Quote of the Day: Boris Yeltsin: Russia is “The Biggest Mafia State in the World.” (And Mr. Trump is in it Up to His Neck.)

From the New Republic, for those who believe that the Russia investigation is a total “nothing burger”:

President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.

. . .

[speaking of Simion Mogilevich: ]

“He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says, “but to influence governments and their economies.”

In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.

Which brings us right up to today.  Litvinenko was murdered in 2006 with polonium, a radioactive synthetic element, a crime that could only be carried out with the resources of a nuclear state: Russia.  Little was made of his death at the time, but now, just a few weeks ago, another ex-Russian agent survived an assassination attempt with “Novichok”– an advanced chemical warfare agent with seemingly incredible powers.  A solid, it is lethal at doses of roughly 10 milligrams– less than 1/30 the weight of an aspirin tablet.  It is persistent, and English scientists believe it was smeared on the victim’s front door knob, where he and his daughter were exposed.  They both were found unresponsive, with symptoms of atropine-like nerve poisoning: drooling, pinpoint pupils, and coma.  Even survivors of sublethal doses of this agent do not recover well; they are often impaired for the rest of their lives with severe depression and weakness.

The Russians are the only known government in the world to have sponsored the development of these nerve agents, which were never known to have been used.  It appears that a small supply was manufactured some years ago (perhaps between 1973 and 1990) and hoarded up for uses such as the one to which it was put on March 4, 2018.  On that date, former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were discovered in a public park, on a park bench, in Salisbury, UK, unconscious and suffering from symptoms of atropine-like nerve poisoning.  A policeman who responded to the scene also fell ill from similar symptoms.  Yulia Skripal has recovered consciousness and is talking, but her father is in more guarded condition.  It is now suspected that others may have died from the same or similar agents in the past and have mistakenly been thought to have died of natural causes.

The bottom line is that Russia is controlled by a kleptocratic autocracy which has taken over since the fall of the Soviet Union, a government run by a mafia-like organization that is extending its tentacles of dirty dealing and death through-out the world, including to subvert and enslave relatively free countries like the United States.  The US is under attack from Russia, and the “boss of bosses”, Simion Mogilevich, a highly intelligent, patient, but completely corrupt and potentially murderous “don” is the godfather, with Vladimir “the Impaler” Putin in day-to-day command of the onslaught on our somewhat civilized institutions.

So here you are: Russia has succeeded in subverting the government of the United States and, as a result, there have been installed leaders who are attempting to turn back the clock on human rights, civil rights, the rights of people of color, the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender people, and the rights of women to control of their own bodies.  The only answer to this attack and near-overthrow of representative, humane, progressive government is to declare open war on Russia– a cold war, but a war nonetheless.  The first strike in this war will be at the ballot box with votes for Democratic leaders who can reverse the retrogressive policies of the Russian-entangled Republicans and strike a blow for freedom all over the world.

The article linked and quoted at the top of this column in the New Republic describes most of what is known and suspected about Donald J. Trump’s entanglement with the Soviet and Russian governments, from as early as 1987.  This article on linkedin.com will definitely make your brain explode with incredibly detailed information about the labyrinthine interconnections between Mogilevich, all his intermediaries, and Donald J. Trump and his family.  The friendly relations between Donald and the Don go way back and are as thick as the cables holding up the Golden Gate Bridge.  Most of what Donald has done for the Don in the past is simple money laundering, but with his election to the presidency his breadth of subversion has dramatically increased.

Post-Script: Just for personal enjoyment, to make your day more entertaining and relieve your stress, there is the superbly eloquent poetic jeremiad “The Trumpiad”— a very long, closely-researched, profusely illustrated with satiric cartoons, poetic tour de force describing the history of the Trump (nee Drumpf) family in crime and draft dodging (yes, Donald J. Trump’s grandfather Friedrich was a draft-dodger in his home country of Germany and was deported to the US for same, but not until he’d made his fortune running whorehouses in the gold-stricken Yukon) (Donald’s father Fred was a slumlord who made trashy, whites-only segregated housing a fixture of New York and New Jersey) (and Donald was dumped into military school because he assaulted one of his teachers in grade school, among other defiant, violent acts) from the late nineteenth century to March 29, 2018, due to be updated soon, I hope.

(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and Makalu)