 25 to 30 percent of person income and wealth taxes—about 10 times more than the general population.

"This process is aided and abetted by professional wealth managers who facilitate and lubricate the process of hiding wealth. Many of them work in private family offices that serve wealthy families. These are not mom-and-pop financial planners who help protect families from running out of money. We’re talking about the well-compensated professionals that serve the richest one-tenth of one percent of Americans."

But getting back to Trump and Russia––who has been floating Trump while he runs his grift on Americans? Fortune magazine reports.

"Trump said in the deposition that Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me,” and that he was teaming with Bayrock on other planned ventures in Moscow. The only Russians who likely had the resources and political connections to sponsor such ambitious international deals were the corrupt “oligarchs.” Although Trump claimed that negative publicity about him from O’Brien killed the deals, he still insisted that “we are actually going to be [in Russia] fairly soon.” When asked if he had “concerns about investing in Russia,” Trump answered “No.”

“...The plaintiffs in a 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, among others, alleged in the civil lawsuit that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes. The lawsuit cites as a “Concrete example of their crime, Trump SoHo, [which] stands 454 feet tall at Spring and Varick, where it also stands monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.””

How has Trump gotten away with this? It's complicated and complication makes criminals harder to jail. Complex schemes are likelier to keep the money they've stolen. Look at how the financiers who collapsed our economy evaded jail. Trump's genius is in deception and evasion and big talk. He took the schtick on TV and got big ratings. We loved Trump like we loved Tony Soprano, because he wasn't hurting us personally... so we thought. Enough Americans loved that and bought it to make him a viable candidate in the Republican Party where that kind of scheme is accepted and admired. Where successful criminals are Winners and victims are Losers. Millions of Americans love throwing their money away at casinos and investing in bogus schemes and this scheme was bogus and entertaining. It's not new. What's new is the elevation of flim-flam and racketeering into the White House. If he hasn't yet fully criminalized the White House he has left enough of a criminal trail for investigators to follow. Trump fired Comey and Preet Bharara for investigating him. Will he fire Mueller? Can he? Will we let him? Maybe the Republican Congress will give him time to finish the job.

The New Yorker reports on the deliberate complexity of this kind of crime.

"Donald Trump has long deployed what might be called the chaff approach to evading legal scrutiny in his business dealings. Parts of his labyrinthine business holdings seem to be likely targets of investigation. He was sued for civil fraud over promises made to students of Trump University (a case that was settled after Trump became President). He talked on CNBC about the need to pay bribes when doing business overseas. His Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, was in violation of anti-money-laundering laws when Trump owned it. He has had ties to New York Mafia figures. Yet he has never been indicted nor, for all we know, did any prosecutor consider pursuing a criminal case. Perhaps this is because the structure of Trump’s business has been, like chaff tossed out of a bomber, a remarkably effective defense. There is no one thing to look at when investigating Donald Trump. There’s not one company, there are hundreds, possibly thousands. Every deal he does has its own legal structure, its unique set of participants and business model. Rarely—and less often in the past decade—is Trump the primary owner and visionary of a project. More typically, he has sold a license to put his name on someone else’s project.”

What we are witnessing is a massive criminal takeover of our country, including the public sector––the government––and the economy. While they make us look over there (sparkly object: tweets, empty promises, rallies, boasts, showbiz) they quietly pick our pockets. The GOP Congress is fully engaged: promising Bigger and Better and Cheaper while quietly removing healthcare benefits and guarantees for pre-existing conditions and removing the systems that keep the poor covered and regulations that protect average people from being preyed upon and poisoned and impoverished. And they are doing this to deliver trillions in tax cuts to the top 1%. They are looting America the way Putin has looted Russia.

PBS's Frontline reports on how Putin has looted the Russian economy.

Russian mobsters have been looting the Russian economy since the 1990s when Putin took over. The ones doing it are licensed to loot by Putin himself, who gets a cut of everything. The looted trillions need a place to hide and some of that cash has been hidden in and laundered through Donald Trump’s many failing and dicy enterprises. Because nobody else would finance Trump. The banks refused. When the banks won’t help you, you turn to the Mob. Trump appears to be fully mobbed up.

But the larger pattern is more disturbing: the entire Republican financial scheme, including the healthcare “reform” and tax “reform” and deregulation and reinventing government itself, all seem to be modeled on the old scenario of mobsters taking over your business and looting it. Where is there money? Find it, take it, leave the system that money was operating in as a dysfunctional shell. They are operating on our national economy the way diners work on crab legs at Red Lobster: cracking the shell and sucking out the meat. What’s left is garbage.

They look at an economy full of hard working people and they see the workers as a liability not an asset. Dump them. But fleece them first. Ditch all the promises made to them. Suck out all the benefits and loot their retirement funds. Then replace them with robots, as Carrier is doing in Indiana with the money Trump gave them to save jobs.

Trump and his Republican friends in Congress are hollowing America out, using the Russian model. Like rodents looking for food supplies or missiles seeking targets, they are finding all the pockets of money being used to keep the system running and putting it into the pockets of their richest friends. Because they and their rich friends don’t need that system, they are rich, they are neatly invested offshore. They, like Putin and any of his Russian mobster/international gangster friends, don’t need America except as a source of loot. The America they do need is one with a pliant, obedient, cheap and desperate workforce, eager to mow their vast lawns and do their laundry and clean their homes and wait silently at table. To do the work and expect very little. Who cares if they die younger? Let them die the moment they can’t do the work. The way they do in Russia.

So it really is about Russia. Very much so.

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.