Even with the Trump/Russia corruption investigation news that we have been marinating in, how much do most Americans know about Vladimir Putin, why he is adored by our president, and why that is terrible or our country?
President Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson not because his brief tenure was a portrait of failure and ineptitude, nor because he eviscerated the diplomatic corps and hollowed out the foreign service, nor even for being credibly reported as having called his boss “a fing moron.”
He booted him ignominiously via Twitter because he dared to criticize Putin’s Russia, in support of the prime minister of England, our great friend and ally, for poisoning a former spy and his daughter.
Tillerson said he had no idea why he was fired. But we do.
Who is the richest man in the world? Do you think it is Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the Waltons, perhaps the Kochs, Warren Buffet or some Saudi oil baron?
Actually, Putin is considered by many to be the richest man in the world. His net worth is estimated to range as high as $100 billion, although as with so much about Putin that lurks in the shadows, a precise number is not easy to confirm. But there is no doubt he is an utterly ruthless don dominating an economy that is really an unimaginably vast criminal enterprise.
So, how did this happen?
In the Soviet Union, most major industry was owned collectively, by the people, or by the state, if you prefer. After the demise of that economic system, some method of privatization had to be instituted. Boris Yeltsin, with lots of encouragement from some right-wing American think tanks and clandestine operatives, gave over 50 percent of the gross domestic product to 17 friends, parceling out industries like pastries around the plutocratic dining room table.
Wonder where these “Russian billionaires” you always hear about came from? That’s where.
They were called “kleptocrats” and the people hated them, and still do. They didn’t invest their filthy lucre in the Russian economy. They stashed it in Swiss bank accounts and wherever else they could hide it around the world.
Then Putin leveraged his KGB skills into the presidency and the kleptocracy was complete. The entire country is a mafia pyramid. Putin has a piece of all the meaningful action. And he enforces compliance and obeisance with any murderous means necessary.
If you start a business in Russia and it has promise of success, you will find that the government is your partner and its involvement and cooptation devolves all the way to the top where Putin presides.
Trump’s main business model by the early 2000s other than swindling gullible American consumers with crappy steaks, rot-gut vodka, and worthless real estate courses, was to build ostentatious properties in unlikely spots, like Baku or Panama, mostly with other people’s money, with no concern for how they got it. He’d slap his name on a tower and sell luxury units to anyone who put their rubles on a plane and brought them there.
Read the Paradise Papers. When Trump says he has no business in Russia that is not to say he has no business with Russians, and if you have business with Russians you have business with Putin.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders said, “The major issue of our time is the rapid movement toward international oligarchy in which a handful of billionaires own and control a significant part of the global economy. The Paradise Papers shows how these billionaires and multinational corporations get richer by hiding their wealth and profits and avoid paying their fair share of taxes.”
Global oligarchs. Their countries mean little to them other than as bastions of power from which they can extract wealth as they consort with one another astride the world extractive economic matrix.
Trump, our homegrown global oligarch president, is happy to be a lackey to the world crime boss. Putin is the one dude whose pocket he’s glad to wallow in because he is starry-eyed about all the dough in there. You will never hear him utter a negative word about Vlad and it is safe to say he is in envious awe of him.
Recently, he even declined to criticize Putin’s blatant anti-Semitic allegations that the Jews, not the Russians, compromised the U.S. elections. What are you gonna believe, the consensus of 17 U.S. security agencies, or the iron-fisted ruler of the country they all say helped you to power?
Our most exemplary former president, Jimmy Carter, correctly identifies that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”
If you support Trump, you support government as kleptocracy and international oligarchy. Own it.
And if you are among those who thinks Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in our political process is a smokescreen for Hillary Clinton’s disastrous campaign, can we at least agree that the enemy is international oligarchy and the Putin/Trump axis needs to be exposed?
Jonathan Klate, of Amherst, writes about spiritual consciousness and current affairs.
