The Real Link Between the White House and the Kremlin

[TexasTowelie]

‘At the root of the Russia scandal are the parallels between Trump and Putin that animate all our president’s unsavory behavior: a willingness to loot and an eagerness to lie’


In the late 1980s, a scandal began to unfold in the Soviet Union that would ultimately engulf members of the highest levels of government and the military, a case of corruption that was astounding in its brazenness.

For decades, the leader of the Communist Party in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, Sharaf Rashidov, had overseen Uzbekistan’s cotton production. With the help of Yuri Churbanov — Leonid Brezhnev’s son-in-law and a four-star general — and a slate of local KGB officers, Uzbek officials had fed the Kremlin a steady stream of statistics detailing excellent harvests, quotas met and exceeded, new fields planted, and irrigation networks created. Some 3 billion rubles in crop subsidies flowed back to Uzbekistan to help keep this agricultural bonanza flourishing; the state’s resources poured into the cotton fields to such an extent that the crop earned the moniker “white gold” among Uzbek elites, according to Mark Galeotti’s magisterial history of Russian crime, The Vory. There was just one problem with the Uzbek bounty: The harvests were faked in their entirety, as hollow as the “dead souls” once collected by Gogol’s hero Chichikov. In 1982, the new general secretary, Yury Andropov — on the warpath against corruption since succeeding Brezhnev — resorted to desperate measures to break through the cozy patronage networks and cheerfully shameless conspiracy that defined the gambit: He directed spy satellites to photograph the fields where Uzbekistan’s cotton wealth supposedly flourished. The photos turned up endless swathes of scrub and steppe. The cotton had never existed.

At the heart of the Uzbek scandal was a vastly overpromoted son-in-law, one with unprecedented responsibility over national security. Churbanov, who had worked as a security guard before marrying Brezhnev’s daughter Galina, served as the well-placed Moscow connection for the cotton scheme; he was sentenced to twelve years in a prison camp in 1988. But the Uzbek cotton scandal, while dramatic, was merely the natural outgrowth of a culture of corruption that defined late-Soviet life. From ordinary citizens bribing doctors and shopkeepers for basic necessities to the ostentatious black-market ventures of party officials, the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union thinly veiled an economy that hinged on under-the-table transactions. The state was the prime mover of that society while, at the same time, serving as the personal bank of its highest-placed stewards.

Here in the United States, bribery is a rarity in ordinary life; money is everything, but by and large it’s exchanged over the table. And yet over the past two years, we’ve watched an unprecedented culture of corruption take over the highest levels of the executive branch of our government. Unlike the Uzbek cotton conspiracy, American corruption is happening right out in the open. Our very own overpromoted son-in-law, Jared Kushner, takes in high-level national security information while raking in millions from outside ventures, including real estate deals with foreign countries. President Trump followed up on a disastrous NATO summit and a meeting with British prime minister Theresa May by spending a weekend at his own golf resort in Scotland, Trump Turnberry; the U.S. government reportedly paid nearly $70,000 directly to Trump’s private business for the privilege. As has become numbingly routine, Trump took advantage of his presidential audience to tout his own business: “This place is incredible! Tomorrow I go to Helsinki for a Monday meeting with Vladimir Putin,” he wrote on Twitter.

Read more: https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/07/19/the-real-link-between-the-white-house-and-the-kremlin/

[uponit7771]

1. Will be uncovering Red Dawns corruption for decades

[Rhiannon12866]

2. "A willingness to loot and an eagerness to lie"

That this is actually happening completely boggles the mind. And people question why the Mueller investigation is taking so long? Trump and his greedy cronies initiate additional scandals every day! I'm surprised the investigation can keep up!