Time Is Running Out.......

We are in trouble, and if we don't act soon, our free 

way of life will disappear..

All the negative things that so many have foretold with the ascension of the Trump machine are happening and it portends an ugly result.

The full panoply of Russian activity and subversion is becoming clear, and what were at first tenuous threads to the Trump people are being revealed as much more substantive.   In fact the relationships that are being revealed are so antithetical to what we have always believed were American values, that it is breathtaking.

The level of lying, misrepresentation, obfuscation and distraction is constant and at a high level.  As soon as reporters or critics point to questionable and downright illegal activities by the Trump Administration, the immediate response is to distract, change the subject or revive old tropes about the Clintons or Democrats.

The House Intelligence Committee farce; the double standard and crass shell game the administration is playing is not fooling anyone, but the continually muted flaccid response from Republicans is remarkable.  When will all these people remember that they are Americans first before Republicans.  Our democracy is truly in danger.

The Russians are slowly, successfully dismantling our democratic institutions with the complicity of the Trump Administration.  The Administration itself is slowly but surely dismantling all the safeguards set in place by the previous administrations to protect us, the citizens.  Instead the ‘preferred citizens’ are now corporate interests and greedy billionaires.  Eventually the populist promises will wind up biting the believers in the ass, and then, maybe we can recapture our democracy from the clutches of those whose goal is to dismantle the ‘administrative state’.

There are so many potentially egregious, impeachable actions taking place at every turn, that we are all being numbed by it.  Guess what folks, lying is not OK!  Stonewalling investigations and raising of red herrings is not OK!  Changing our democracy into a strongman authoritarian ruling modality is not OK!  Not releasing tax returns, continuing to maintain economic controls and management of personal interests which is in violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution is not OK!

And now, look at the ‘Presidents’ advisors:  Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump—nepotism, please!  All the unqualified people running parts of the government now who subscribe to the President and Bannon’s plan to deconstruct the government seem to have a free hand to do their damage.

I am certain that the founding fathers are spinning in their graves at the metamorphosis taking place in our beloved republic.

Connecting the Dots

I have become a fan of Rachel Maddow.  I really like her opinionated and passionate style, but what I really love is her ability to tell a story.  As with any good storyteller, she begins with something that at first seems innocuous until she weaves all the elements of the story together, carefully and skillfully , until the overall picture  begins to come into focus.

That is what she did last night on her program on MSNBC.  Starting with a backgrounder on Bechtel, the giant infrastructure company that completes huge projects around the world, which evolved from an interesting history of the Seatac Narrows Bridge in Washington , she enumerated the scope of the companies activities worldwide.  Then she focused on a particular project Bechtel was bidding on in Azerbijian. 

Azerbijian has become very wealthy because of it’s oil reserves and with lots of money, wanted to build a huge road infrastructure throughout the country.  When Bechtel’s bid of $4-5 Million per kilometer of road was rejected in favor of another contractor’s bid of $18 Million per kilometer, Rachel asked the obvious question:  Why would Azerbijian choose to pay 3 times the cost to this alternate construction company?  Turns out the alternate construction company was a front for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the largest purveyor/exporter of terrorism in the world right now.  Hmmmm.

So you might ask why Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has a construction company…..well, it turns out that using front companies is how they launder money out of IRAN to support their worldwide terrorism activities.  You see, the Azerbijiani Transportation Minister responsible for letting those contracts pays all that money to the Revolutionary Guard of Iran’s Construction company which is then free of any restriction to distribute that money abroad.  So he is supporting the terrorist activity……and of course is making a huge ‘fee’ while doing it.  This is the quintessential definition of a corrupt business practice, not to mention supporting a terrorist organization.

Then Rachel turned to her most salient part of the story.  It turns out that Donald Trump, up until a month after the election, was a business partner with the Azerbijiani Transportation Minister’s family to build the new Trump Tower in Baku, the capital of Azerbijian.  He even sent Ivanka there in 2014 to manage the deal.  The only fly in this ointment is that the new hotel was being constructed in a place that was probably the least desirable location in the city, far from the place where a tourist hotel of the caliber of a Trump project would expect to be seen.  It was in the middle of some railroad yards and surrounded by highways with no ‘off ramps’ to get to the building.  There are some sketchy financial records that were part of Trumps presidential filings prior to the election that shows he received several million dollars from this project before he backed out of the deal in December of 2016.  What do you suppose was going on there?

Is it too much to surmise that Trump was doing business with a family that has the reputation of being the ‘Corleones of the Caspian’, as described in Foreign Policy Magazine in 2014?   This inexplicable project which was inexplicably abandoned 1 month after the election, makes it highly likely that Mr. Trump was doing business with a corrupt, bribery ridden supporter of terrorist activities worldwide.

It is against US Law to do business with people, companies or countries in which simple due diligence shows that their activities are sanctioned, corrupt and illegal.  Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Law, you cannot go into business with people like this—it is punishable with jail time…..and yet he did.

How many other deals like this are there around the world that the Trump Organization has or is still participating in?  How many of their business partners are in the business of laundering money, paying outrageous sums for projects that make no sense, supporting front organizations that support international terrorism?  (How about the $30 Million house in Palm Beach that the Trumps bought and then immediately sold to a Russian for $90 Million without even opening the front door, and then saw it demolished?    A quick $60 Million for moving money around?)

This is just the tip of the iceberg friends.

And so, we see the dots being connected by journalistic professionals who are doing real digging.  This President’s financial records must be examined.  The American people need to understand the moral or amoral motivations of this man before it is too late.

And I encourage all of you to watch Rachel Maddow.  She is perhaps the most articulate and coherent story teller we have seen in many a moon.  And her stories are so important to listen to….. for the health and safety of our democracy.