How the Republican Party Spins Trump’s Corruption

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at The Saker

On June 20th, Pam and Russ Martens, at their anti-corruption site “Wall Street on Parade,” headlined “As Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Face Criminal Probes, Barr Fires Top Prosecutor; Tries to Replace Him with Banks’ Former Lawyer, Jay Clayton”, and reported that Donald Trump’s consigliere William Barr was firing the U.S. Attorney who was leading criminal investigations into Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase banks, and Trump was replacing him with the SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton, who had been condemned by U.S. Senators of both Parties for greenlighting corporate frauds by insider CEOs that cheated both investors and employees while enriching only themselves. Clayton, whose career had been spent defending major U.S. corporations at the old Dulles brothers’ law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, owned “Over $1,000,000” worth of stock in WMB Holdings, which was “connected with numerous firms whose agent was the infamous Mossack Fonseca, many of them offshore companies”, and “This company [WMB] and its affiliated partners (Delaware Trust Co and CSC) are conduits for creating shell corporations and other sketchy vehicles used in tax evasion and money laundering.” So, this fox-in-charge-of-chicken-coops at the SEC was now selected by Trump’s agent, to lead the criminal investigations into, and prosecutions of, Wall Street banks.

The Republican Fox ‘News’ operation didn’t mention any of this but just gave the boilerplate, “President Trump nominated the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, to replace Geoffrey Berman as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, late Friday night in what appears to be political shakeup.”

However, a libertarian financial news site, Zero Hedge, posted on June 22nd an article by a fellow-libertarian Tom Luongo, and this was overtly pro-Trump, because libertarians oppose regulation (anything that imposes the government to restrain criminality by corporations and their executives and owners) — it can even be defined as hostility toward regulation. Luongo headlined “The US Is In Civil War (And Why Berman’s Firing Matters)”, and he said:

From the moment the protests against the killing of George Floyd were hijacked into looting and rioting I worried about this turning into something far greater, something with a far higher purpose.

Within a couple of days it was obvious the U.S. was now the subject of a color revolution of the same type and build up that occurred in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Egypt, Serbia and others.

And it’s pretty clear the color for our revolution isn’t orange or brown or violet, it’s black.

The questions I have are why this is happening now? The obvious answer is the full court press to deny Trump a second term. That’s a practically stated goal at this point.

But I feel this is far deeper than that, and likely has to do with knowing that Trump has pieces in place post-Jeffrey Epstein raid/murder to upset the Deep State’s apple cart. …

Useful idiots eventually become useless eaters in any post-Marxist revolution worth discussing.

But for the people who foment these things. They have to start with laying the groundwork. And the stronger the local cultural institutions and local economic power the longer and harder they have to work to undermine it.

The U.S. has been under constant attack this way since before even World War II, going back to Commintern (which never ended, it just morphed into today’s NGO’s)

Trump and Orban represent leaders who understand this problem explicitly and are trying to dismantle the apparatus arrayed against them.

No mention is made in any Republican media regarding the obvious corruptness of Trump’s having chosen to lead the SEC a corporate insider and professional defender of corporations, who also happens to be an investor in a money-laundering operation, and now reassigning him to become instead the U.S. prosecutor against Wall Street banks (though Clayton had never even been a prosecutor).

Clayton’s wife Gretchen had resigned from being one of the many Vice Presidents of Goldman Sachs in order for her husband to be allowed to lead the SEC. But Trump wanted him now to lead the prosecution of Wall Streeters, and this certainly indicated that Trump was just as much a protector of megabank CEOs and top executives as Obama had been. Like Obama had secretly told them: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. … I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you. … I’m going to shield you.” And he did.

So, this time it’s a Republican President who will “clean the swamp.” (Or so libertarians might somehow hope.) The only difference is that instead of Democrats promising to do it, Republicans are. And now Joe Biden is. Nothing changes. And each Party’s media attacks the other Party.

Later, on June 20th, was announced that Berman’s deputy Audrey Strauss would lead the office on an interim basis, as “Acting” Prosecutor on Wall Street, and that Berman said of her “She is the smartest, most principled, and effective lawyer with whom I have ever had the privilege of working.” She had been an elite corporate defense lawyer, as had been her boss, Berman. None of them had had any experience as a prosecutor. All of them were career defenders of America’s top corporations. That’s the type of career the U.S. Government wants to ‘police’ Wall Street. And the American public thinks that this is an acceptable Government. The problem isn’t only Trump, and it’s not only his opponents. It instead is virtually everyone who ascends to the top of the U.S. Government. If one’s career isn’t dependent upon American billionaires, then one stands next to no real chance to make it into that level. Billionaires also control the ‘news’-media. So, the public accept this system, the system that basically authorizes billionaires to control the Government. It’s the modern form of serfdom, and it’s called ‘democracy’. People such as Clayton, Berman, and Strauss might represent different mega-corporations, but they know their place and whom their real bosses are. Their bosses might be different individuals, but they all are of the same class. It’s a class of around 600 individuals. And it’s the class that controls this Government.

One class, two political Parties. But really just one big party.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.