As our country musters the will to hold a former POTUS accountable for a litany of crimes, his son-in-law sits like a hairless cat, smooth and smug in the South Florida sun.
Knowing no one will be coming after him for his complicity in his crimes.
Ditto the petulant bride who earned him his dowry and could never quite shake the obsessions of her father. A man who made no secret of his favor.
Jared is himself the scion of a corrupt real estate family who decided that being born on third base was a good enough reason to spend his life taking and never giving back.
The day after Trump left office, with the embers of an insurrection still smoldering, Kushner filed the paper work for what would become his private equity firm.
He set the firm up to take advantage of loopholes in our financial system that allow the investors’ identities to be concealed.
We know now that Jared’s first big client was Saudi Arabia and chiefly MBS, who despite objections from his own KSA sovereign wealth fund board, personally approved the two billion dollar payment to Jared Kushner’s new hedge fund.
Despite the fact the then thirty-nine year-old dilettante had no previous institutional investment experience.
It is no wonder that Jared spent his last January in the White House flying around the Middle East procuring the windfall that would come his way if his father-in-law’s coup d’etat failed.
It is even more maddening that this was all done under the guise of Mid-East peace.
Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to steer Israel towards an authoritarian model and threatens to not be the beacon of democracy we had almost come to take for granted in the region.
Netanyahu is of course doing this to ‘reform the courts’ as he faces a corruption trial for his actions while he was Prime Minister - while Trump was in office.
Bebe and Jared go way back, with the younger man even loaning out his bedroom to Netanyahu when he spent the night at Kushner’s home long before both men became synonymous with corruption and venality.
The tentacles of corruption run deep, especially in the global sense.
There are always tell-tale clues to follow when someone is up to no good or using the powers of the state for personal enrichment.
Trump, Kushner and their international partners oozed the scent of corruption. Instead of deodorant they try and mask the stench by seeking and attaining absolute power.
This has become a trend worldwide: it should alarm anyone who sees democracy and human rights as crucial to the survival of our planet.
Unfortunately, the last few years have been a master class in the dark arts of trans-national crime syndicates and how to get away with the loot.
Jared has been an eager apprentice and is now happily plying his trade.
The first rule is to conceal the identities of your partners and investors.
Trump used this methodology to sell condos in his New York City towers to wealthy Russians looking to take pilfered cash out of the former Soviet Union.
The condos were purchased with cash using LLCs to shield the identities of the buyers; a small consortium of lawyers and real estate agents were able to keep the anonymous cash transactions flowing for decades.
Jared would later exploit a variation of this technique to engineer a bailout of his property at 666 Fifth Avenue while he was working in the White House - by using KSA to force a blockade on Qatar - after that nation initially refused to loan Kushner Companies the money for a bailout.
Qatar acquiesced and used a hedge fund based out of Toronto to process the cash infusion.
Perhaps one of the most audacious and egregious abuses of geo-political brinkmanship for personal gain in modern history.
Rule number two is the larger the amount money involved, the less questions and scrutiny the transaction comes under as the ‘too big to fail’ effect sets in for would-be auditors.
This has been endemic at the institutional level for decades.
We saw variations of this dynamic in both Bernie Madoff and the banking industry prior to the collapse in 2008.
This is the rule that allows Jared to luxuriate in the Miami sunshine and gentle breezes of Biscayne Bay.
Trump played the media world like a fiddle beginning last weekend when he announced his imminent arrest the following Tuesday.
Of course, Tuesday came and went without his indictment but he dominated the opening segments of every cable news show for the entire week.
It was obviously primarily negative coverage of his precarious legal situation on multiple fronts - but for Trump the effect is the same - wall to wall coverage that he used to raise a lot of money, breathlessly sending out fundraising emails.
There is no such thing as bad press for Donald because his brand seems to be bulletproof with the GOP.
Trump began his career in the spotlight by calling up ‘Page Six’ and bragging about how many models he was bedding in the cocaine-fueled New York City of he 80’s.
He did this of course under his nom de guerre ‘John Barron’; he was married at the time but understood the value in branding himself a stud to the marks he was foisting his image upon.
