onald Trump’s sole “philosophy” is personal profit. His real “party” is the mob. His mafia “don,” Vladimir Putin, is the world’s #1 crime boss. For the pair of them, the issues of the day all boil down to one: cash flow.

Russian crime lords have been laundering money through The Donald since the 1980s. Like his slumlord father, who was allied with the New York mob, nothing really matters to Trumputin except that river of lucre. If Special Counsel Mueller touches the bottom of The Donald’s swamp, it will all be about money laundering and his ties to the organized underworld. There are many reasons he’s hiding his tax returns.

Meanwhile, let’s look at some actual issues:

GUNS: The National Rife Association is a sales organization for the weapons industry. All that twisted blather about the Bill of Rights is cheap cover.

The Second Amendment requires all gun owners to be part of “a well-regulated militia” serving “the security of a free state.”

Trump’s idiocy about arming all teachers makes sense only for promoting gun sales. Ubiquitous assault weapons and concealed handguns are both profit centers. Living school kids are not.

DRUGS: The Drug War is about keeping prisons full, jacking up pot prices for the transnational mob, protecting the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries, and preventing citizens of youth and color from voting.

It’s also no accident that our principal allies in Vietnam were heroin dealers, our Contra puppets in Nicaragua were coke pushers, and our fellow “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan are poppy growers.

The idea that Trump and Jeff Sessions oppose pot legalization for reasons of public health is a sick joke.

More than 40 million Americans have been arrested in the Drug War since Nixon declared it in the early 1970s. Dick’s assault powered a “Southern Strategy” meant to destroy communities of youth and color. Nixon’s own mob backers profited hugely from higher black market drug prices and a booming prison industry.

Sadly for Trumputin, legalization in Colorado and elsewhere has lowered crime and incarceration rates, reduced alcohol consumption, and provided serious breakthroughs using cannabis for ailments like epilepsy and glaucoma instead of hugely overpriced pharmaceuticals. Opioid death rates are far lower where pot is legal.

So all of Nixon/Trump/Sessions’ worst fears about losing cash flow and elections with the end of Pot Prohibition are coming true. But don’t look for them to give up soon.

PUERTO RICO: Trumputin is using Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico to ethnic-cleanse the island and make it a mobbed-up profit center. Despite fierce opposition from San Juan’s sane mayor, Carmen Yulin Cruz, Governor Ricardo Rossello wants to turn over the island’s utility and school systems to Trump cronies.

FEMA is re-running its race-based fiasco in New Orleans after Katrina. Amidst soaring emigration and suicide rates, countless US citizens remain without power, shelter, jobs, schools, clean water, and food. Land prices have plummeted, opening the door to corporate speculators. Republicans speak openly about the island as a financial center like Hong Kong or Singapore. The linked Trumputin vision would be a mobbed-up pre-Revolutionary Havana, filled with dirty money-laundering luxury hotels, casinos, and prostitution rings.

GOLF: Trump’s trips to his Mar-a-Lago resort line his pockets with taxpayer dollars. The direct expenses to haul his immense corpus down there are of course enormous. But the Secret Service and staff stay in rooms, eat food, buy drinks, ride in golf carts, and wrack up “ancillary costs” paid for by you and me. For every round Trumputin bogeys, our millions flow to his bottom line.

ELECTION THEFT: Of course, the US itself has flipped scores of national elections around the world since the 1890s. That would include Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the CIA illegally installed the drunken Mafioso idiot Boris Yeltsin. Trumputin is our imperial vulture come home to roost.

But did the Russians actually strip our voter rolls and flip our electronic vote counts?

The bottom line: they could have. Our electoral system is ridiculously vulnerable, and won’t be much better come this fall’s midterms.

Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, Kris Kobach, J. Kenneth Blackwell, and their fellow American fixers have done such dirty work for years. The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were stolen by “domestic terrorists” a surely as Russians intervened in 2016.

Of course, the US itself has flipped scores of national elections around the world since the 1890s. That would include Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the CIA illegally installed the drunken Mafioso idiot Boris Yeltsin. Trumputin is our vulture come home to roost.

Thus far, Mueller’s investigations confirm that Putin’s mobsters meant to put their very own money launderer right here in the White House. Their exact impact on his election remains to be seen. But there was some. And he is an underworld nightmare come true.

Corporate Democrats, of course, love to tag Putin with Hillary’s absurdly avoidable loss. They’re thrilled to trash Bernie and the Greens while re-casting the Russians as the Cold War USSR. They are the ultimate fake “opposition” party, utterly void of fresh ideas, social commitment, and the slightest shred of grassroots democratic charisma.

Through it all, only one thing is certain: our elections can be flipped and stripped by virtually anybody — Russians, Republicans, Democrats, the Kochs, the alt-right, free-lance hackers, that 400-pounder in Trump’s NJ basement … you name it.

Until we have universal automatic voter registration with transparent, well-protected voter rolls, and universal hand-counted paper ballots, our electoral system is a bad joke.

And only Trump and Putin will be laughing. For them, the one “principle” of government is to guarantee that the Manchurian Mobster and Team Trumputin can continue to suck up the cash from our stripped and flipped electoral Laundromat.

Original at Reader Supported News:  http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/48672-focus-trumputins-qp...