Trumputin's Mob Masters Own the White House, but for How Long?

By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News

26 August 18

 

he Mueller Wave of crony convictions and confessions has barely begun.

But one thing is clear: the term “collusion” vastly understates Trump’s oneness with Vladimir Putin and the Russian Mob.

Collusion implies two independent parties working together.

Trump is not separate from Putin. Trump is Putin’s employee. His debtor. His servant. His baby mama. Or, in CIA terms, Putin’s asset. Since the 1980s.

The tsunami of proof ranges from Craig Unger’s remarkable new House of Trump, House of Putin to David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse Than You Think and much more. (For a full hour of Unger’s narrative, hear this week’s “Green Power & Wellness Show.”)

Here is some of it:

Trump inherited a huge fortune from his mob-connected father (Trump’s mob-connected grandfather ran a brothel in the California gold country).

Donald was apparently born void of business ability. According to Unger, Trump’s massive over-expansion into Atlantic City in the 1990s left him $4 billion in debt, replete with six bankruptcies.

As no legitimate sources would fund him, Trump turned to the Russian mob, then looting the natural resources of a massive landmass. That epic cash flow enhanced its regular lines of extortion, prostitution, gambling, etc.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in flight capital sought access to the Western banking system. But to get it, the Russian mobsters and oligarchs needed to launder their money. They turned to Trump and his real estate-based cash washing machine. They also began cultivating him as a political asset.

Unger says more than 1300 real estate transactions ensued that, according to BuzzFeed, averaged $1.2 million per unit and “had the characteristics of money-laundering deals.” Buyers with hard money used shell corporations that were barely scrutinized, if at all. In a single legendary deal, one oligarch allegedly plunked down $6 million in cash for five condos.

Trump Tower, at 721 Fifth Avenue, became a dormitory/nerve center for the Russian underworld. Trump’s “comeback” was fueled with rubles they wanted hidden. Having stiffed a legion of creditors, Trump himself went from being dead broke to doing big business with scads of cash.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin, the Russian mob became a de facto agency of the Russian government, and vice versa. With Putin at the top, Russia was (and is now) “a mafia state.” Says Unger: “In Moscow there’s no Wall Street, no Goldman Sachs. If you have any financial inclination, you go to work for the mob. That’s where the money is.”

With his roots in the old KGB, Putin transferred the new FSB secret police into a wing of the mafia. Its minions soon filled as many as a third of the roughly 300 units at Trump Tower (calculations are difficult because Trump regularly lies about how big his buildings really are). In the 1990s, when the FBI went looking for a renegade Russian mobster, that’s where they found him. “If anybody should not have a security clearance,” says Unger, “it’s Donald Trump.”

“We’ve been attacked three times,” Unger adds. “Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and now this. After Pearl Harbor and 9/11 they didn’t take over the White House.”

Much of the mob’s cash flow comes from Ukraine, which depends on Russia’s gas, which is sold at below-market prices to insider oligarchs. There, Paul Manafort installed a pro-Putin regime (since overthrown). Unger estimates the annual skim at about $750 million. During one of the earlier, very deadly coups, a Manafort daughter famously tweeted that “Dad has blood on his hands.”

Other Trump associates share similar roots. According to the NY Daily News, the grandfather of White House flunky Kellyanne Conway allegedly was Jimmy “The Brute” DiNatale, described by law enforcement authorities as a “significant criminal associate” of Philadelphia mobster Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo.

To keep Donald in line, Vlady may or may not have incriminating sex tapes to hold over Donald’s private parts. But they would pale before a real accounting of the Trumputin money trail.

Trump’s entire economic being depends on Putin’s rubles. He could bankrupt Trump with just one nyet.

The Russian people are not our enemy. Nor, technically, is the Russian government. We are grateful for not being in a shooting or nuclear war with them.

But with Trump in the White House kissing Putin’s ring in the Kremlin, we’re being colonized by Russia’s mobster oligarchs working in sync with our own corporate oligarchs.

It’s mostly about oil and gas, with coal and nukes as critical diversions away from what the Russo-American oligarchy fears most: renewable energy.

