This Is So Much Bigger Than Paul Manafort

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/this-is-so-much-bigger-than-paul-manafort/566501/

This Is So Much Bigger Than Paul Manafort
With Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman on trial, America is reckoning with its very serious kleptocracy problem.
Franklin Foer
Jul 31, 2018


On the eve of the Paul Manafort trial, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin casually announced that the Trump administration was considering a fresh $100 billion tax cut for the wealthy. The two events—the trial and the tax cut—should be considered plot points in the very same narrative. Manafort had grown very rich by looting public monies, and Mnuchin was proposing an arguably legal version of the same.

Unlike past Trump tax cuts, this proposed cut would be implemented by executive fiat, without a congressional vote—a highly unusual and highly undemocratic act of plunder that would redirect money from the state to further enrich the American elite, not to mention Mnuchin himself.

The trial of Paul Manafort is not merely an episode in a larger scandal that will unfold over many chapters. It is a warning not to be ignored. It’s an occasion for the United States to awaken from its collective slumber about the creeping dangers of kleptocracy.

snip//

It doesn’t require any imagination to see how money stolen from Ukrainian coffers, money won in rigged privatizations and crony contracts, money obtained after the brutal murder of rivals, ended up with Paul Manafort. Clean money doesn’t need to travel through shell companies in Cyprus, like the millions that Manafort poured into accounts there. And Manafort allegedly used the same techniques of his dodgy clients to repatriate the money in the United States, taking advantage of gaps in the enforcement of anti-money-laundering laws to sneak cash into the country through real estate, expensive rugs, and tailored suits.

What’s increasingly clear is that Manafort also attempted to exploit the Trump campaign with similarly kleptocratic aims. Take the story of Stephen Calk that has emerged in the course of Mueller’s pretrial filings. Calk owns a small Chicago bank. In the summer of 2016, Manafort applied for a loan from the bank—and the claims in Manafort’s loan applications were obviously shaky. According to Mueller, officials in the bank were quite adamant in expressing their reservations about Manafort’s application. But there was apparently a backstory that these officials didn’t know. Calk had won a place on Trump’s board of economic advisors, one of 13. Mueller’s lawyers have said that they plan to prove that Calk only landed this official title after promising Manafort loans. So, even as Manafort departed the campaign amid widespread allegations of misdeeds, Calk extended him loan after loan, $16 million in total. (The loans represented 22 percent of the bank’s total equity capital.)

This small tale is just one instance of a larger genre repeated across this administration—the hints that foreign countries are financing deals that profit the president’s own family; the long list of officials (see also: Scott Pruitt, Tom Price) abusing the perquisites of their office. And those stories are just a subset of an even larger narrative still, of an American elite increasingly at home in the ranks of international kleptocracy. Thanks to Robert Mueller, that racket is now on trial.

[malaise]

1. Greed - national and personal is what eventually brings down empires

Stealing for the nation is never enough for the goons governments send to plunder elsewhere.

[dameatball]

2. Correct. Scientists will cure cancer before they cure the disease known as greed.