Image by Ja’Crispy, iStockphoto
Image by Ja’Crispy, iStockphoto
Trump has surrounded the White House with armed federal agents and National Guard soldiers, and we have no idea what is going on in there, just as we will have no idea what is said when he meets with Putin in Alaska.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Here’s the way the mob used to run their protection rackets in Greenwich Village. A guy in a suit would show up at a laundry or a deli or a bodega. He’d say, nice little business you got here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.
The next day, another guy in a suit would show up at the neighborhood businesses that had been visited the day before, and he’d say, you give me a small cut of your business, and I’ll protect you from the threats you’ve been getting.
How did the second guy know that the businesses had been threatened? Because the two guys in suits worked for the same boss, who could usually be found at a table in his “social club” at Sullivan and Third Streets. The boss was Vincent “The Chin” Gigante. He ran the South Village. If you wanted to do business in his neighborhood, you paid protection. In the bars, the mob, in the person of a representative from Cold Coin Industries, would show up and say, it’s terrible that your customers have to go down the street in the snow in the winter for a pack of cigarettes. We’ll be glad to put in a cigarette machine for you. If the bar owner turned down the offer, there would be a big fight at the bar a couple of nights later, and all the backbar bottles, the high-end liquor, would be broken, along with whatever mirrors and pictures that might be on the wall. The next time the guy showed up from Gold Coin Industries, the bar owner would be glad to accept the mob’s cigarette machine. Woe be unto the bar owner who took an advance from the Gold Coin guy to pay a bill for back payroll taxes. The guy in the suit would soon darken the bar’s door, and the owner would be paying a percentage of his take every week to the guy in the suit.
That’s what Trump is doing with Nvidia and Advance Micro Devices. He’s running a protection racket. It’s terrible you can’t get that license to export those AI chips to China. Must be terrible for business. How does 20 percent sound? Trump didn’t actually put it that way. At a press availability at the White House after visiting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang two days before, Trump told reporters exactly what he had said to Huang about exporting AI chips to China: “I said, If I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something because I’m giving you a release.”
Sounds like a man in a suit talking to a bodega owner in the ‘hood, doesn’t it?
Click here to read the rest of this article.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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