Steven (Steve) Mnuchin (lead image, right), a New York banker who has spent a year being Secretary of the US Treasury, is worse at dissembling his racket than his better-known American peers at racketeering, Alphonse (Al) Capone of the Chicago Outfit (left) and Charles (Lucky) Luciano of the New York Commission (centre). Mnuchin's racket is billions of dollars bigger, but in legal principle and method,
the fraud and extortion are much the same as the Outfit's and the Commission's. Mnuchin's muscle is bigger too,
though that requires warfare, which the Outfit and the Commission were established to do without.
Last week Mnuchin issued a Treasury
report to Congress on the impact of US sanctions on Russian sovereign debt,
which isn't a report at all. It's a
leak to a news wire,
so sloppily arranged that one of the seven pages is a duplicate of the first, though the leaker didn't notice he had slapped the same page on to the copier screen twice. The US Treasury didn't
realize, Bloomberg, the newswire, didn't
check. In the 228-year history of US Government reports to the US Congress,
such a goof has never happened before.
Comment: Whether the UK remains in the EU or not is for the British people to decide - not for a US billionaire.
It is interesting that George Soros, the quintessential election meddler, is predicting the collapse of the EU and already blaming Russia for it, and he has made a veiled threat to Donald Trump. It is ok for Soros to disrupt democracies around the world with his billions and NGOs, but it is not ok for Russia to defend its sovereignty or for Trump to beat Soros's candidate.