Robin Hood, Trump and MbS

Trump is a moron, of course.  

But, as I have argued before, an honest one, if inconsistent.  

Many people confuse these two things: honesty and consistency.  Honesty is saying what you believe -- at the time you believe it.  But beliefs can change, unless they are grounded in a lot of serious thought.

Some politicians, like Jeremy Corby are both honest and consistent because they think and care deeply about things -- which often makes them unelectable to the extent that the public is itself inconsistent, caught up in its own contradictions and delusions.   Corbyn languished in the back benches, until catapulted to leadership by accident.  

Other politicians,  like Obama, the Liberal That Never Was,  appear consistent using clever PR to keep them in sync with the public mood. But they are not honest because their actual agendas are different from what they express to the world. What they say they believe and what they really believe are different things.     

Trump says whatever comes into the empty space above his nostrils.  He contradicts himself.  And he doesn't care.  Now, that is honest!    But inconsistent -- because his beliefs change at the twit of a twitter.

Does he have an agenda?  Not really, nothing more defined than what to have for breakfast. 

Trump is not Evil -- just a walking, talking embarrassment -- the first President whose trouser zippers-- metaphorically speaking -- are always open--his faux pas a constant distraction. 

Zip It

Yet, paradoxically, Trump's radical WTF honesty / inconsistency focuses attention on  the contradictions of the last 100 years or so of American policy and social values.  That flabby thing is flapping right in front of our face when we look up to the podium, not withstanding (no, not his mouth). This is what a flaccid empire looks like.

We have only ourselves to blame.  After all, we had a chance-- briefly in 1944 or  45 -- but we blew it up along with Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  Remember the GI Bill?  Remember tax rates of 90 % on the wealthy?   Remember the country we built? It was grand for a while.

the Four Horsemen

Now, we face Armageddon  --   with  inequality, racial tension, poverty. and the economic collapse-- the Four Horsemen and nuclear horseshit. 

 Is Trump our AntiChrist?  No, we are -- collectively..  The GOP is an old jock-socks smelly locker room joke.   The Damnednoocrats have self destructed -- with Hillary pooping in her pant suits -- clearly not a solution -- but a large part -- if not the largest part -- of the problem.   

Obama has moved on to Blowjogs You Can Believe In -- massive payouts for 30 minute speeches to Rich People.  

The US faces the Day of Judgment.  Not judgment by God .  Why should He bother?

 Lucifer will judge. Because nobody is going to Heaven, which has moved to China, anyway.

But...but...but... Oh, how I love that word!

Is it a bird?  Is it a plane?  SuperGay/Black/Feminist/Transgender -- out of nowhere comes a charismatic-- and transformational  leader with a new party that sweeps congress.  The idea is radical:  justice for all.

The first thing he (or she or it) does is declare a state of emergency, perhaps to quell the separatist movement in California  and Oregon and Washington.  He stacks the Supreme Court.  Fuck you John Roberts.  And passes a revised Rico Act to include economic crimes.

Leadership

Suddenly, in coordinated swoop, he detains the richest men in America -- the Kochs, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and others --who find themselves locked in the New York Holiday Inn unable to leave and unable to access the porn movies on cable.  

Those not in the US are apprehended through "extraordinary rendition" -- the same methods used over the years for terrorists.   They will all be held indefinitely -- until they pay fines wiping out the national debut and paying for reconstruction of the economy.  

Koch Bros

The reasoning is simple.  The rich have the money -- but it is mostly hidden in trusts, or tied up in stocks and bonds or legal entities overseas.  Getting it by conventional means would take years.  

The government is not going to chase it all  down -- so it is up to each individual to get the money.  If they pay up quickly -- they get out, still with more than enough money to live comfortably-- forever -- in the style to which they have become accustomed.  If  they don't pay up ..well...we still have room in that little chunk of Cuba set up conveniently as a prison.  Who needs showers when you have waterboarding?  And orange is such a pretty color.

We don't do that?  What about the rule of law?

LOL...

