It's Just Business, Folks...
It’s Just Business, Folks…
I finally get it. The picture has gone from amorphous to fuzzy to clear; the rhetoric translated from bombastic to a narrower focus: the Trump administration, family and friends are not political, they’re in business, and the business is making as much money as they possibly can on the backs of the gullible American public and taxpayers. All the rest, you know, like running the country, is just a front for making a buck, or in this case, billions of them.
Appointments and advisors like Tillerson, Pruitt, Kushner, on and on ad nauseum, are all business people with no political experience or knowledge. They are there to make a profit from this presidency and for this president. Bannon and his ilk are a smokescreen, designed to upset liberals, but make no mistake, Trump’s real focus is making money, and not for the U.S. Treasury, but himself and that of his pals. The Kushner family’s push for real estate investment from Chinese investors started with one of Trump’s first orders, renewal of the EB-5 visa program, which allows foreigners to become US citizens if they invest $500,000 or more. Jared Kushner oversees China policy. This goes way beyond conflict of interest.
Stocking the EPA with industry executives instead of scientists, using his personal residence Mar-a-lago as a weekend golf getaway, with an occasional head of state showing up to be wined and dined, while doubling the entry fees for new members and costing the country millions in unnecessary security fees for himself and his family, who are flying around the world making Trump family business deals, from China to Russia to Dubai. Tax cuts for the wealthy, coming from healthcare and his new tax plan, along with the rollback of legislation environmental and financial that allows corporations free rein to profit and pillage on a grand scale are all huge money machines. There’s so much it’s beyond my meager resources and your patience to list all the many ways Trump, his family and cronies are getting very rich at the expense of all of us.
Then there’s the tax return thing. Watching Sally Yates and James Clapper testify, it all became clear. Trump’s tax returns are lousy with Russian money. Even his son Eric brags about how they didn’t need American investments (since wary American banks won’t do business with them) because for years they’ve had all they needed from Russia. Of course Trump knew about Flynn and all the others with Russian connections. He didn’t need Sally Yates to tell him and didn’t appreciate it, either.
That’s the tip of the Russian iceberg, and it’s a big one. Interference in the election and collusion between Flynn, Page, Manafort and many others is obvious and the complicated web will hopefully be unraveled in the months to come. There is much, much more. You think Michael Flynn could have been blackmailed? Just think about the blackmail implications when the president himself owes his soul to Russian money. Now THAT’s blackmail material par excellence.
The smokescreen Trump has devised to cloud his activities is insistence on “fake news”, whether it’s from the established media or the intelligence community. This campaign started long before the inauguration and for good reason. Like propaganda we’ve seen in the past, he thinks if he screams “fake news” to hide his nefarious activities long and loud enough, people will buy it. Sadly, some of his deluded supporters still do. They don’t seem to know much about economics. It’s a shell game of “don’t watch the man behind the curtain.”
No wonder Trump doesn’t know or care about American history, tradition, or how to behave and act like a president. He’s not in this to make America great again, he’s made the biggest deal of his career with the biggest financial payoff. He’s in it for the money. This deal has no “art”, only artifice. It’s a blatant snatch and grab. Not simply impeachable or just conflict of interest, but mired in the reeking territory of treason.
But, it’s all just business, folks. Silly rabbits.
Raven Grimaldi
