Wednesday, May 9, 2018

The Trump Presidency: Oligarchs, Billionaires, Corporations, and Porn Stars

The Trump Presidency: Oligarchs, Billionaires, Corporations, and Porn Stars:

"If you think the point of the Trump presidency is hatred of women and people who are not white, I couldn’t blame you. The evidence appears to be ample. Just this week we heard Attorney General Jeff Sessions promise to take away the children of refugees fleeing violence in Central America who cross into the United States to seek asylum. Put mothers in detention and take away their babies. Hard to find a case more demonstrative of performative hatred. But the hate is not the point of this presidency. It’s a tool for protecting the massive looting of the public commons currently under way, and most importantly, the shady network of Russian oligarchs, U.S. billionaires, Kremlin cronies, hapless lawyers, and privately held corporations that brought Donald J. Trump to power. The U.S. billionaires and privately held corporations are in it for the looting. Some publicly traded Fortune 500 companies are along for the ride. The Kremlin and its oligarchs are in it for the chaos Trump has wreaked upon Russia’s geopolitical foe, the United States of America. And the Republican Congress not only knows on which side its bread is buttered; its members know who’s doing the buttering. That would be the U.S. billionaires and privately-held corporations invested in Trump’s Plunder Project™. On April 27, the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee released a report that basically said, yeah, the Trump campaign had contacts with some Russians. So what? No evidence of collusion. And, by the way, the FBI sucks for having collected potential evidence of a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign and agents of a foreign government. But despite the best efforts of the House Intelligence Committee, led by its sycophantic chairman, Devin Nunes, each day brings new revelations that suggest conspiratorial relationships between Russian oligarchs and the president’s closest associates. And you don’t get to be an oligarch in Russia without the approval of the Kremlin’s top dog, the authoritarian Vladimir Putin."