*** “Corruption is never an individual act. It always involves groups of people bound by one fundamental rule of association: an exchange of favors…It allows crimes to be protected with impunity and is characterized by an intolerable arrogance.” [ Roberto Matta ]
1] “The reality is that he [Trump] brings together the least attractive elements of capitalism and socialism, fusing heavy-handed state control with high inequality, and entrenching a set of oligarchs who serve simultaneously as the ruling party’s victims and co-conspirators. The more that political favor displaces market competition as the basis of corporate success, the worse things will get.” [ Jonathan Chait: “The Fear Economy..How Trump is exploiting American capitalism for personal power”; April, 2025; The Atlantic – portions follow – READ THIS ARTICLE!!!!!]
***. “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
[ Benito Mussolini ]
2]. “Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms….His rehabilitation complete, Zuckerberg assumed a place of pride at Trump’s inauguration..”
*** “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in some conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” [ Adam Smith ]
3] “The President’s public communion with the business titans who have submitted to him has been analyzed as a signal of authoritarianism and his alliance with the rich. But it also reveals another emerging aspect of Trumpism: his rejection of the capitalist principles that ultimately generate prosperity.”
*** “Wherever there is power, greed, and money, there is corruption.” [ Ken Poirot ]
4] “He [Trump] believes, like Putin in political control of the economy’s commanding heights – success for those executives and companies who please him, failure for those who don’t.. a psychological transformation within the executive class…the combination of fear and solicitousness that Trump now commands is wholly new.”
*** “The fear tactic is a tactic that’s used by people who want to maintain control, and it’s very effective.”
[ Hamza Yusof ]
5] “Putting the screws to media owners in particular, especially early on, seems to follow the same playbook that Putin and other strongmen have used.”
*** “It is a characteristic of a tyrant to dislike everyone who has dignity or independence; he wants to be alone in his glory.” [ Aristotle ]
6] “Although Trump has so far devoted the most attention to media businesses, he has not ignored the broader economy. Every economic policy decision is a potential weapon to punish dissent or reward his friends, beginning with tariffs.”
***. “My task is not to make men better but to make use of their weaknesses.” [ Adolf Hitler ]
7] “..Trump has also used tariffs to gain personal and political leverage over American businesses. During his first term, Trump..entertained a parade of executives pleading for exemptions, which his administration doled out at its whim.”
***. “The technique of acquiring dictatorship over what has been a democracy… always involves the same mixture of bribery, propaganda, and violence.” [ Bertrand Russell ]
8] “A 2019 investigation by the Commerce Department’s inspector general reported ‘the appearance of improper influence in decision-making”…Trump has managed to solve this problem..by firing, to date, the inspectors general of 18 federal agencies, including Commerce.”
*** “Corruption is like a ball of snow, when once set a rolling it must increase.” [ C.C. Colton ]
9] “Musk, like Trump, respects no distinction between his personal financial interests, those of his political party, and those of the country….tells everybody [in] the upper class or aspires to it that their safest path is to join the ruling claque.”
*** “..Trump’s administration proceeded to crystallize and put into practice – in barefaced ways unseen in the United States for a century – exactly the type of systematic corruption Americans decry…a U.S. integrated kleptocratic network like the ones that dominate so many developing countries. It is the most sophisticated, powerful, and threatening such organism..in the United states since the Gilded Age…They want private, not democratic , control of the country’s resources.” [ Sarah Chayes: “On Corruption In America” – READ THIS BOOK – to understand post-1980 declines in people’s incomes and in American democracy}
10] “If Americans think that by empowering Trump, they have traded away some of their equality, civic decency, and political freedom for prosperity, we may find one day that we have sacrificed them all.”
*** “They that can give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
[ Benjamin Franklin ]t ]
With Justice For All 