That branding of Trump as a virile playboy still works on the fools who follow him today - endless chatter about his payments to an adult film actress only plays into his tiny hands and increases his bona fides with the GOP base.
And Trump knows it.
It also gives him reason to freak out and give voice to his more sadistic impulses - as his ratcheting up of calls for political violence reflected this week.
He used tired antisemitic tropes about George Soros and appealed to the brutal instincts of his followers to protect his own interests and freedom.
His darkly lit Sturm und Drang campaign videos also reflected these themes and exhortations to violence and appeared to be shot in some sort of ‘Real World’ confession closet from Hell.
Trump’s words may get people killed.
Again.
We all know what happened on January 6th, 2021 but somehow have forgotten about February of the previous year when Trump privately told Bob Woodward about the emerging and deadly Covid-19 virus that would quickly metastasize into a global pandemic.
Trump’s initial public response to Covid-19 was to downplay the risks publicly and not let a cruise ship dock with sick and infected passengers because he thought the increased number of cases in the U.S would make him look bad.
Even though he already knew as early as January how serious and deadly Covid was, Trump failed to act accordingly and with the best interest of the American people in mind.
How many lives could have been saved if Trump had been honest with the public from the beginning - instead of looking out for his own political interests and personal profit.
If you don’t think the guy who owns hotels wasn’t factoring in the looming pandemic’s impact on his bottom line you don’t know Donald.
Looking at guys like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis it’s pretty easy to figure out how famine and persecution became running themes through out world history.
Especially when you consider the character of the GOP and see how it easy it is for so many to go along with the insanity.
For it is madness, the personality traits that allow someone to consolidate power and waste resources or redirect them for their own purposes.
A person who is able to do such things - especially in times of crisis - is clearly suffering from severe character defects, a spiritual malady and personality disorders all at once.
Both Trump and DeSantis seem to have hit this trifecta when it comes to aberrant personalities.
This is toxic and dangerous - and we have almost come to accept it in Republican politicians.
The pathological predator has become the GOP’s defining characteristic.
The most notable trait I saw in Donald Trump, the overarching theme in his life, is how much he hates women.
He of course pretends to be some epic ladies man but that is all a ruse to entice the kind of men he needs around him to use women for his true purpose: punishment.
As I have often pointed out on twitter, Trump was the guy who made Jeffrey Epstein double over in laughter and embarrassment when he whispered in his ear, as the two predators ogled a bevy of NFL cheerleaders that Trump had lured to Mar-a-Lago.
Do you know how twisted you have to be to get that sort of reaction from Jeffrey Epstein?
If you have seen the video to which I am referring you most likely know exactly what I mean.
I am sure when Trump set out on his political path even he had no idea how much his inner demons and latent misogyny would dovetail so perfectly with the Republican politics.
It was a match made in Hell.
Layer in some Putin-backed pysops designed to exploit existing wounds in the same demographic Trump was courting and he stumbled into a way to project his own lifetime of sexual predation and abuse on to his opponents in the Democratic party.
The deviant issues he himself was most vulnerable on as a candidate, his factual history of abusing women, was superimposed onto the HRC ‘Pizzagate’ and ‘PedoJoe’ Biden memes and conspiracies and amplified by thousands of trolls and right-wing influencers.
Most notably this content caught fire with the QAnon online cult which has morphed into mainstream MAGA and the Republican party itself, whose de facto thought leader and spokesperson, MTG, was a ‘Q-tuber’ before taking office.
The long game on all this and the destabilizing effect it has on democracy was no doubt partially engineered by Putin himself, who is a student of Judo: the art of using an opponents strength and weight against him.
Even Vladimir was probably surprised how quickly the lies all spread - and now human rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights and democracy itself is being engulfed by the reactionary flames of their fascistic fires.
We must stop them before it is too late.
"beacon of democracy"
Your regular reminder that Israel is a brutal apartheid state founded on the principle of dispossessing Palestinians of their land and homes. The Nakba is ongoing.
https://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/world/netanyahu-govt-says-west-bank-settlement-expansion-top-priority/ar-AA15JU9g
As usual, so brilliantly insightful, as well as poetic. Thanks, as always, for all you do for the side of sanity. Fingers crossed we can survive those sociopathic parasites and all the other fascistic autocrats around the world.