But the Russians did not steal America’s elections in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004. That was the Bush Family, with deep CIA roots, guided by Karl Rove, linked to the House of Saud.

The Russians did not flip the US Congress and 1000 public offices from the Democrats to the GOP from 2008-2016. That was the Koch Brothers’ hugely funded GOP attack team. They stripped the voter rolls, flipped electronic voting machines, bought judges, stole the government … and are poised to do it again in 2018.

The Corporate Democrats continue to say and do nothing about a totally corrupted electoral system. Even this week, in a highly dubious Congressional race “won” by the GOP in central Ohio, the Dems have failed to even speak with election protection expert Bob Fitrakis and the seasoned team of local activists all too familiar with how these critical seats are stolen.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton bought the Democratic Party by paying its $20 million debt. She put it on an allowance and took the nomination. She trashed Bernie Sanders and the young social democrats who could have put her in the White House. She’s still said nothing about the utter theft of a presidential race she won by three million votes. Unless the party is radically changed, it will be deja vu in 2018 and 2020.

The Corporate Democrats’ contempt for Trump’s “deplorables” is exceeded only by its fear of the grassroots left. Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and their ilk have opposed social and regulatory policies that date to the New Deal. They’re clearly more comfortable with Trump in the White House than Bernie Sanders.

But the Russians came at 2016 from another angle. Backing their Manchurian Mobster, they toyed with social media, faked the news. With the GOP regulars, they hacked voter registration rolls, databases, electronic tabulators and more in at least 21 states. They laundered money through the National Rifle Association and Mitch McConnell. They rebooted Dick Nixon’s “Dirty Trickster” playbook (previously perfected by Rove and Dick Cheney) and put their own made man in the White House.

His mission:

• Boost oil and gas prices to hand-funnel cash to the Russo-American fossil fuel kleptocracy;


• Shred environmental regulations to monetize the destruction of human and planetary health;


• Destroy Western trade and state relationships for Russian benefit;


• Gut military alliances to exalt Putin’s global standing;


• Flood the internet with trolls, bots, phishers, hackers, liars, manipulators, Foxists, etc. to trash grassroots democracy worldwide;


• Enthrone a deranged criminal psycho/sociopath to distract the media and public from all of the above.

None of this rises to the level of a “philosophy.” It’s all about the venal theft of public resources for the private profit of a power/greed-crazed few.

For American corporatists like the Kochs and so many others, Trump’s insane tweet-storms hide the further looting of our air, water, food supply, tax code, educational system, public housing, natural resources, pipeline proliferation, etc. Our Social Security and Medicare funds are next in line to feed ever-more military madness. Likewise obscene handouts to coal and nuke burners (while assaulting renewables with taxes, tariffs and more). In short: Trump has escalated Robber Baron rape from Reagan to the ridiculous.

For Trump’s mobster masters, the bonanza extends to pipelines through Ukraine (like the ones through the Dakotas), mass slaughter in Syria and Yemen, Europe flooded with refugees, an enhanced drug trade, global destabilization, Putinic enshrinement, and more.

The common denominator is always private profit at public expense.

And the ultimate enablers are always the Corporate Democrats. These Weimar Wimps are astute at just one thing: caving to the far right.

Next up is that fifth Supreme Court seat for the corporate thugs. Are you ready for the Dems to crumble yet again?

Team Schumer/Pelosi is always ready to assault social democracy and those who bring it. Their endless fundraising emails howl at Trump’s antics but never push a humanist vision that might impinge on corporate profits. They’re still unwilling to speak the truth of Trump’s mafia roots to the power of the corporatocracy.

But we are not them. And the supremely arrogant Donald may have crossed too many lines.

As long as Trump serves his don Putin while the Corporate Democrats wallow in fake opposition, there’ll be plenty of cover for the Russo-American kleptocracy to rape and pillage our dying planet.

But Nature does bat last. Let’s make sure She swings real soon.

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Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman’s Life & Death Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to the Trumpocalypse will soon be published via Solartopia.org. His “California Solartopia” show airs at KPFK-Pacifica in Los Angeles. “Green Power & Wellness” is at prn.fm.