The Trial & the Tax Cuts: America's elite kleptocrats taking the country down

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.

  The Atlantic

So much easier that way.

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

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Conventional wisdom long held that America’s free market would never tolerate the sort of clientelism, nepotism, and outright theft that prevailed in places like Brazil and Italy. [...] America has become the sanctuary of choice for laundered money, a bastion of shell companies and anonymously purchased real estate.

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During the 1980s and 1990s, [Paul Manafort] provided strategic advice to the thuggish dictators who served as proxies for the Reagan administration’s anti-Communist foreign policy. With his mastery of American media, he helped sanitize crooks like the former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda—the symbol of their regime, the 3,000 pairs of shoes she owned, was a little less than the number of people by killed it. These dictators (also Angola’s Jonas Savimbi, the Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi) should never have been respectable figures in Washington. But Manafort reinvented them as latter-day Thomas Jeffersons, allies in the cause of democracy, and successfully lobbied for them to receive arms and aid from the U.S. government.

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In Russia, the KGB steered billions into offshore accounts during the dying days of the [Communist] regime. [...] These funds became the basis for some of the fortunes of those who now appear as characters in the Russiagate scandal. Vladimir Putin himself amassed wealth that totaled more than $40 billion. [...] Russians who invested in Trump real estate over the years had many motives. But everything we know about kleptocracy suggests that they were likely attempting to relocate their money to a place where it would both disappear from public view and have the protections that come with the American rule of law.

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During [the years Manafort represented Ukrainian oligarchs], the country hemorrhaged more than $118 billion in illicit financial flows, according to the Kleptocracy Initiative, a think tank that has published invaluable reports about the scourge of corruption. (To set that number in relief, the country’s entire gross domestic product in 2013 was $181 billion.) Stealing this money wasn’t a victimless crime: It came at the expense of Ukraine’s development as a market economy; it sucked funds away from public investment; it eroded faith in democracy and Western institutions.

Of course Manafort wasn't the only American involved.

Barack Obama’s White House counsel Greg Craig and his top-drawer law firm Skadden Arps abetted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s efforts to smash the political opponents who might get in the way of his thievery. Manafort arranged for the firm to publish a report justifying the arrest of a former Ukrainian prime minister, who had been denied counsel at crucial moments of her trial. (Last April, Craig retired from the firm under a cloud of scandal. Another Skadden associate who worked with Manafort has pled guilty to misleading Mueller’s investigators.) Tony Podesta, a leading Democratic lobbyist of his generation, has watched his own power firm collapse after Mueller revealed his complicity in Manafort’s efforts. [...] American law firms play an essential role in protecting global kleptocracy and helping it relocate money to the United States.

Russia never got a chance to establish a working democracy. People like Manafort were there from the beginning.

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.

And the Manafort trial, I'm sure, is just a scratch on the surface.  Unfortunately, the fact that so many in Congress - particularly, but not exclusively in the GOP - have dirty hands will be a barrier to having these practices routed out, even once they are exposed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.