I Guess This Isn't an Important Story

 I want to discuss a story which I first read about a week before the election.  I was curious to see if our mainstream press, which has given such immense coverage to Donald Trump's phony lawsuits and ludicrous claims of Democratic corruption in the counting of votes, thought this story important enough to cover for more than a second, but I guess not.  Here are the bones of the story:

"An energy company tied to a hedge fund that loaned millions to the Trump Organization and the Kushner Companies will benefit after Team Trump approved railroads running “bomb trains” through our nation.

They are loaded with liquefied natural gas with more explosive power than the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima...

Trump in April 2019 had called for federal rules to be rewritten so trains could carry liquefied natural gas.

The regulation financially benefits New Fortress Energy, a publicly-traded company founded by billionaire Wes Edens. Fortress Investment Group, a New York City hedge fund co-founded by Edens, was part of a deal to loan the Trump Organization $130 million to help build the Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago in 2005...(New York Attorney General Letitia) James said that Fortress forgave more than $100 million of the loan, money that may have been taxable."

Just so you understand the risk that this executive action on the part of Trump imposes on people who live along these rail lines, here is a picture of a liquefied natural gas explosion that took place in Cleveland, in the 1930's, which devastated nearly a square mile of the city, leaving the area looking like Hiroshima:

Now, let me state clearly what happened here.  This "forgiving" of Trump's loan was a $100 million dollar bribe.  Let me state this again, in big red letters in case anyone did not get it:

Donald Trump, as President, accepted a $100 million dollar bribe to do away with a regulation preventing almost unimaginable damage to American citizens.

And nobody seems to care.  I remember a couple of decades ago a Democratic Speaker of the House being thrown out of Congress for improprieties in a book deal.  I remember Republican screams of outrage over totally made up supposed acts of corruption by every Democrat they could think of.  I remember a month ago, when Joe Biden was accused of taking millions of dollars of bribes, without a shred of evidence.

But here we have a real, massive act of open corruption and criminality, and because Trump is a Republican, it is okay.  A hundred million dollar bribe, taken right out in public, with no concern that he would ever face any consequences for his behavior.

And he won't either.  The whole issue has been abandoned by the press, which is far more interested in lending credibility to the latest self-humiliation of Rudy Giuliani, or finding new ways to play up the eternal "Democrats in disarray" narrative.  And I have, of course, not heard a single Democratic leader mention this crime either. It's okay for a Republican to take a hundred million dollar bribe.

And that is why our country is not emerging from its Republican reign of terror any time soon.

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A little more:  I did a little looking around the internet today.  Not too systematic, but I wondered how this $100 million + bribe stood in the history of bribery.  As far as I can tell, there have actually been two or three known cases of companies spending more than $100 million in bribes, but never to a single person.  This may indeed be the largest known bribe to an individual in the history of the world.  Well, he did tell us that he is the greatest.