Hartmannreport.com

04/08/2025

Corruption of this sort is morally repugnant, but not just because of the injury it does to our national integrity and reputation. It also impoverishes everybody in the country who doesn’t have the money to buy their own regulations, tax breaks, pardons, immunities, and government contracts.

It’s almost certainly why Trump just suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which outlaws government officials (like himself and his cabinet members) from profiting off companies, oligarchs, and even foreign countries themselves’ desire to do business in or with America. Now they can drain America dry, just like Putin does Russia and Orbán does Hungary.

The next step, of course, was to slap tariffs on countries, rather then on products (as has historically been done for over 220 years) so foreign leaders would have to come to Trump hat-in-hand to grovel and offer him the kinds of gifts the Saudis have been showering on him and his family for almost a decade since they made the Jamal Khashoggi murder scandal go away.

His tariff scam is just his latest grift to enrich himself while expanding the power of the presidency in defiance of the Constitution which clearly states that only “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises…”

In the 44 years since Ronald Reagan began trading campaign contributions for favorable regulatory and tax treatment, fully $50 trillion has been extracted from the American middle class and deposited instead in the money bins of the morbidly rich. We’ve gone from two-thirds of us being in the middle class in 1980 to around 47% of us today.

It’s a level of wealth transfer facilitated by SCOTUS-legalized corruption that Putin and Orbán can only dream of — and has made America’s billionaires the richest in the history of the planet. No pharaoh, king, or emperor has ever come even close to the wealth today enjoyed by Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al.