Donald Trump: On the Razor’s Edge
Donald Trump is skating along the edge of a razor that once belonged to Friar William of Ockham. Recall that Ockham’s Razor (Occam’s Razor) is the first law of parsimony (a system of solving problems). It states that we often over-complicate problems in which the solution is usually the simplest and most obvious: If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is usually a duck. In this particular case, it looks an awful lot like espionage, pure and simple. It quacks loudly, like skulduggery gone awry. If only ducks could scream.
Why? Because America’s core demographic is changing from white to non-white. Somewhere around 2012 it started to sink in on the American people that this change is an absolute, inevitable fact. The traditional logic of the white people calculates that if more brown people vote than white people, the numbers may represent …well, a potential quantum shift in the economy of the upper-middle-class whites. Along comes Donald Trump, a documented racist who has made the national newspapers in race-related stories for sixty years. He speaks to the relatively uneducated middle-class white people in “dog whistles” that subliminally address their fears. Talk about timing! The Trumpist Evangelical Minority turned out and voted for him to a man jack, sweeping Trumpy Bear™ up out of the gutter and into the White House. It is important to note here that an overwhelming majority of the population did not vote at all.
The fact that Donald Trump was born into an organized crime family doesn’t seem to be a media issue these days like it was back in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. A brief re-cap of the history of crime in America and Donald Trump’s place in it, follows:
After the repeal of prohibition, mathematics genius Meyer Lansky, the criminal mastermind’s criminal mastermind, took full advantage of the changing events by repurposing the syndicate’s massive infrastructure built for enterprise-scale alcohol production, transportation, and distribution, into legal corporate entities. Using their existing distilleries, warehouses, and trucking companies (they were also said to “own” the Jimmy Hoffa Teamsters), they made more money than ever. “The Syndicate” Capo di Tuti Capo, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, retired in Havana as a “corporate consultant.” Meyer Lansky applied for Israeli citizenship with the intention of retiring there. On their way to retirement the two men divided the Syndicate’s New York assets into five regions, distributed equally among the five largest crime families in New York. All five families were to share the syndicate monopoly on New York construction cement and contract award rigging. In order to protect their highly profitable corporate entities, which were legal, Meyer and Lucky traded the heroin business to the Russian “Brotherhood” in exchange for murder-as-a-service and intelligence information from the KGB. Brighton Beach mobster and KGB operative Evsy Agron provided “enforcement on demand.” As these events changed the structure of crime in New York, Fred Trump’s real estate activities made him an ideal business “front” for the Gambino family, one of the core “Five Families.” The Gambinos specialized in racketeering, extortion, fraud, illegal gambling, money laundering, and …wait for it…. real estate contract fixing. The marriage between Fred Trump and the Gambino family was implicit. In son Donald Trump’s case, the ties were hereditary. The most commonly told story is that Fred advised his son Donald to operate strictly within the Gambino family territory, then gifted him with control of the construction cement and cement contract monopoly via shell companies set up by disbarred mob attorney Roy Cohn (yes, that Roy Cohn). Spoiled brat Donald wanted Manhattan, which was outside the Gambino controlled territory; however, Donald was eventually able to strike a deal with the Russian Mob by laundering Mob money through those properties the Russians allowed him to build in Manhattan.
“Do the Trumps know anything about money laundering? Fuggedaboudit!” — N.Y. Cab Driver
My point here is to call your attention to how easy it is to close your eyes and imagine Donald Trump trading our United States National Security secrets for money and power …and there you have it: We closed our eyes, and he betrayed us for money and power!
But all is not lost! The solution to the survival of our Democracy is simple when you recall that America’s architects took it as a foregone conclusion that a wise citizenry would necessarily want to elect only the very brightest, best educated, most capable and experienced people they could get their hands on to govern themselves …and only with their consent. Unfortunately, when we elected Donald Trump we elected a boorish career criminal; certifiable ignoramus, and an unabashed, unapologetic lout to our highest office. When we did that, we pissed away our international credibility. When we did that, we pissed away our economic stability. When we did that, we marched from one highly questionable economic policy to another until we found ourselves …well, here. Now what we need is to get back to what our framers intended. We just need to get back to …well, there.