Of course we do this stuff. We've been it for years, killing perhaps 20 million people.  The good thing about the 0.1 % who control most of the world's wealth is that they are so few -- and so easily found.   Can we imagine the Kochs hiding in caves in Afghanistan?


Power does what power will. And we have had a lot of practice.

The public won't accept it?  They have accepted everything else, why not this?  And besides the "People" are always on the side of fairness when they don't have to pay.  Just tell them no taxes for a year!

You no doubt think I am being facetious.  Not at all.  This is a realistic scenario -- which, in fact, has happened only too recently.

MbS

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has just detained a few hundred princes, clerics and influential government offices in Riyadh in the Ritz Carlton.  His "one percent".

MbS is just 32 -- having usurped power in the KSA, with the apparent approval of King Salman, who is ill and wants to abdicate -- and also with the support of a majority of the Saudi population, who happen to be under 30.

The alternative to MbS is the a continuation of the system set up by Grandpa Abdullah, which kept things in the kingdom quiet through a consensus of some 20,000 princes and medievalist clergy.  The princes got paid to play; the clergy got to translate the Spanish Inquisition into Arabic (as it were).  Oil underwrote everything.  if you didn't like it, you got your head chopped off.

But black gold is just black these days.  Times are tough. 

MbS sees the future and he sees bankruptcy. Not good, given that 500 million dollar yacht he just bought and the Chateau in France.

If he sits on his hands and accepts Abdullah's KSA -- the status quo --  he will be forced aside when King Salman moves on. There are lots of Mb's who want to take over. Things aren't working well now.  Things will get much, much worse. So he doesn't have much choice.  

  MbS has decided to  modernize the KSA.  Although the KSA faces an economic crisis caused by lower oil prices and a soaring deficit -- the Saudi elites are rich. Most of that  money, as in most countries, is tucked away overseas. 

New Saudi City?

Now according to our Rule of Law  Rich People never go to prison and get to steal indiscriminately form the poor, homeless, old ladies and everybody else.  Law, as the Supreme Court tells us sanctimoniously is not the same as Justice. 

Fortunately, the KSA does not have  the Rule of  Law.   MbS is the law.  He has simply detained the richest princes and is political opponents -- indefinitely -- until they pay up.

Their detainment is luxurious -- the Ritz.  But detainment nevertheless.  The Iranians claim they are being tortured, which probably means that they are denied pedicures.

By doing this, MbS can repatriate more than enough money to wipe out the national debt and fund his ambitious plans for redevelopment of the economy. -- in the end, perhaps more than one hundred billion dollars .

The move is also hugely popular with the public who don't get salaries of 300,000 dollars a month for doing nothing as the Princes do and are more than happy to see the Wahhabi Islamists fall from grace.  Now they will have bikini beaches and get to watch American superhero movies.   Sure its bribery and  extortion.   It's thievery.  It's also Robin Hood.

The foreign press doesn't like it. Revise that:  they hate it! That's because the foreign press i owned by at most 50 hugely rich people.  It is a bad precedent. What if?  So they  compare MbS to Putin.  Putin, as you recall is the Great Satan.....

Yet Putin was democratically elected in a nation which still had a semblance of democratic process and the "rule of law".  He used legal process to rein in the Oligarchs.  He did not -- and does not -- rule by fiat. He aimed to build democracy -- not to destroy it.  

But Putin is not MbS, who we don't know much about.

One cannot fault MbS for this move.  He is just lucky that the KSA is not democracy and that there is no law. That has allowed him to cut the Gordian Knot in one slash.  

What will come next?  Will he advance his country and maybe the cause of peace in the Middle East?  Or will he go the way of Hitler, who started by reforming Germany in ways very beneficial to the German people before starting wars and killing Jews, and Slavs and anyone who didn't like his silly moustache.  One should remember that many of Hitler's reforms survived WWII and became the basis for German success in the postwar period.

There is a risk.  But justice and fairness are the least risky strategies in politics  and generate support.  MbS will be nothing without that support.   

In the US, that would be the case also. Power rests ultimately with the people.  Which is why it is so important that Trump is confronting us with so many things that we have denied up until now.  If we come clean with ourselves we can have change we believe in.