'The two main public figures whose current activities make this book timely - Trump and Putin - are made more understandable by this book. The various investigations now underway seem likely to reveal, one way or another, more of what these two men have been up to. If nothing else, this book and the way it relates to this particular time in world history, should be a wake up call to nations who claim to value the rule of law. There is a price to pay for letting the bad guys buy up your prime real estate, whether in the US or the UK.''With the passage of time, it is easy to dismiss the "glory days" of the Italian mobs as mere historical entertainment. This book demonstrates how the poison of those days lingers in the lives of many contemporary American public figures - people whose values, aspirations and accomplishments are rooted in the mob culture and economy.
The second strand of the book, the evolution of the Russian mafia from its pre-WWII roots to the place it occupies today as the dominant economic force in Russia is equally shocking .. how pervasive the criminal economy was and is in Russia.
The anecdotes of how these two forces came to interact with each other in the US seems very credible. It is a complicated undertaking with so many specific individuals that it's hard to keep them all straight. The details - places, names, the various criminal enterprises - made my head spin, but were none the less entirely believable. As others have said, this is a well researched book with lots and lots of footnotes.
The two main public figures whose current activities make this book timely - Trump and Putin - are made more understandable by this book. The various investigations now underway seem likely to reveal, one way or another, more of what these two men have been up to. If nothing else, this book and the way it relates to this particular time in world history, should be a wake up call to nations who claim to value the rule of law. There is a price to pay for letting the bad guys buy up your prime real estate, whether in the US or the UK.
I'd like to see a follow-on book written that would reveal just how it came to pass that the US government failed to promptly collect the gasoline taxes that were so instrumental in letting these two hellish organizations take root. The book mentions that similar massive criminal exploitation occurred in regard to Medicare fraud as well. We are seriously fooling ourselves if we believe that it is only small time cheats who take advantage of inefficiencies and sloppiness in our various government programs. And as this book shows, it isn't just the money that is lost or wasted, but the fact that it is used to build and strengthen really terrible criminal enterprises that become a cancer so deadly it can threaten our institutions. I suggest you not read this book unless you are prepared to take on a heightened level of anxiety about our future.'
- Review of
House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia (
Source, August 24, 2018)
'..all those ideologies that were to turn the twentieth century into a bloodbath were ultimately based on Hegel’s philosophy of history..'
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The Science of Human Action - Praxeology (The Logic of Human Action) - Die wirtschaftliche Energie (1893) (“Economic Energy”) - The Third Industrial Revolution has begun (6)Context'..Russia .. What is needed .. a truth commission, like South Africa’s Commission on Truth and Reconciliation..'